In 2002, the filmed version of the Bob Fosse/Kander and Ebb musical Chicago won the Academy Award for best picture. It was a stunningly great film with a message for our media-manipulated times. The genesis of these works, as well as William Wellman’s 1942 film Roxie Hart, was a hit Broadway play from 1926 by Maurine Watkins, a Chicago Tribune reporter who sensationalized the stories of two female murderers and contributed to their acquittals at trial. One of the killers was Beulah Annan, a glamorous and adulterous party girl who, in 1924, shot her lover, Harry Kalstedt, when he announced he was leaving her. The other was Belva Gaertner, a cabaret singer who gunned down her lover Walter Law as he sat in his car. The larger-than-life producer and director Cecil B. De Mille grabbed the rights to the play, and the result is the 1927 film Chicago.
Chicago takes up the story of only one of the murderers, Beulah Annan, who from this film onward becomes Roxie Hart. Played by Phyllis Haver, she is a beautiful, golden-haired waste of space who is only interested in money and fame. Her straight-arrow husband Amos (Victor Varconi) adores her. He picks up one of her garters as she sleeps, a gaudy contraption with bells on it, and shakes it lovingly near his ear. Later, he waits on a man at his tobacconist shop. This man, Rodney Casley (the great character actor of silent and sound pictures Eugene Pallette), takes an interest in some cigarettes for ladies whose advertising suggests your woman will stay with you if you buy her these cigarettes. Casley laughs that he’s trying to unload his woman. Amos drips that if Casley had his wife, he’d never want to be rid of her. In fact, we learn they are talking about the same woman, Roxie, when Casley fumbles in his pocket for his wallet and comes up with the other silver-belled garter.
Casley goes to meet Roxie to end their affair. She persists in trying to keep him, but he pushes her roughly against the wall and knocks her bureau over. Out spills a gun. As Casley opens the door and steps out into the hall with the words “I’m through” on his lips, Roxie says, “You’re through, all right,” and shoots. A bullet shatters a mirror on the door, and passes through, hitting Casley. The broken mirror is a brilliant spidery image, followed by an equally brilliant depiction of Roxie’s reaction to what she’s done. We never see Casley’s body, only Roxie looking at it as she tries to maneuver around it. You can see the wheels turning in her, trying to figure out what to do, wondering if he’s really dead, being disgusted by the dead body in her front room. She tears the piano roll out of the player piano; this is a reference to the Annan murder in which it was reported that a recording of “Hula Lou” was playing on Annan’s victrola as Harry lay dying in a pool of blood.
Roxie calls Amos, who comes running and phones the police. They and a male reporter show up. Amos tries to take the blame, but the sly assistant district attorney (Warner Richmond) traps Roxie by saying Amos said she did it. She goes ballistic, accusing her husband of ratting her out. Of course, he did no such thing, and the heartless Roxie realizes she’s been set up. Nonetheless, the reporter is thrilled by her seductive good looks and has his cameraman pose her as remorse itself while a cop stands in for the dead man on the floor.
The scenes in prison while Roxie awaits arraignment are clever and all too short. Roxie’s all-out fight with another woman on murderer’s row, who is strapped in to a hip-reduction machine, is comic and a little frightening. The wit and sardonic humor of this film is just as piercing as in the 2002 film, and most of it is done without words. Haver gives a knockout performance, showing the difficulty Roxie has being anything but a chippie. When her attorney Billy Flynn, played with cynical grace by Robert Edeson, has her rehearse her brave, sweet, innocent, and noble looks before they face the jury, she needs a lot of coaching. He puts her in a cream puff of a dress that we are told is pink and has her carry a bouquet in her hands. She looks like an overgrown infant with a nosegay to ward off the smell of her own rotten character. The trial ends with Flynn snatching the bouquet from her hands, tossing it to the floor, and crushing it underfoot, a symbol of delicate womanhood threatened by a guilty verdict. Roxie flings herself on the broken blossoms and passes out. “The defense rests,” Flynn murmurs. You bet it does!
The director of record was Frank Urson, but the hand of De Mille is in clear view. The basis of the real murder, sex, shows how the canny De Mille always had one eye on the box office in his choice to produce the film and in the bawdiness of many of the scenes. Filming the entire murder sequence with Haver in a negligee starts the ball rolling. Of course there is nothing like a balls to the wall catfight to stir the blood. During the trial, a clever sequence showing Roxie’s legs and the curled toes of the male jury shows the Little Bo Peep routine to be a variation on the sex with a schoolgirl fantasy.
De Mille the moralist shows up in the end, of course, preserving his reputation as a God-fearing man with Urson as his front for the smut on display. Amos Hart is on screen way too much, stealing money from Flynn to make up the rest of the $5,000 he needs to hire the lawyer for Roxie in a completely unnecessary scene, and flinging Roxie into the streets, trashing the apartment, and stomping on her photo in a moralistic rage, knowing that he helped her get away with murder. The film should have ended with Roxie disappearing into the crowd on the uncaring streets of Chicago, but we are shown that good triumphs as the Hart’s maid Katie (Virginia Bradford) cleans up the apartment and is poised to become the good wife Amos always deserved. Too late. The phony melodrama of the main story flings the straight-up melodrama of the happy ending into the brass spitoon where it belongs.
Really, Howard? You’re in film noir! Of course your partner was going to kill your hostage!
On Saturday, January 26, I had the unique thrill of being at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco for the premiere of the restored 35mm print of Try and Get Me! at Noir City 11. Try and Get Me!, whose original title The Sound of Fury was scrapped, changed to something more lurid, and remarketed for national distribution when the film flopped in California, isthe powerful film that blogathoners turned out in force to support during 2011’s For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon. Eddie Muller, president of the Film Noir Foundation, thanked a large coalition of organizations and people whose efforts were responsible for bringing this film back to pristine condition for future generations; yes, blogathoners, you received your due and the grateful applause of a sold-out audience.
From working with the Film Noir Foundation on the blogathon, I knew this film pushed the warning needle far into nasty. However, I was not adequately prepared for its visual and narrative power, or the nakedly emotional performances of Frank Lovejoy, Lloyd Bridges, and Kathleen Ryan. Based on a real incident that took place in San Jose, California in the 1930s, Try and Get Me! is one of the darkest—and best—noir films I have ever seen.
When we first meet out-of-work ex-GI Howard Tyler (Lovejoy), he is in Seattle convincing a truck driver to give him a ride back to his California home. His young son Tommy (Donald Smelnick) is sassing his mother Judy (Ryan) when Howard comes through the door and gives his son half-a-dollar so that he can go to a baseball game with his friends. Judy is overjoyed that this extravagance indicates that Howard has found work—but he hasn’t.
One afternoon, after trying and failing to get day work, Howard heads for a bowling alley to get a beer. He ends up talking to Jerry Slocum (Bridges), fetching the conceited bowler’s shoes and following him home when Jerry hints that he knows about a job for Howard. He throws Howard an advance on his pay, and the elated man runs home to treat his family to gifts, groceries, and a good time. He has second thoughts when his job turns out to be getaway driver for stick-up man Jerry.
After the duo commits a series of robberies, Howard’s discomfort grows unmanageable. Jerry says they will commit the inevitable “one last job” that will set them on Easy Street for good: the kidnap for ransom of a rich man’s son. Snatching Donald Miller (Carl Kent) goes smoothly, but when the three men go to a quarry where Jerry says they will hold Donald, Jerry orders Howard to tie the victim’s legs with a belt and push him down a gravel pile. The kidnappers follow, and Jerry bashes Miller’s head in with a rock. He and Howard dump the body in the water at the bottom of the pit and leave town with Jerry’s girl Velma (Adele Jergens) and Velma’s friend Hazel (Katherine Locke) to provide themselves with an alibi. Eventually, Miller’s body is found, and Hazel, who thinks Howard is single and interested in her, soon learns from the conscience-stricken man that he and Jerry killed Miller and turns them in. Newspaper columnist Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson) and his profit-minded publisher Hal Clendenning (Art Smith) try the case in the press, and public sentiment turns ugly. Stanton realizes too late that his appeal to emotion has set irrepressible forces into motion that will mean a horrible end for Howard and Jerry.
Lovejoy fills Howard with a genuine pathos, portraying a man too desperate to understand what kind of person he has gotten himself mixed up with. Jerry treats him like a lackey from the start, having him fetch his shoes and fasten his cufflinks, bullying him into increasingly reckless crimes. Any confidence and command Howard might have had drained out of him long ago; his son loves him, but runs wild, and his wife’s quiet acceptance of their situation is almost worse for Howard. He feels he is not good enough for them, and his rapid slide into crime seems almost a fatalistic attempt to get out of the way of a better future for his family, a wish he eventually voices explicitly in the last act of the film. Howard has our sympathy, a decent man with a loving but stressed family life, whose own lack of guile brought him a form of mob justice we feel he doesn’t deserve.
Lloyd Bridges is insanely good as Jerry. A supreme narcissist without the brains to pull off anything as sophisticated as a kidnapping for ransom, his Jerry seems entirely without conscience. Obviously a sociopath, he knows a patsy when he sees one and closes one door after another behind Howard until there is no hope for escape. His partying with Velma, a blonde B-girl whose instinct when at the courthouse where Jerry and Howard are being arraigned is to pose seductively for the photographers, shows that he hasn’t given Donald Miller or Howard, for that matter, a second thought. When the angry mob forms outside the jail where the two men are being held, Jerry moves like a caged animal, pacing rapidly in his small cell, rattling the bars, bashing his head against the cell wall, and whining in a pained panic. His fear gives way to defiance: “Try and get me!” he challenges. Howard’s worried face is almost too painful to watch.
Ryan, playing a version of her loyal Kathleen Sullivan from the British noir Odd Man Out (1947), Irish accent and all, is quite affecting in pleading with Stanton not to characterize her husband as a monster. Her understated fear runs as a steady undercurrent throughout the film and economically characterizes the financial hardships and privations so many families felt in postwar America, the unease that defines much of what we call film noir. Katherine Locke has a truly kooky role—the plain friend of the sexpot Velma who lives in a fantasy of finding true love, believing Howard is actually her boyfriend whom she has a right to scold for his drinking. We’d laugh at her in another film, but she has just enough edge of crazy to her to make us hold back. Cliff Clark brings a no-nonsense authority to his supporting part as the town sheriff trying to uphold the law and keep his prisoners safe.
What makes Try and Get Me! truly extraordinary is Cy Endfield’s direction, his last major American film before the Communist witch hunt of the 1950s gobbled him up and forced him into exile in England, where he continued to make powerful films such as Hell Drivers(1957) and Zulu (1964). His camera is always on top of the action, as we can practically feel Miller rolling down the hard gravel to his doom and imagine his murder from indistinct movements Howard only hears and interprets with a wretched, horrified face. I have always wondered how a well-guarded jail could be breached by a mob. Now I know. Endfield’s climactic scene builds in intensity as the mob masses and works together like a colony of army ants to overpower the tear-gas-wielding cops with fire hoses and pull open the doors of the jail with gangs of men pulling on ropes in unison to the cries of “heave, heave, heave.” The audience in the Castro Theatre was breathless with horror, watching with compulsive fascination the extraordinary staging of one of the most compelling scenes ever committed to film.
Endfield was radicalized by the Depression of the 1930s, an era that produced Fury (1936), Fritz Lang’s version of this true story that accorded more with the zeitgeist of its time. Try and Get Me! appeared just as audiences and critics alike were turning against dissent and discord to achieve the artificial peace of the 1950s. Endfield’s nihilistic vision of group think and the court of public opinion was not destined to find favor in its own time. Looking at the film now, it seems timeless in the brutality of its psychology, making the haves of society as represented by Stanton and his circle seem decadent and profit-driven, and showing how desperation and lack of opportunity can prove a breeding ground for criminality of every type. Blogathoners, you should be very proud to have contributed to bringing this important, brilliantly realized film back to life for future generations to view and ponder.
Over the past week, Chicago cinephiles have been treated yet again to another installment of Noir City, the celebration of film noir staged by the Film Noir Foundation each year. As a satellite festival of FNF’s 10-year-old main event in San Francisco, Noir City Chicago has brought film fans out to the historic Music Box Theatre for only four years, but presenter Alan K. Rode, a good friend made during our fundraising blogathon for FNF, has assured us that the festival in Chicago will continue as long as the current level of enthusiasm and support remains. That’s good news for film buffs in search of the rarities regularly presented at the festival alongside the more famous fare that forms essential viewing for film neophytes.
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is just such a rarity. While not completely unknown or forgotten, the film has never been officially released on VHS or DVD. Most people who have seen it remember it from commercial television in the 60s or 70s, or misremember seeing it because it shares the same title as the famous ballet set to Richard Rodgers’ music and committed to film twice, first, with the original Balanchine choreography in On Your Toes (1939) and then in 1948’s Words and Music, with new choreography by Gene Kelly. While Laven’s Slaughter includes the Rodgers music, rendered in a tasteful, effective score by Herschel Burke Gilbert, the film bears no resemblance to the ballet’s story of a love triangle that ends in murder.
Instead, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue has been hung with the unfortunate label of stepson to On the Waterfront (1954). While both films focus on mob corruption in New York’s longshoremen’s union, each deals with it in its own way and from different angles. Elia Kazan’s masterwork, told from the point of view of the longshoremen, is greatly elevated by the towering performances of Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, and Karl Malden, whereas Slaughter’s cast, though fine, is packed with yeoman actors like Dan Duryea, Charles McGraw, and Sam Levene, and anchored by a much weaker leading man, Richard Egan. Slaughter has one virtue On the Waterfront lacks: based on the nonfiction book The Man Who Rocked the Boat cowritten by former New York district attorney William J. Keating, it tells in compelling fashion the true story of the only murder conviction achieved against a mobbed-up union official from the prosecutor’s point of view.
In a very suspenseful opening sequence, we watch three men arrive at an apartment building on 10th Avenue and spread out to cover all exit routes, climbing on the roof and entering the stairway from the top and stationing themselves in blind spots from below. A car pulls up in front of the building—it is Benjy Karp (Harry Bellaver), who always gives his friend Solly Pitts (Mickey Shaughnessy) a ride to work. Solly’s wife Madge (Jan Sterling) yells down that Solly will be right there. After some affectionate banter, Madge hands Solly his metal lunch box and sends him off with a kiss. Moments later, Solly is cornered and gunned down. As the gunmen flee, Madge runs to her husband who says, “‘Cockeye’ Cook (Joe Downing) and two of his gorillas did it.” He is taken to the hospital, gravely injured.
DA Howard Rysdale (Levene) sees the Pitts shooting as an impossible nut to crack, another of the 150 waterfront murders unsolved because of witness fear and payoffs. ADA Keating (Egan), two months on the job, steps forward to take the case: “I have to catch one of those sooner or later.” Rysdale, his resources spread thin, reluctantly agrees. Keating works with police lieutenant Anthony Vosnick (McGraw) to locate witnesses and build a case.
Slaughter is a police procedural in The Naked City mold that has more in common with the politically conscious films of the 1930s than with the postwar fatalism that informs the thoroughly pessimistic outlook of many classic noir films. Keating, the son of a union coal miner, is a crusader for justice for a man who dared to stand up to the mob and paid the ultimate price, but he’s strictly by the book, not shadowed by a painfully guilty past. Vosnick, a trusted member of the waterfront community, is more the pragmatic veteran who convinces a reluctant Benjy and Madge to testify and gets Solly to change his “I didn’t see them” statement on first being shot to repeating what he told to Madge. But because he does it “off the record,” he jeopardizes Keating’s case when extremely crafty mob attorney John Jacob Masters (Duryea) casts reasonable doubt on the defendants’ guilt by highlighting the flip-flop statements (even calling into question Solly’s deathbed testimony) as evidence of police coercion. The fragility of truth and justice does get a slightly noirish sort of airing, but this film doesn’t admit those noir shades of gray in depicting its battle between good and evil.
Nonetheless, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is extremely satisfying. Sterling’s performance as a tough-minded widow is beyond good, showing the various emotions of a worried wife tending to her dying husband and a strategic witness who avoids taking the stand until after Christmas to ensure that the killers will be convicted and get the electric chair. Duryea, not at his most evil but certainly at his most articulate, has a field day with the excellent dialogue and legal logic screenwriter Lawrence Roman provided to him; Duryea certainly is one of the best actors to emerge from mid-century American cinema. A wonderful turn comes from diminutive Nick Dennis, who plays a longshoreman nicknamed Midget who goes ballistic the day after the attack on Solly, drinking and cursing the union bosses who had him hit. As the goons who shot Solly chase him around and through the dock machinery, we see how vulnerable a single man is, with only his speed to keep him ahead of deadly force, as his coworkers opt to keep their mouths shut to live to see another day. Mickey Shaughnessy spits his contempt for the men who attacked him during his deathbed deposition, lifting his hospital gown to show “Cockeye” exactly what his guns did; while we see only blood-stained gauze, the gesture is still shocking. Julie Adams plays Keating’s fiancée and wife with more presence and authority than her “little woman” role normally would have afforded her.
Egan is a bit pallid as our central character—Laven reportedly wanted Robert Mitchum in the role—but he is believable as a straight arrow dedicated to upholding the law. When he gets involved in a wildcat strike on the docks, he forgets himself and behaves as he did when at his father’s side on the picket lines, slugging it out with the hired muscle trucked in to quell the protest. It would have been nice to see more of that side of Keating from a dramatic point of view, though I imagine this fight was a script embellishment, not reality.
A surprise is seeing Walter Matthau in his fourth big-screen appearance as union boss Al Dahlke. His charisma is unmistakable, but his acting, sliced, would go well with cheese on rye. He is both too big with his sarcasm and oily “friendship” and too small with his menace. He comes off more as a skinny bully made bold by having big guys surrounding him than a genuine made man with the notches on his gun to prove his mettle.
DP Fred Jackman Jr. makes the most of the dockside settings (Long Beach, CA, doubling for New York) to lend a verité look to the film, and his lighting and camerawork in the stairwell where Solly is shot is appropriately ominous; kudos to film editor Russell Schoengarth for making that scene coil and pounce with thrilling menace.
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue should have been a contender, because it’s got class written all over it. Here’s hoping more people will take the chance to enjoy the action and artistry of the talented cast and crew who made this fine mid-century movie.
You can view the entire film for free here on YouTube.
In cinema, even documentary cinema, the question of who we think we see on screen and who is actually on screen are two different things, fueling all kinds of existential fun and games for the astute filmmaker and receptive audiences. Identity as a motif has preoccupied numerous filmmakers, from Ingmar Bergman (Persona) to Monte Hellman (Road to Nowhere) to Abbas Kiarostami (Close-up). Identity is often tied up with psychosis, and psychotics frequently feature in horror and suspense films because they channel the nameless, faceless Id that resides in all of us that, on some level, we all would like to release in all its rampaging glory once in a while. The idea that any one of us could become a gruesome killer if someone or something pierced our social conditioning is at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure. Kurosawa, interested in the shocked comments people invariably make after a neighbor or acquaintance commits a brutal murder (“He was such a nice man. They were an ordinary couple.”), explores the nature of identity and whether our bodies and minds are mere vessels waiting to be filled.
On a busy street in Tokyo, a man (Ren Ohsugi) walks through a damp tunnel as cars pass on his right. A fluorescent light illuminating the tunnel blinks and buzzes. We next see the man in a hotel room with a naked prostitute. He is moving about the room, and she is sitting up in bed. Suddenly, he grabs a pipe and bashes her twice on the head. When next we enter the room, it is filled with police investigators. The lead detective, Kenichi Takabe (Kôji Yakusho), observes that a deep “x” has been cut across the prostitute’s neck and chest. The man is found naked, hiding in an air duct in the hallway. When he is questioned at police headquarters by Takabe and police psychiatrist Makoto Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), the man has no idea why he killed the woman. The case resembles other murders under investigation where a similar “x” was carved into the victims.
Takabe will have several more such murders to investigate as the film goes on, but he must balance this puzzle with the increasing burden posed by his wife Fumie’s (Anna Nakagawa) mental deterioration. We first see Fumie talking with her psychiatrist (Toshi Kato) as an outpatient and observe her attachment to the story of Bluebeard. She tells the doctor that she knows how the story ends—Bluebeard is killed by his wife. Fumie doesn’t appear capable of murder, but the worry she causes Takabe, the things she does that drive him crazy, the loss of companionship he experiences by her disconnectedness certainly must cause a kind of death to his spirit. Not being able to talk to her about the pain of his work is especially difficult for him.
As other “x” cases come to the fore—a young man kills his wife of two years, a police officer shoots his partner in the head, a doctor kills a man in a public bathroom and peels his face away from his skull—we and Takabe slowly discover what links them together: a young amnesiac who is soon identified as Kunio Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), a medical school dropout whose disheveled home reveals shelves of books about psychiatry, psychosis, and works about and by Franz Mesmer, a German physician who developed the idea of animal magnetism, or in the term used in the film, hypnosis, to influence behavior. We saw the young husband, Tôru Hanaoka (Masahiro Toda), encounter Mamiya on a beach and after Mamiya collapses, take him home. Mamiya questions him over and over about who he is and asks him questions about his wife Tomoko (Misayo Haruki) while transfixing Tôru with the flame of his cigarette lighter. As Mamiya bounces from one encounter to another—Hanaoka takes him to the police station, where he mesmerizes Oida (Denden) the cop before being sent to a hospital to put Dr. Miyajima (Yoriko Dôguchi) under his spell—the daisy chain of violence barely outpaces Takabe’s efforts to unravel the mystery before he himself is drawn under Mamiya’s influence.
As with most detective-centered stories, Takabe is no ordinary cop. He is intelligent and tormented, a Japanese version of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, and his complexity makes him a Rorschach image of good for his evil opposite Mamiya. Mamiya entices Takabe with an accurate assessment of the detective’s torment, mentioning a vision Takabe had of Fumie hanging dead in the couple’s kitchen that incited the detective to helpless wailing. Of course, as a mesmerist, Mamiya causes his victims to conjure such visions by helping them to access their deepest fears and hatreds through his highly developed gift for hypnosis. Only by remaining empty himself can Mamiya be the master rather than the victim.
It is Mamiya’s conviction that most people don’t know themselves, the many selves hidden under the surface, the duality of their generous and vicious impulses. He considers Takabe extraordinary, like himself, for recognizing the split in himself—trying to be a loving husband while seeing the worst in human nature on a daily basis. The encounters Takabe has with Mamiya create convulsions of emotion in him, signaled not only by his violent outbursts toward Mamiya but also toward some of his colleagues; in fact, when Takabe tries to turn the tables on Mamiya by forcing him to look at his own lighter while incarcerated, a vision of a rain-collapsing ceiling overwhelms Takabe, and the lighter goes out. It appears to have been put out by the rain water, but my guess is that while Takabe was having the visions, Mamiya merely blew the lighter out. But, of course, this wouldn’t be a horror story if we didn’t give ourselves over to wondering if the strange sights on screen are real or imaginary.
Kurosawa’s camerawork is beyond good. He scouted locations in and around Tokyo that reek of decay, giving us a fair approximation of a haunted house in the penultimate scene where the final showdown between Takabe and Mamiya takes place. He combines handheld work with static long shots of great beauty and atmosphere. He knows how to create tension by considering the images outside the frame that haunt our imagination, for example, having Sakuma enter Mamiya’s cell, which has a short wall hiding the toilet area in which Mamiya is standing. We don’t see the prisoner, but we know what he’s capable of, and the fear of actually looking at him infuses this scene powerfully. In a later scene, we see one handcuff hanging from a pipe, and the story a cop tells Takabe about it creates the image of the body that had been attached to it in our minds in an uncomfortable parallel to the way Mamiya was able to create images in the minds of his victims. Indeed, Mamiya is rather like a filmmaker, bringing us under his spell, finding our triggers, conjuring images through exposition and suggestion.
But Cure does more than that. It makes us wonder what Takabe achieved by resolving the murder investigation. The last two scenes are powerfully suggestive, but also highly ambiguous. Takabe has put his wife in a psychiatric hospital, and we see a very brief scene at the hospital in which the image of a corpse with the telltale “x” appears. Takabe is later seen eating heartily and happily in his regular diner, apparently cured of his previous troubles. His waitress removes his plates and is called over to speak to her boss. Calmly she moves to a station and picks up a large chef’s knife. Has Takabe taken over where Mamiya left off, or has our experience of the film left us imagining the worst?
It’s 40 years now since The French Connection was released, soon to capture the Best Picture Oscar, set up William Friedkin as a directorial talent with the world before him, and make Gene Hackman a top film star, pushing age 40. From such a distance, during which time the film’s status as a classic has wavered and Friedkin’s career has never quite lived up to its great early promise, now the cultural bullseye The French Connection scored seems ever more peculiar. Not simply in that it’s a crime flick, not a prestigious genre, lacking the epic pretensions of The Godfather which would win similar garlands the following year, but also in the rich yet radical, machine-like beauty of its filmmaking, the eerie disquiet of its ending, the oft-ugly ferocity of its pig-faced bog Irish cop hero, and tangible atmosphere of then-decaying New York. The two French Connection movies are coarse, bloody, rapidly paced, unswerving and experiential rather than analytical. The first entry is a police procedural that seeks for the most part to clearly, intricately, and excitingly describe a fictionialised version of one of the biggest drug busts in history, with as much nuts and bolt detail about both smuggling and policing as any film ever made. Lacking big stars, romance, moralising, and even much action except in the central, ever-impressive chase sequence, The French Connection brutally contrasts much of what passes as popular filmmaking today, and Friedkin’s film and its sequel by John Frankenheimer constitute summits of mainstream American movie-making.
Friedkin’s film, moreover, always strikes me as a different movie each time I watch it. Initial viewings are almost a sensory overload: there’s little that is overtly tricky about Friedkin’s filmmaking, but the depth of his reliance on visual storytelling, the alertness to environment, to detail, to nuance of behaviour essayed at such rapidity, infuse the screen with a lustre that only seems to increase as time passes. With repeated viewings the potency of Friedkin’s conception of Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle’s cat-and-mouse game with drug kingpins as a form of class warfare jumps out at me. Anti-drug messages were big at the time of the film’s production, in the waning phase of the counterculture and the onset of the Nixon-era mood of social depletion, and that possibly gave The French Connection the right gilt of nobility to swing its Oscar victory, whilst it was in line with the short-lived affection for gritty fare inaugurated by Midnight Cowboy (1969). Nonetheless, it’s fascinating how little The French Connection is actually about the white powder over which lives and punishing effort are expended. The only user seen in the film is the slick-mouthed long-haired chemist (Pat McDermott) who tests the purity of the imported heroin for a small amount of it. Yet the junk seems indivisible from the snatches of blasted and sorry suburbs of the city, filled with urban decay, cheerless wintry wastelands, and infested with small-time dealers, which Friedkin describes with chilling efficiency throughout. In this vision of a contemporary American metropolis, white cops beat hell out of black dealers in scenes of predatory flushing and catching of the prey, yet there’s a pall of certainty around both sides that they’re both stuck inhabiting the same wilderness, fighting on the level of primitives for the scraps society is casting down their way.
Popeye and his partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) have the best arrest record in their department, but they’re all too acutely aware, as their superior Simonson (Eddie Egan) reminds them, that in essence their labours are petty and ineffectual. But then, after a bust that sees Russo get a slice on the arm and the perp (Alan Weeks) angrily knocked about and bullied, the two retire to an up-market tavern for some R’n’R, only for Popeye’s raptor-like eye for criminality to zero in on a gathering of underworld figures out wining and dining their women, including Sal Boca (Tony LoBianco), tossing around money. Popeye talks Russo into following them about, and eventually they’re stunned to find that Sal returns early in the morning to his teenaged wife and a tiny diner business. Popeye is immediately convinced that Sal is connected in some serious fashion, and he’s dead right. Sal is arranging the Stateside end of a massive heroin deal, of junk being supplied from Marseilles by Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), which will be brought into the country inside a Lincoln Continental by French TV star Devereaux (Frederic de Pasquale). Popeye’s convictions are patronised by his senior and by FBI agent Mulderig (Bill Hickman) attached to the case. The past, which involved the accidental shooting of a fellow cop, dogs Popeye as wickedly as the hangovers he nurses each morning after drinking himself stupid. But the team’s work begins to pay off when Charnier and his pet thug Nicoli (Marcel Buzzoffi) arrive in town to make the deal, and they link Sal to Weinstock (Harold Gray), a financier for traffickers, whom Sal is trying to get to invest in the deal.
Although it’s most certainly not a documentary, The French Connection gains a lot of its pep from the practically neo-realist elements of which it is partly composed. Those include the casting of non-professionals like the real-life analogues of Doyle and Russo, Egan and Sonny Grosso, and Irving Abrahams, who plays himself in the car-stripping scene. The immersive vision of a gritty metropolis offers glimpses of men lying sprawled on the pavement, filth-crusted subway tunnels, and camerawork in the street where it’s clear the crowd, constantly glancing at the camera, aren’t extras. The film probably gave Scorsese some permission to explore his city in similar fashion with Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976). The method Friedkin adopted, with his toey but unaffected handheld camerawork in many scenes, lends physical energy to the essentially observational sequences, whether they’re about Doyle and Russo trying to eat whilst freezing their asses off on a surveillance job, or, most memorably, the sequence in which they strip down the Lincoln in which they think the shipment has been hidden, bringing to the fore the amazing amount of empty space in such a seemingly solid car, and the increasing frustration of the cops as they fail to find anything before Russo’s observations about the car’s weight lead to a sudden, successful realisation. A peculiar quality of The French Connection, one that its sequel shares, is that it’s a beautiful-looking film, with Owen Roizman’s photography absorbing colour in variegated patches that come to resemble a Rauschenberg artwork. An arsenal of New Wave tricks, from zoom shots to disjunctive sound and vision, sees the film accumulate in layers, offering an aspect of raggedness that conceals the great filmic talent at work behind it. That talent is clearly at work in the dance of actors and imagery in Popeye and Charnier’s amusing hide and seek in the subway, in the cold-blooded assassination Nicoli commits after the deceptively ambling opening shots (complete with tearing off a hunk of his victim’s bread loaf), and of course at a much higher volume in the chase scene and the violent finale.
The French Connection’s monomaniacal bent in sticking almost purely on the matter at hand is often why it’s been discounted as a simple cop flick by many over the years, and yet I feel it’s precisely there where its greatness lies, in refusing to linger on extraneous detail or pompous presumptions of socio-political and aesthetic import, whilst still concisely evoking them. Early in the film, when Popeye and Russo visit the tavern in which they first make Sal, The Three Degrees, a black girl group, croon lyrics that point neatly to the irony that this generation, sending rockets to the moon, is also the one living in decaying tenements, beating hell out of one-another, and stuffing drugs into its veins. Otherwise the context is simply there to be read, in the lives its heroes lead and those of the villains. Popeye inhabits a boxy little apartment in a grim tower block, and the only pleasures he gets are liquor and sex, at which he’s fortunately adept at getting, as when he picks up a bicycling girl, cueing the film’s lone islet of bawd as Russo, coming to Popeye’s place to talk over a new development in the case, finds him handcuffed to his bed and the girl still darting naked about the flat. But life is otherwise not much fun for these guys, and Friedkin makes a marvellous, almost Chaplin-esque visual suite out of the scenes in which Doyle and Russo try to cram their faces with pizza and terrible coffee whilst Charnier and Nicoli dine in a ritzy restaurant. Whilst Popeye’s behaviour demands tempering empathy for him with wariness of his fiery brutality and racism, here the pendulum shifts his way: you can practically feel Doyle’s white-hot antipathy in Hackman’s grimace as he watches the pair, not only a personal resentment owing to his own working-stiff righteousness, but in the already clearly conceived detestation of people who are getting seriously rich by eating out what’s left the fabric of his city and world.
Daryl F. Zanuck warned Friedkin that if the film wasn’t done right, he’d end up with a glorified The Naked City episode, and Friedkin’s answer to that was to invest Popeye with his voluble ambiguity; by turns, Popeye, with his signature pork pie hat and trenchcoat, is a swashbuckling hero and a scary prick. His maniacal dedication to the case at hand is both his great virtue and great weakness, blind to other matters, whether it be mangled car wreck victims in a scene where he comes to blows with Simonson and Mulderig, and finally accidentally gunning down Mulderig in the finale when he’s chasing Charnier, barely blinking when he and Russo discover the mistake and keeping after the villain. That closing moment is one that Friedkin shoots in the environs of the ruined warehouse where the drug deal was going down, and through which Popeye dashes off, as if he’s disappearing into an existential void in keeping after Charnier, emblem of a world beyond his grasp and comprehension. I suppose it could be said that the great chase sequence that is the film’s centrepiece betrays the texture of the film’s realism, but of course it’s also the bit you look forward to, as the eruptive elegance of Jerry Greenberg’s editing and the brilliant shooting of Friedkin and Roizman converge here for a masterpiece of its kind. The chase starts when Nicoli makes an ill-fated attempt to rub out Doyle, recognising that it’s his drive that is sustaining the threat to the deal. Nicoli instead finishes up plugging a carriage-pushing mother and a railway guard, driving a train driver to have a heart attack, and causing a train wreck, as Doyle all the while chases at high-speed through busy streets in a commandeered car. The hood-mounted camera shots of speeding motion through the streets giving the sequence its sense of hurtling doom, and the sequence resolves with brute frankness as Doyle plugs Nicoli in the back when he tries to run. Other cops objected to this touch, but Egan gave Friedkin the nod to include it: even in adding some pizzazz to the film, the integrity of its unromantic take is retained. Scheider, who was cemented in the cinemagoers’ mind in ’71 with this film and Klute, is terrific even in playing a relative second fiddle. His peerlessly pronounced retort to Mulderig’s comments about his partner, “Shove it up your ass,” is one of the summits of on-screen profanity.
French Connection II seems at superficial attention to announce some unfortunate aspects of Hollywood’s nascent sequel culture: it was the first major Hollywood sequel to have a simple numeric attached to the title, a touch that was in keeping with the film’s veneer of terseness and yet soon to become a signature of corporate Hollywood laziness. It also moves away from the reportage of the original for a fictional continuation, more dialogue-heavy and melodramatic in form. Yet such descriptions are deceptive, as French Connection II is as good as, perhaps better than, the first film. Friedkin, who had moved on to his other best-known movie, The Exorcist (1973), didn’t return for it; instead John Frankenheimer, the solidly established and lauded hand from the precursor generation of new-style American directors, took over. He retained key aspects of the first film’s style, whilst also refining it and making some innovations of his own. It stands as possibly also Frankenheimer’s last truly great film, for a similarity of both his and Friedkin’s careers was their early brilliance and their shaky later oeuvres. A key linking element of the two films, other than Hackman and Rey, is Don Ellis’ nervy, vibrant scoring, accented with elements of jazz, funk, spurts of musique concrete, and even modernist atonal passages that infuse the cityscapes with alien vibes. The sequel picks up spiritually where the original left off, with Doyle still chasing Charnier, having been sent to Marseilles as the only man who can certifiably recognise him, to liaise with the local detective chief Henri Barthélémy (Bernard Fresson), who treats him with dismissive contempt and relegates him to a desk next to the men’s room door. Popeye doesn’t realise that he’s actually been sent to lure Charnier out, and, worse, he’s really being set up by other cops back in New York whom Charnier bought off, hoping he’ll get killed.
Inevitably, Popeye is a fish out of water in this world, and scenes in Frankenheimer’s film carefully mirror some in Friedkin’s. This contrasts his earlier behaviour and former competence, as when Popeye chases down a suspect running from the scene of a sabotaged narcotics lab, only for Barthélémy and his men to drag him off, because the guy’s actually an informant, underlining the irrelevance of Popeye’s racial assumptions and his inability to recognise the lay of the land he’s so sensitive to back home. Popeye’s head-on policing style in such a circumstance seems doomed to cause havoc, his signature bullying tactics and verbal tirades are reduced to a comedy routine before a laughing, uncomprehending prisoner, and his declarations of determination to nail Charnier seem like so much empty rhetoric. Alienated by Barthélémy, he instead starts pounding the streets in trying to catch a glimpse of his quarry. One night, after chatting up a beach volleyball player (Reine Prat) and being spied doing so by Charnier, he’s kidnapped by Charnier’s thugs, and one of the tailing policemen Barthélémy has on Popeye is run over and killed. Charnier has Popeye kept prisoner in a seamy hotel filled with drug addicts and prostitutes, and pumped full of regular doses of heroin for three weeks, partly to extract what he knows about Charnier’s new operation, which is nothing, and also in a precisely sadistic vengeance on the most implacable of anti-drug enforcers, reducing him to a robotic dependent. Finally Popeye is given a hot dose and dumped outside the police station, and Barthélémy and doctors fight to save his life.
Frankenheimer, who had worked on French location several times before, uses a mostly French crew, including DOP Claude Renoir. The filmmaking team’s eye for picturesque decay invests Marseille with the same mix of lively affection and squalid authenticity as New York received in the first film, with labyrinthine, rubbish-strewn poor quarters lurking behind the ritzy harbour surrounds. If Friedkin’s film has its roots in the docudrama of ‘50s crime flicks, Frankenheimer’s is closer to genuine film noir, and, in a way, can be seen as a stealing back of that tradition from the New Wavers. Such a perspective is implicit in the way the film offers a deglamourized and peerlessly tangible sense of the locale that anticipates, and possibly laid seeds for, modern French crime films like Un Prophet (2009) much more than it resembles the icy but aestheticised, denaturalised works, from the likes of Godard, Melville, and Chabrol, of the time. There’s as much procedural detail in this sequel as in the original, as Charnier’s innovative new smuggling methods, including in tomato cans and on ship hulls, are carefully depicted, but whereas the first film is to a large extent “about” that detail, here it’s more functional within a cohesive, driving plot. French Connection II is more concerned with exploring Popeye’s gruelling journey and penitential suffering, in being almost destroyed by Charnier and his own arrogance, before resurging with (literally) fiery wrath.
Popeye seems initially like the quintessential ugly American in his insensibility to warnings and blithe indifference to local niceties, as Barthélémy needles him into getting on the street. Popeye begins to adapt, slowly: in a terrific early scene, Popeye strikes out with a couple of local ladies but finds a sort of a pal in a bartender (André Penvern) with whom he gets tanked and reels about the streets with, and his capture by Charnier comes after he’s managed to score with said volleyball player, proving he’s still got his mojo working. Meanwhile Charnier has returned to his piss-elegant lifestyle: dialogue scattered in both films suggests that his actual background, in spite of his mansion and purebred young wife, is in the working class and the docklands. He is arranging a new big shipment now with multinational collusion and finance, with the aid of an American General, Brian (Ed Lauter). With its suggestions of wider conspiracies and higher levels of malfeasance, French Connection II subverts some of the presumptions of the original, becoming in effect a Watergate movie in which Popeye finally finds a better working partnership with the Frogs than he did with his own feds.
Hackman had won the Best Actor Oscar for the first film, a deserving win in a strong year for contenders. But he’s even better – perhaps the best in his career – in the sequel, particularly in the lengthy, grinding scenes in which Barthélémy helps him through going cold turkey, a regimen Barthélémy insists on because it would be the end of Popeye’s career if his state becomes a matter of record. We find out things about Popeye here that explain a lot about him, like the reason for his surprising athleticism – he was once a baseball player who instantly joined the cops when he caught a glimpse of a young Mickey Mantle – as well as his fixated intensity, and the despair within him that addiction reveals rather than causes, previously anaesthetised with booze and work, but given free reign by a junkie’s pathos. Hackman’s opinion of his character was low – “Doyle is a fascist,” he said unequivocally, whilst reporting that cops generally loved the honesty of the portrayal – but his reserve against the character’s stridency and cruelty falls away in the sequel. The central, achingly sustained scene of the film comes when Popeye rambles on to an attentive but largely bewildered Barthélémy, who’s guilty at Popeye’s fate and his own not being able to rescue him. Popeye tries to demonstrate baseball moves with chicken drumstick and orange, in between contortions of withdrawal and desperation, struck through with the impossible need for friends and familiar things in going through hell, in a city that just doesn’t offer them, from hamburgers to people who know who the hell Mickey Mantle is. His stay in the hotel, where he’s visited by an aged English addict (Catherine Nesbitt) who soothingly rambles to him about her own past whilst stealing his watch, has a bleak cul-de-sac of the soul atmosphere to it reminiscent of the boarding house in The Seventh Victim (1943), the perfect place for Popeye to be lost in a haze of his failings as well as heroin.
To a certain extent, this whole narrative movement serves a not dissimilar purpose for Popeye as Indiana Jones’ encounter with the black sleep of the Kalimar in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984): the protagonist, partly defined hitherto by antiheroic traits, goes through an ordeal that makes him look into his dark side, and emerges newly fired up for total war. There’s an implicit approval of Popeye’s reckless style, and yet another message is quite clear, that if he and Barthélémy had worked together properly from the start, his ordeal could have been avoided, and the last act sees the policemen working together in a purposeful unit. The other actor the two films share is of course Rey, who was reportedly accidentally cast in the original when Friedkin requested “that guy from the Bunuel films”, meaning Belle de Jour’s Francisco Rabal, and the casting agent signed up Rey so quickly there was no time to renegotiate. It was a happy accident, if true, because Rey’s excellence is in how utterly un-villainous his Charnier seems, a dapper and affable man about town whose ruthlessness and cleverness are only hinted at in his insolent little wave to Doyle in the first film, and then revealed in the most specific circumstances. His best moment in the sequel comes when Charnier first spots Doyle in Marseilles, acute anxiety charging his features before resuming normal operations, and adopting a cobra-like chilliness when he later interrogates his cop prisoner. Once he recovers, Popeye embarks on a campaign of purification, fending off Barthélémy long enough so that he can track down the hotel himself. Pouring petrol about the place, he sets it ablaze to drive out the denizens like rats, flushes out Charnier’s goons, and releases his now deeply personal sense of grievance and frustration on the only scale that can satisfy it. It’s a typically outsized reaction from Popeye, but it does work: he gets a lead on Charnier’s new deal. He and Barthélémy almost manage to capture a new shipment where it’s being extracted from the hull of a Dutch freighter in a dry dock. But they barely survive an encounter there with Charnier’s new number one henchman, Jacques (Philippe Leotard), who wields a German army machine gun with brutal aplomb and kills Barthélémy’s subordinate Miletto (Charles Millot), before letting the sea into the dry dock.
Popeye saves Barthélémy’s life when he’s knocked out by a falling spar, and the French cop repays the favour by helping Doyle stay, when his superiors want him kicked out of the country, and acting on Doyle’s hunch, watching the Dutch ship’s captain (Raoul Delfosse), who leads them to Jacques. The cops track him back to the warehouse where they’re able to bust the whole of Charnier’s operation. Barthélémy gains some vengeance when he dispatches Jacques, who, trying to escape with some of the drug shipment in a truck, instead crashes into the warehouse doors Barthélémy sets closing: Jacques is hurled out through the windscreen. Meanwhile, Popeye chases Charnier on foot through the city. Amongst the many felicities of his filmmaking, Frankenheimer engenders the visuals with a sense of physical connection to Popeye, painstakingly portraying the delirium and liquid sense of time and care when he’s under the influence, his attempts to get back in shape after he’s recovered. This pays off in the finale’s lengthy foot chase, the modulated soundtrack and the lunging POV shots conveying Popeye’s exhaustion, so that the audience practically share his burning lungs and aching feet. Inevitably, this sequel risks being more prosaic as it finally gives Popeye the closure he sought, and yet there’s still an existentially gruelling aspect to his chase, running without gaining. It finally resolves in one of the sharpest and nastiest comeuppances in movie history, as Charnier, right on the threshold of again cheating Popeye of his prize, hears his cry from the quayside seconds before bullets smack into his body, and Frankenheimer cuts directly to black. The final effect is both satisfying and chilling, and one of the most perfect endings anywhere.
“Jesus, I love to shoot film.”
“Look out, Haskell, it’s real!”
—Medium Cool
Although Monte Hellman did not cite it has an influence, Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) was the film that came to mind as I watched Hellman’s first feature film in more than 20 years. Road to Nowhere is a film about filmmaking, and the love Hellman has for the form permeates this film. So, too, does Hellman employ a documentary style to expose the bones of the filmmaking process for his film within a film. However, neither the film Hellman stand-in Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan) makes, nor the fact-based story on which it is based is at all real. The fun for audiences is not just in trying to make sense of the reflexive storytelling, but also in recognizing how we, like the directors, love to lose ourselves in making the unreal real.
In this particular film, the “real” story collides with the film Haven is making (also called Road to Nowhere) in the form of Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon), an unknown actress he casts to play Velma Duran, a woman mixed up with corrupt politician Rafe Taschen, to be played by A-list actor Cary Stewart (Cliff de Young). Political blogger and scriptwriter Nathalie Post (Dominique Swain) says the pair faked their own deaths to perpetrate an insurance fraud, and flashbacks of Laurel confirm that she was hired to play Velma in “real” life in the North Carolina town where the suicides were staged to preserve the lives of Nestor Duran’s (Fabio Testi, also in Hellman’s Iguana) family in Cuba, though why they would be in danger, and from whom, is never made clear. It appears that North Carolina insurance investigator Bruno Brotherton (Waylon Payne) posed as a construction worker at Haven’s home with the express purpose of slipping a DVD of Laurel, whom he thinks is Velma, to Haven during the casting process and ingratiating himself as a location adviser to keep an eye on her; he doesn’t have to talk Laurel up to Haven, who is bewitched by her and turns down an offer by Scarlett Johansson to play Velma for scale to pursue his obsession.
Hellman has crafted two intriguing and very different films. Haven’s Road to Nowhere is slow and contemplative, making stunning use of the Smoky Mountains location and Sossamon’s enigmatic face to create a mournful atmosphere that is as enveloping as the low-hung clouds that roll off the mountains and across the water where Taschen’s plane goes down. A scene whose portent we won’t discover until nearly the end of the film shows Sossamon drive to a tunnel, walk in, and double over in an agonizing gut-wrench of emotion; carefully shot so we don’t see the other opening of the tunnel, this is indeed the titular road to nowhere.
Hellman’s outer shell of Road to Nowhere is caught up almost completely in the mechanics of filmmaking. We witness Haven’s arguments with his screenwriter Steve Gates (Robert Kolar) over casting, the endless ad libbing on set, the build-up of Laurel’s role, and the accompanying requests by increasingly marginalized cast members for more lines. Such is Haven’s obsession that Gates and the rest of the company are reduced to being his yes men and women. Cary Stewart is shown on the phone with his agent complaining about how the movie has shifted him into a supporting role; when asked if anything can be done contractually, he responds to what he hears on the phone with “Yes, we should have asked for more money.” Haven does a preproduction interview with real Variety reporter Peter Bart, implying that he doesn’t get romantically involved with the people on his shoots, and then sharing a room with Laurel on location.
What really put me in the same place as Haven was his evening occupation with Laurel—watching DVDs in their barebones hotel room using equipment he brought for that purpose. His film choices—The Lady Eve, Spirit of the Beehive, and The Seventh Seal—are as different from each other as Hellman’s two Road to Nowhere films, yet Haven proclaims each of them masterpieces. When Laurel asks how many films he has seen, Haven scolds her for the question: “Never ask a director how much time he spends watching other directors’ dreams.” “Then, am I your dream?” asks Laurel. Indeed she is, and other writers have suggested that Hellman’s one-time paramour Laurie Bird, his star in Two-Lane Blacktop, has uncomfortable parallels to Laurel.
Certainly, Hellman’s film is chockablock with references to his life and movies in general. Writing in an insurance investigator (and possibly cuing our memories with a Barbara Stanwyck vehicle) certainly calls to mind Double Indemnity. Several of his characters and the production team for the Haven film share the same first initials as he and other members of the production team. In fact, his fondness for cutesy names, like the matinee idol mash-up Cary Stewart and the destined-to-blog Nathalie Post, is a quirk meant to suggest types more than people, I imagine, but one I find more cheesy than effective. The extremely literal lyrics of the songs contributed to the film by alt-country singer-songwriter Tom Russell also seem to slam us over the head with the film’s theme. Perhaps this is Hellman’s sly trick on the Hollywood dumb-down most films must get before they can be marketed to the widest possible audience internationally. However, Hollywood isn’t the only target to get blown a raspberry—the lingering cheesecake shot of Swain’s curvaceous butt and one of Laurel taking a phone call while sitting on the toilet seemed like they escaped from a recipe book for audacious indie filmmaking.
A friend I spoke with after the screening couldn’t believe how appallingly bad Sussamon was, but Laurel insisted to Haven that she wasn’t really an actress. Her performance in the scenes we see in Haven’s film certainly are quite wonderful, and if she was trying to play an actress who couldn’t act, as I believe she was, she did a very fine job. In fact, I would say that generally speaking, the other performances don’t quite measure up to hers.
The climax of the film is the part that evoked Medium Cool most strongly for me. “Look out, Haskell, it’s real,” is a famous line from Wexler’s film, a reference to tear gas police shot into the crowd of protesters of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In fact, there was no tear gas where Wexler was shooting, and the line was dubbed into the film. In the same way, Haven shoots Bruno in a rage with the line, “You brought a gun into the scene,” a suggestion that the murder was an unplanned part of Hellman’s film. Wexler’s film ends with a camera pointing at the audience, whereas we get to see the murder scene and the police stand-off through Haven’s HD camera viewer—and a shot of Hellman’s crew filming it all.
Road to Nowhere is an intriguing film that will appeal most strongly to the serious cinephile who has wrestled with the implications of cinema as a voyeuristic and reflexive art form. In the final analysis, however, Hellman’s film has a valedictory feel to me, a summation of a life in the movies by one of its most staunchly independent elder statesmen.
In life and art, the blackest of humor has always been a part of the Irish sensibility. Although the lace-curtain Irish have fought for respectability against the more anarchic elements that surface regularly from the Irish collective unconscious, their own rioting at the premiere of John M. Synge’s patricidal and immodest Playboy of the Western World shows a nature that simply won’t be denied. Odd Man Out provides another unflattering portrait of the Irish, mixed with the noble image they tend to have of themselves and their struggles. In the end, only love proves honest, if not entirely honorable.
Johnny McQueen (James Mason) is the head of an unnamed organization no one could fail to recognize as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He has barely paused to take a breath following his release after a long stretch in prison before getting back to business, meeting with his compatriots at the Belfast home of Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan) to plan a payroll robbery to help fund the organization. Guns are issued, and as Pat (Cyril Cusack) brandishes his buoyantly, Johnny scolds him not to be quick to use it. Johnny’s second in command, Dennis (Robert Beatty), urges him to sit out the robbery, observing that he seems shaky. Kathleen, who is in love with Johnny, agrees with Dennis, but Johnny feels that he needs to assert his command and that his rightful place is alongside those taking the risks.
Johnny and his three co-conspirators walk into the mill they plan to rob and empty the contents of the office safe into their valises. As they make their way down a hall, the alarm sounds. As the others exit and hop into the getaway car, Johnny is momentarily dazzled by the sunlight. A guard catches up with them and wrestles with Johnny, shooting him in the shoulder. Johnny draws his weapon, kills the guard, and is dragged alongside the car by two of his men as Pat speeds away. Pat takes a sharp turn, and Johnny is flung free of the car. As Pat argues with his comrades about his fears of capture if he backs the car up to rescue their fallen leader—making his argument legitimate by wasting oodles of time—Johnny staggers to his feet and disappears around a corner.
Johnny’s gang exemplifies the opposite of the discipline and loyalty that would have characterized the IRA when Johnny and Dennis were coming up. Dennis is aghast that the gang left Johnny behind, but it’s clear that Pat was only thinking of himself. Pat’s lies to Dennis about why Johnny didn’t make it back with them forces Dennis into the streets to find his comrade.
Johnny evades capture when Dennis, having located him, lures the cops away by pretending to be the injured Johnny and rather carelessly sacrificing his own freedom by punching a couple of cops on a crowded bus. Johnny gets past a roadblock in a hansom cab that the police searched earlier. The cabbie (Joseph Tomelty), astonished to see Johnny in his cab, settles him into a washtub discarded in a dump on the edge of town. There Johnny sits, ridiculous, with snow falling around him, until a ratty little man named Shell (F. J. McCormick) finds him and contemplates whether to turn him in to the police to collect the sizeable reward on his head or negotiate with Father Tom (W. G. Fay), the priest the Catholic community turns to when looking out for their own best interests.
At this point, the story veers sharply from the IRA story and transforms into a strange burlesque in which Johnny becomes almost incidental, serving merely as the catalyst by which we view the Irish character as it is constellated by a talented and varied cast. Shell favors amusing, elliptical blarney to communicate his insider information, for example, bringing one of his pet birds to Father Tom and using it to allude to his discovery of Johnny in the washtub. He goes from planning to claim the £50,000 reward to agreeing to come to terms with the priest, though it’s pretty clear that he’ll probably get nothing but a florid thank-you. Is he inept? A fool? A patriot? McCormick dances with the highly literate dialogue provided by F. L. Green, screenwriter and author of the novel on which the film is based, and transforms Shell into a Beckett character, waiting for his ship to come in, yet seeming to conspire to ensure that it won’t.
The other half of this Godot pair is the iconic mad artist, here named Lukey and played broadly by Robert Newton. Lukey lives in the same tenement as Shell and waylays him whenever possible to pose for endless hours as a model for a series of Christ paintings. When he finds out that Shell has a lead on Johnny, Lukey is overcome with the idea of being able to paint the eyes of a dying man. The machinations that get Johnny out of a private booth in the Crown Bar (shot on location in Belfast) and in front of Lukey are too absurd to detail here. The stereotypical Irish thirst for booze and brawling takes the spotlight as Johnny hallucinates the heads of people he’s spoken with during the day in the bubbles of beer spilled on his table.
The outside world is a mixed bag that Reed carefully locates with his set decoration in the various strata of Belfast society. Two women trained in first aid during the war come to Johnny’s aid, and bring him into their thoroughly bourgeois home. Their goodness won’t allow them to turn him in, but they disapprove of him and don’t want to be mixed up in his criminality. War profiteer and vice lord Maudie (Beryl Measor), on the other hand, lives in a resplendently tacky home that has its own phone booth. Maudie is a Mother Courage knock-off—not so far from Reed’s most famous character, Harry Lime—selling Pat and his comrade out to protect her interests with the police. In this sense, what goes around comes around for the selfish and stupid Pat.
You couldn’t ask for a better-looking, more atmospheric film than Odd Man Out. Many noirish elements, including deep shadows, nighttime exteriors, shooting down stairwells, skewed camera angles, cages, and bars mark Johnny as a trapped animal. During Johnny’s fevered meanderings through Belfast, director Carol Reed treats us to frightening and absurd hallucinations, like the aforementioned, surreal “bubble heads,” but more poignantly, Johnny’s hallucination of his jailor as he hides in the air raid shelter and imagines it is his cell. We come to understand Johnny better from his imaginary conversation with this jailor than in many of the real-world interactions he has.
James Mason emphasizes his character’s weakness, not strength, his foolishness, not his resolve. Johnny’s self-defeating pride, his wavering commitment to armed resistance to achieve a united Ireland while failing to take his own advice to Pat, his offhandedness about Kathleen’s love, and his relative passivity as he’s passed around like a hot potato by wary locals make him less a Christlike figure than a pawn, an idea.
But it’s not that he doesn’t have a prayer—in fact, Kathleen intends to escort him to Father Tom while they wait for a boat that will take them to freedom. Of course, the symbolism of the boat signals death (one is reminded of James Mason on another boat—a cursed ship in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman), and Kathleen provides an angel’s love to escort him beyond life to a place where she can protect him for all eternity. Kathleen seems to be the moral center of this film because of the purity of her love that seems very motherly (is she chaste as well?), but the life of the guard Johnny killed means nothing to her in the grand scheme of her devotion.
Most of the characters in this film seem quite childish. In an early scene, a group of children are playing soccer in the street when their ball lands at the feet of a grown man. Instead of passing it back to them, he kicks it as hard as he can in the opposite direction—a nice device that eventually will lead to Dennis’ discovery of Johnny, but also a needlessly mean and infantile reaction from the man. Late in the film, Johnny quotes a famous line he learned from Father Tom: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Ironically, Johnny’s pangs of adult conscience and an awareness of mature feelings for Kathleen are only awakened when he is at his most helpless and dependent—in the last hours of his life, after he learned he had killed a man. Odd Man Out is an Irish tragedy indeed.
There are often great pleasures in the programmatic films churned out by Hollywood’s independent film studios. Like Roger Corman’s productions, many of these movies gave future cinematic titans experience and chances to experiment. Such a film is Railroaded!, a fairly routine crime drama made by Poverty Row’s Producers Releasing Corporation that flirts with being a full-blown film noir thanks to the edgy direction of Anthony Mann and his cinematographer Guy Roe and the obsessive performances of John Ireland and Jane Randolph.
We start in noir country—a nightscape of a city street lined with bright theatre marquees. The camera moves down the street and swoops down to a close-up of a shop window advertising “Clara Calhoun: Your House of Beauty.” The door opens to Clara herself (Jane Randolph) ushering a happy patron with a new coif out with hopes that she gets home safely. The remark was meant to flatter the patron, but it has portends of a tragedy soon to befall the shop.
Clara runs an illegal bookie operation in the back room of her shop. After she closes up, she and her assistant Marie (Peggy Converse) start counting the take. Marie goes to the front of the shop to lock up, and Clara opens and closes the back door three times to signal two men in a laundry truck. They enter the shop to steal the gambling money. At the same time, a policeman patrolling the street hears Marie scream and shoots into the shop. He hits one of the robbers, but is killed by the other. The two men flee, with the unharmed man, Duke Martin (John Ireland), abandoning the truck and his badly injured partner, Cowie Kowalski (Keefe Brasselle), in front of a doctor’s office. Clara and Duke, lovers and conspirators, bemoan their bad luck but begin their campaign to frame the owner of the truck, Steve Ryan (Ed Kelly), as the gunman who killed the cop.
The film has a fairly standard plot that moves through Steve’s arrest by Det. Mickey Ferguson (Hugh Beaumont), Ferguson’s growing suspicion that Steve is innocent, and his progress at uncovering and apprehending the real murderer and making time with Steve’s beautiful sister Rosie (Sheila Ryan). Among the complications are Rosie’s independent attempt to find the killer, which causes her to cozy up to Martin; Martin’s growing paranoia about anyone who could tie him to the murder and his greed for the money his employer, Jackland Ainsworth (Roy Gordon), makes off the entire bookmaking operation. The final showdown between Martin and Ferguson, with Rosie as the damsel in distress, plays just as expected, as does the closing clinch between Ferguson and Rosie.
It is the bizarre and atmospheric elements in this film that make it more of a standout than its filmic brethren. The robbery has some lurid, adrenaline-inducing moments that raise it above its unpromising beginning. Martin, wearing a Navy scarf belonging to Steve, pushes Marie into the beauty salon, where he intends to rob the cash register as Cowie bags the money from the book operation. A hand rattling door knobs proves to be the unlucky cop, O’Hara, who we soon see in full approaching the salon. His shadow plays against the window, warning Martin and causing him to raise his shotgun and walk toward Marie, warning her not to scream. Mann directs the camera to look straight up the gun barrel, cutting to close-ups of Marie as she backs away and does exactly—and inevitably—what she is told not to do. The menace of the scene almost had me doing the same.
Another crazy, erotic scene occurs when Rosie goes to Clara’s apartment and confronts her, sure she lied when she identified Steve as the killer. Martin is in the apartment, but hides behind some curtains. Accusations and tempers start to fly, and soon we find ourselves in an extended cat fight, with the two women shaking and hitting each other, falling over couches, knocking over lamps, and eventually landing on the floor for the obligatory hair pulling. Martin, like we, watch this fight with a voyeuristic excitement. Rosie eventually stands up and leaves, having gotten denials from Clara, but also the location where Marie has gotten a new job. Clara’s revelation of this information and Martin’s awakened sexual interest in Rosie will cause him to turn on Clara and have her seeking solace in booze.
Ireland and Randolph easily walk away with this film. Ireland plays a psychotic killer and abuser of women with an ingratiating hardness that is fascinating to watch. We just know he’s going to kill everyone he can! Randolph is just as hard and cynical at the beginning of the film; she projects an insolent toughness, and her set-up of the robbery is carefully calibrated. She can’t be shaken from her identification of Steve as the killer, but Martin’s changed attitude toward her turns her into a desperate neurotic who knows she’s suddenly become expendable. Clara goes to a nearby shop to phone Ferguson and take him up on his offer of protection, but Martin has spotted her and crept up on her on the sly. While she stands in the phone booth, too nervous to notice Martin has cracked it slightly to listen in, the cuts between their faces ramp up the tension. The pathos of Clara looking behind her as she walks home to meet Ferguson is rather touching, since Martin is already waiting for her there and certainly intends to kill her.
By contrast, Sheila Ryan seems like a high school girl trying to act tough, and, well, Hugh Beaumont was born to play Ward Cleaver, not a romantic and rugged cop in a proto-noir. They have no chemistry and nothing interesting to say. Check out this dialogue, symptomatic of most of the script:
Criminologist: You know, there are only two kinds of animals that make war on their own kind – rats and men… and men are supposed to be able to think.
Mickey Ferguson: I think you’ve got something there, Doc.
Zzzzzz. And dig those crazy shoulder pads—they fairly mesmerized me with their outrageous awfulness.
I was quite taken, however, with several actors in small roles. Kelly has a great face, and his character is no pushover. He protests his innocence, but expresses cynicism about the wheels of justice. It was good to see a suspect with some balls. Ainsworth’s girlfriend Wilma, unfortunately uncredited, quite reminded me of Claire Trevor. She sits in smug obedience to her keeper in the first scene in which she appears; in the second, however, she’s full of insolence and insults toward the man. In another scene with an interesting walk-on, Martin has agreed to pay a wino to take the fall for the robbery, getting Steve off the hook. The wino, also uncredited, repeats by rote the story he is supposed to tell the police, as though the thought of having money to buy as much alcohol as he wants brought his mind into focus. Neither of these characters has a real role to play in the plot, but as in most great B-films, and especially noir, these small touches add atmosphere that pays big dividends.
In this film, although the police want to get someone to pay for killing one of their own, they expressly state that they don’t want to convict an innocent man. Despite the noirish lighting and truly bizarre set pieces, the lines of good and evil are far too carefully drawn to make this a true noir. In a few years, noir would blossom fully, and cops would be as rotten as robbers. In the meantime, however, Railroaded! provides a crucial and entertaining link in the development of a future noir master, Anthony Mann.
In looking for a film to write about for the Film Noir blogathon, I initially felt most motivated by what I wanted to avoid. Film noir was a dark, nasty, immediate kind of cinema movement that sprang out of artistic and real-world inspirations that were crucially of their moment, reportage from the front lines of domestic landscape of the Depression and World War II eras. It was really a style more than a genre, though tropes of crime fiction have become inextricably associated with it, blended and mediated through a specific range of clichés and metaphorical niceties that were exhausted with great speed. The intervening half-century of pop culture has often threatened to render that vital and spiky cinema a powerful magnet for nostalgic fetishism and arbitrary appropriation. Thus, I began to think more about what film noir had evolved into. I thought about what could be called the noir revivalism since the ’80s, some of which, like Wim Wenders’ Hammett (1982), Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), or Brian de Palma’s The Black Dahlia (2006), preoccupy themselves in recreating the tangy milieu of noir but also employs a grittier portrayal of things more tangentially explored in the older genre works—sexuality, drugs, race, the whole shebang. And there are other films that, like Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), the Wachowski brothers’ Bound (1996), Rian Johnston’s Brick (2005), and the oeuvre of John Dahl, took the basic precepts of classic noir and played them out in a contemporary context.
Only a few current English-language directors have, however, truly kept the ethos of noir alive without a hint of retro cute. Since his debut with 1981’s Thief, the most high-profile is Michael Mann. Miami Vice, a bristling prestige project that had a troubled production and proved a surprise semi-failure on release, is nonetheless a genuinely evolved noir film. Adapted from the slick ’80s television series created by Anthony Yerkovich, for which Mann was executive producer and unofficial artistic mastermind, this Miami Vice refused to be nostalgic even for the ’80s. Mann signals his take fairly early when a nightclub pulses with Felix da Housecat’s remix of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman”: the song is old, the beat is new. Mann built upon the stylish minimalism William Friedkin and Peter Yates had brought to crime flicks in the ’60s and ’70s, but his fascination with pared-down, art moderne visual textures was something new: existential haute couture. Mann’s stylistic reinventions have often outpaced audience receptivity throughout his career, and many of his early films, including the now-lionised Manhunter (1986), were bombs.
Miami Vice shows quickly enough how little interest it has in going through the niceties of adapting a TV show. Mann tosses the viewer in medias res with “Sonny” Crockett (Colin Farrell), Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), and the members of their undercover squad, including Tubbs’ paramour Trudy Joplin (Naomie Harris), Gina Calabrese (Elizabeth Rodriguez), Stan Switek (Domenick Lombardozzi), and Larry Zito (Justin Theroux), busy trying to sting pimp Neptune (Isaach De Bankolé) in that nightclub. Crockett is drawn away by a frantic phone call from informer Alonzo Stevens (John Hawkes), who’s charging across the city in his sports car, hoping to make it home. His wife has been taken captive by the mob of drug-dealing white supremacists, after Alonzo had arranged a meet-and-greet between the criminals and some FBI agents. Alonzo spilt the beans to the racists, and FBI agents are brutally, summarily gunned down by the white supremacists’ military-level firepower. Crockett and Tubbs manage to intercept him on the freeway and get him to pull over and explain, but when word comes through that Alonzo’s wife has been found murdered, Alonzo steps in front of a semitrailer. The boss of the blown FBI operation, Fujima (Ciarán Hinds), approaches Crockett, Tubbs, and their boss Castillo (Barry Shabaka Henley), because they’re the only people he can now trust with a mole certainly within his own operation.
Crockett and Tubbs swing into action, using their knowledge of who’s shipping what in and out of Miami and their willingness to bend the rules. After Trudy carefully falsifies criminal records for them, they destroy the high-speed boats being used to ferry in the gang’s dope. Then, using another criminal interlocutor, Nicholas (Eddie Marsan), the duo shop themselves out to the supply end of the business, represented by arch narcotics entrepreneur José Yero (John Ortiz) and the shadowy Isabella (Gong Li) from their base in Ciudad de Este in the Brazil-Paraguay-Argentine borderlands. Both are merely senior employees for the glowering kingpin Francisco Montoya (Luis Tosar), an internationally powerful, stateless monarch whose final approval Crockett and Tubbs have to gain to run a drug shipment into Miami. They pull this off, and get a second, larger contract, hoping to learn as much as possible about Montoya’s operations. Crockett enters a swiftly combusting romance with Isabella, who is Montoya’s lover but also a nominal free agent. Yero, ruthless, paranoid, and suspicious of these too-efficient newcomers, uses this affair to convince Montoya they should nullify their deal with the Americans and let their Nazi business partners take care of them.
Unlike most of the neo-noir I mentioned above, Miami Vice maintains the defining aspect of noir: the visual style is an aesthetic unit with the story’s preoccupations and the overt and covert themes. Mann’s film burns like liquid nitrogen, laying out the eponymous city as a sprawl of lights drenched in darkness and populated by swashbuckling law enforcers and monstrous villains. The film’s imagery often resembles modernist painting and varieties of experimental photography. Such affectations retain a quality that was part of the punch of classic expressionist-influenced films, retaining a definite link with the way directors like Lang, Welles, Hitchcock, and many others could twist a cinematic frame so that the elements within it became somehow abstracted. Mann shoots faces, bodies, technology, and architecture in such a way that they hover in a kind of electrified, yet impersonal beauty, sometimes with a crisp distance redolent of Jeffrey Smart or David Hockney, sometimes so close as to lose all sense of proportion and form. I particularly love the glimpse of the colossal white-supremacist thug festooned with tattoos and resembling some kind of humanoid brontosaur ransacking a refrigerator, while Alonzo’s wife’s slain form lays lifeless in the background. Another, very different moment of wonder comes when Sonny and Isabella flirt, their foreground faces blurred, but the background landscape sharp, perfectly communicating the almost drug-like intensity of their attraction.
The result is one the few genuine stylistic masterpieces of modern American film. Refining the aesthetic he’d developed in Thief, Manhunter, Heat (1995), and The Insider (1999), Mann pushed it to a limit here. Miami Vice’s terse, deterministic approach to the usual beats of the action-crime genre, as opposed to the operatic prolixity of Heat, is one of the things I like most about it, but this also perhaps made it bewildering for many. Mann tries to explicate as much of the drama as possible through the behaviour of the characters rather than through what they say to each other, and he floors the notion that action is character. The casual shot in which Crockett notices that Montoya and Isabella are wearing his-and-her watches gives away a lot, though it also opens yawning abysses of subsequent uncertainty. That Crockett and Tubbs trust in each other completely is a matter chiefly communicated through how they stand and sit together, and the later concern Tubbs has that Crockett might be falling under the spell of Isabella and the potential imperial wealth he could accrue with her is as much about eye contact as talk. At the heart of this story, obviously, is one of the oldest motifs of the crime genre: the shifting no-man’s-land between cops and criminals. One of Mann’s most distinctive refrains in his crime stories is not just the porousness of the boundaries between good and bad, lawman and criminal, but also what keeps them polarised.
A significant difference between the hazy outsider parables of classic noir, with their losers, lone knights, femme fatales, and fatalistic sense of social hierarchy (and fascism always sharply remembered on the edge of memory), and the sorts of TV dramas on which Mann cut his teeth, including Starsky and Hutch and Miami Vice itself, was that such cop shows drew their heroes as guys doing a job and enjoying their lives when not working. This paved the way for how most modern cop shows are more about workplace dynamics than crime and its social dimensions. Mann’s concerns since starting his film career have been more classical, repeatedly pondering how people on both sides of any border, but usually a legal one, can have startling similarities as well as telling differences. “There’s undercover, and then there’s ‘which way is up’,” Tubbs notes at one point, firmly placing the film’s concerns back in classic noir territory. The real impetus there is found in the two concurrent, defiantly now-fashioned stories of Sonny and Isabella and Ricardo and Trudy, and narrative urgency is not sourced in any tension that Sonny and Tubbs might be seduced by the dark side, but in what their dedication might cost them and those they love. The early scenes portraying the grisly fate of Alonzo’s family and the FBI agents lay out the threat as almost gothic in scope and menace, especially the startling moment in which the racists’ high-powered weapons smash apart the agents.
Eventually, of course, they have to face down the same threats, when, double-crossed by Yero, they have to first extract Trudy from the hands of the racists, who have yoked her with plastic explosive (a charged image in more ways than one), and then work out a way of extracting Isabella and taking down the baddies without getting themselves annihilated. The story is necessarily simpler than the sorts of intricately woven political, social, and personality strands in some of Mann’s later-career films, like The Insider (1999) and Ali (2001). Yet his attempts to create a modern kind of noir film encompassing global networks of information, transport, permeable borderlines between national borders and even settled ethnic and sexual identities mediated throughout the flow of imagery both extends and, to a certain extent, subverts some of the given elements in classic noir films like Force of Evil (1948), The Big Heat (1953), Underworld USA (1961), in which crime organisations became metaphors for a sinister side to Western capitalism itself. In the course of the narrative, Mann traces the colossal drug-dealing project from end to end, possibly to make up for the epic he had wanted to made about the drug trade that was forestalled by Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2001). This holistic vision of worlds within worlds makes Miami Vice a much darker, denser film than one expects.
Almost all classic noir films are about the subterranean link between mean streets and the mansion on the hill. The original inspiration for Yerkovich’s series was a story he’d read about how the seized assets of drug dealers were being employed in operations against them. Such is the reason why Crockett, Tubbs, and the rest of their team are able to live lifestyles seemingly far above their pay grade. The sheer scale of money and clout the likes of Mendoza can call up, and the lifestyle they can enable, is pretty seductive. Mann is superlative at changing the tone and pace of his films with strange reversals, like the famous sleeping tiger scene in Manhunter and the coffee-drinking scene between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat. Here it’s in a scene where Isabella, after making a deal with Crockett and Tubbs, succumbs casually to Sonny’s come-ons and gets him to take her out for a spin in a borrowed-for-the occasion speed boat. She convinces him to take her to Havana for a drink, and they speed off across the waves. It’s as if he’s suddenly driving the movie into a hazy fantasy, a high-end commercial or space-age version of an Ernst Lubitsch film where ritzy people casually do ritzy things at the drop of a hat. And yet it cleverly and seductively illuminates the film’s biting perspective on a 21st century in which money, and what it buys, has become its own continent. Where once Friedkin’s hero Popeye Doyle had stood on a corner in the cold and watched his quarries stuff their faces, Mann’s are much more comfortable. But this, in its way, proves more dangerous.
What follows is an extended romantic interlude that deliberately echoes the earlier one between Ricardo and Trudy. Both couples shower together in moments of eroticism, but the disparity between the moments is impossible to ignore. Whereas Tubbs and his girl are clearly, easily in accord on all levels to the point where Ricardo can get away with a cheeky premature ejaculation gag and it’s just part of the fun, the layers of truth and deception in Sonny and Isabella’s relationship (Is his anecdote about his roadie father true? Why is he trying to make the super-profitable deal with her?) are all too telling. Add to this, of course, the obvious, suggestive disparities—Sonny the white trash rendered slicker by experience and ambition, romancing Isabella, a Chinese woman with a Spanish name and a mother who was a translator killed in Angola. Mann’s odd, fascinating games with racial coding expresses itself in Isabella and, in less germane style, with Fujima, played by an Irishman. Such seems to be his way of both subverting the clear-cut boundaries of the original series’ drug war geopolitics and simple fascination with watching the world’s wanderers find each other. Professionalism is another of the few meaningful yardsticks in Mann’s films, and, of course, Crockett, Tubbs, and team are arch experts; but so are Isabella, Yero, Mendoza, and even some of the white supremacists.
That sort of chitinous professionalism that hides a hidden psychic cost is also, of course, another long strand in noir, back to Hammett and Hemingway, the latter being one of noir’s biggest nongenre sources (no wonder Mann’s been kicking about the notion of shooting For Whom the Bell Tolls). Mann’s embattled individualists, searching for their own ways of living and often rejecting those that don’t smell right, certainly belong to that tradition, and his version of The Last of the Mohicans (1992) sifted out their link to an even older tradition (and notice Crockett’s name, “sonny” of another frontiersman legend). And yet some of the most fascinating moments in the film are far smaller and human, like Sonny’s care in doing up Isabella’s seatbelt in the speedboat, or the beat in which Isabella waits for Mendoza to speak after she casually informs him she slept with Crockett, and he only wants to know more about what she’s gleaned of his business plans. The cops-vs.-robbers business here is traditional men’s stuff, of course, but also one, Mann repeatedly emphasises, in which modern women are more often a part. Isabella, Trudy, and Calabrese are fully engaged members of what used to be purely masculine fields of endeavour, in a modern sense, and yet when push comes to shove they’re rendered pawns by the baddies. Isabella is no traditional femme fatale, in that her purpose is not consuming destructiveness of herself and others, in spite of the fact that she’s most definitely a criminal; “She’s one of them,” Tubbs states categorically to Sonny to remind him of the demarcations of their world. But she’s really more a kind of brutally pragmatic yuppie, jetting off to Geneva when business calls. I like Li’s performance in the film in spite of her initially inelegant command of English, and in part because of it, for the way Li relaxes and responds to Farrell’s Crockett with her entire physique and manner.
Crockett and Tubbs are, finally, old-fashioned white knights, going down those mean streets. Tubbs’ first specific gesture in the film comes when, infuriated by seeing Neptune manhandle one of his young hookers, Tubbs chases after him and breaks the fingers of one of his bodyguards. Later, when Trudy is endangered, Tubbs gains a personal motivation. Perhaps the true femme fatale is Calabrese, who has what is actually the film’s greatest bit of tough-guy business. She confronts the white supremacist holding the trigger for the bomb around Trudy’s neck, and informs him how she’ll shoot him in such a way that he can’t reflexively detonate the bomb; “Fuck y-” is all he gets out before her bullet does exactly that. The scene in which Tubbs and Calabrese invade the trailer of the creeps holding Trudy—the most-low-rent end to an international conspiracy imaginable—is borderline brilliant, not only for the bit mentioned above, but also for Tubbs’ own no-bullshit handling of the situation. You know all those films where you groaned when a hero failed to stop a villain by neglecting to put a bullet in his head when he was down? Not this one. But then, the nasty twist: Yero remotely sets off the explosive, seriously injuring Trudy just at the point all seems well.
After that, naturally, comes a walloping showdown between the cops and Yero’s coalition of paramilitary enforcers and the white supremacists Sonny and Isabella are literally caught in the middle, and Ricardo chases down and blows a hole in Yero. The action here anticipates the mix of naturalism and first-person force Mann would again muster in his follow-up, Public Enemies (2009), a film that intriguingly attempted to avoid the usual affectations of the period movies comprising much of the noir revivalist oeuvre. That Crockett and Tubbs’ ethics are at a slight remove from the strictures of their job is not shocking, but it is important, as Crockett, with Tubbs’ silent assent, bundles Isabella away from the battle scene to make her escape. Real heroism in Miami Vice is finally being able to tell the difference between right and wrong, and also to make the compromise between wish and reality. The film ends on much the same unfinished note with which it began, with Trudy merely recovering from her injuries, the standby villains defeated but with Mendoza having escaped.
Miami Vice is such an inherently visual film that it’s damnably hard to write about and demands multiple viewings, but I’ve come to love it as well as admire it. The acting is of a very high calibre, with Farrell and Foxx acquitting themselves exceptionally well; I particularly enjoy the unblinking deadpan fashion with which Tubbs asks of Yero, “Are you with the Man?”, a line that might have defeated many other actors. But it’s often the supporting cast, especially Tosar, Henley, and, above all, Ortiz, who truly galvanise the film. The result is one of my favourite films of the new millennium and one that keeps something of noir’s crumpled romanticism alive amongst the high-tech and unforgivingly modern.
The film world is awash today in notices about and tributes to Claude Chabrol, the French New Wave director who died yesterday at the age of 80. Noted for his leading-edge championing of Alfred Hitchcock, Chabrol himself relished in making many a good thriller. But he was also interested in power and corruption in society, in families, and in the human heart.
I can’t pretend to be extremely well versed in Chabrol’s career, nor have I seen nearly as many of his movies as I would have liked. But the films I have seen (This Man Must Die and La Cérémonie are reviewed on this site) have led me to an instant kinship with this critic of the smug, excavator of hypocrisies and depravity, and bemused observer of the strivings of men (mainly) whose ambitions are not only unworthy but surprisingly simple-minded and, ultimately, modest.
The Comedy of Power, his 2006 takeoff on a real-life scandal, is a rewarding exercise in watching him perform a perfect balancing act between a drama of corruption and a comedy verging on slapstick. That he has some female enforcers hand some very self-impressed men their dicks on a platter is even more deliciously humorous.
The first comedic moment comes right at the start, with an explanatory title in bold lettering that contains the boilerplate disclaimer that usually appears at the end of all feature films—that the movie is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and real persons is strictly coincidental. In fact, any French viewer would recognize this story as “L’affaire Elf,” a worldwide, multiyear scheme in which politicians and business leaders enriched themselves through kickbacks paid by corrupt African governments and businesses. But you don’t have to be French to get the inference. Political and financial scandals know no borders, and this movie’s theme strikes an all-too-familiar note.
Chabrol sets up the adversarial sides with economical visual gags. We meet the first corrupt businessman, CEO Michel Humeau (Francois Berlèand), as he prepares in his office for a weekend trip. He speaks on two cellphones at once as a flurry of assistants buzz around him. When the phone that has his wife on the other end cuts off, he shakes it and then uses it to—what—shave? No, he has a skin condition, and he’s always scratching at his face; perhaps his wife literally makes his skin crawl. Outside of his office building, he is accosted by a complement of gendarmes and arrested. Amid protests of “Do you know who I am?!” Humeau is forced to strip at the prison—a literal dressing-down.
We get an inkling of what’s ahead when two of his associates, hearing of his misfortune, say that a magistrate named Jeanne Charmant-Killman (Isabelle Huppert) is the investigator. She is known as “The Piranha.” Cut to a shot of some enormous goldfish sitting at the bottom of a small fish tank—a hilarious and perfect metaphor that is rounded out when the camera pans down and we observe The Piranha in action, eating sushi with a man who is involved in the scheme but who thinks he has her where he wants her.
Of course, no man in this film is any match for Charmant-Killman. Huppert gives her a spine of steel wrapped in a painfully thin form of pure energy fueled by nicotine. She has a short, sarcastic laugh ready for any of the dubious, ridiculous statements made by the buffoonish conspirators she interviews one by one. Descarts (Jacques Boudet), a rubberfaced politician who is fond, as all the conspirators are, of enormous cigars, decides to contain Charmant-Killman by coopting her and setting her in competition with another woman. He has her promoted, moved to a spacious office, and gives her a very sharp assistant, Erika (Marilyne Canto). But, instead of ending The Piranha’s crusade, this move only doubles the conspirators’ trouble. The only person the plotters manage to corrupt is a man, and they show the famous honor among thieves by shamelessly ratting each other out.
This film would have been a farce in other hands, and probably a good one. Chabrol, particularly by casting Huppert, adds the necessary gravity to the story. This really is how the world works. Greedy, stupid, condescending men are lining their pockets with taxpayer money in countries all over the world for luxuries they could well afford with their executive salaries, or a mistress, or some other bit of ephemera to balm their overtended egos. Dedicated prosecutors like Charmant-Killman keep putting their thumbs in the dike, but the pressure is too great to hold out for long. In one particularly tragic case, anti-Mafia fighters Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were Excellent Cadavers, and in the film, Charmant-Killman eventually comes under 24-hour police protection.
The only misstep is the depiction of Jeanne’s rich husband Philippe (Robin Renucci), who becomes ever more lonely and depressed as his wife develops tunnel vision for her quarry. He makes a desperate choice near the end of the film that seems to reach her, and hints are that she may have a change of heart toward her work. This character transformation, if genuine, is unnecessary. Chabrol should have trusted Huppert more. Her performance is so vibrant that it is impossible to see Jeanne Charmant-Killman as one of the caricatures that surround her.
Indeed, Chabrol has shown an affinity for detective stories and their keen-eyed sleuths to such an extent that this collaboration led me to envision Huppert as Charmant-Killman in a series of films to offer a realistic antidote to the fussy concoctions of Agatha Christie. Although Chabrol can no longer offer his amazing touch to the proceedings, I sincerely hope to see The Piranha hunt another day. l
David Hudson at MUBI has a comprehensive round-up of articles, observations, and more here.
Johnny To has emerged in the past few years as a master of Hong Kong genre cinema, filling the void left by the departure and disgrace of John Woo and other industry notables in Hollywood adventures. To and Woo share characteristics, both concentrating on bristling macho dramatics, each analysing fundamental social, business, and personal bonds through the charged metaphors of the gangster film, and both channelling the influence of foreign masters like Ford, Peckinpah, Scorsese, and Leone into their localised aesthetic. They’re very different in other respects, however: where Woo is usually an operatic executor of movies that are fundamentally about movies, reverent of the given structures and precepts of the genre film, To is much more of an ironist, willing to play games with his audience’s expectations in laying out standard elements and then executing simple, but brilliantly effective twists. To’s as strong a stylist as any in modern cinema, but a purposeful, efficient one, saving pyrotechnics for the moment of maximum impact, and with his dancing camerawork, lightning editing, and keen mise-en-scène, he barely wastes a frame. Election proved something of a breakthrough for him in terms of overseas attention, and it’s not hard to see why.
The story is fairly simple, but To keeps his pieces moving on the board so fast it’s a challenge to stay focused. The Wo Sing triad, one of the most notable—but far from only—illegal organisations in Hong Kong is having an election for its chairman, who serves for two-year spells. The tradition of the election is over a hundred years old, and the codes that bind the triad members together go back even further, to the days of resistance against the Manchus and the rebellions of the Shaolin monks. The two candidates to replace outgoing boss Whistle (Chung Wang) are Lam Lok (Simon Yam) and Big D (Tony Leung Ka Fai), two temperamentally disparate kingpins. Lok is calm, disdainful of showy expressions of power, the kind of guy who walks around his neighbourhood and converses with shopkeepers without a weapon or bodyguards, a detail which speaks of his certainty of power. He keeps a fine apartment with his son Denny (Jonathan Lee). Big D is far less restrained: married to a potent kingmaker wife (Maggie Shiu), he’s a man who smiles and cajoles with excessive pleasantness and explodes in childish tantrums when he doesn’t get what he wants. And he doesn’t, when, in spite of his carefully administered bribes to some of the “uncles” who form the decisive circle of triad chiefs, Lok wins the election as the most honourable and respectable of the choices.
Big D decides to dispute the election, and kidnaps two of the uncles he blames for his loss, cranky old Long Gun (Yuen-Yin Yu) and dissolute Sam (Robert Hung), whom he’d bribed but who failed to vote for him because there wasn’t enough money to go around. He nails them inside wooden crates, and rolls them repeatedly down a mountainside until they’re bloodied, dazed messes. Calling up Whistle, he threatens their lives unless Whistle helps him in challenging the triad’s guardian of tradition, Teng Wai (Wong Tin Lam); Whistle responds by having a subordinate hide the carved dragon-motif baton that is the symbol of authority in the Wo Sing in mainland China. Big D senses he might still stake a claim to the governorship if he can get hold of the baton by proving that he has the muscle and guts to snatch the baton to those who would still deny his authority.
Getting wind of an impending clash between the quickly polarising sides, the police, commanded by stoic Chief Superintendent Hui (David Chiang), drag in all the uncles, including Lok and Big D, who, still raging at his fellow uncles who he thinks betrayed him, begins kicking Whistle in front of reporters whilst waiting to be taken into the police station. Whistle flees the violence, but is run over by a car and critically injured. The cops, desperate not to see a gang war start, only want to force the uncles to find a way to sort out their problems. But events threaten to spiral out of everyone’s control as rival bands of men loyal to Big D and the other uncles try to fetch the baton from its hiding place in Guangzhou, and an embittered Whistle tries to blab from his hospital bed.
To’s quick eye takes in a raft of small details that fill out the universe of the triad bosses with alternatively disarming and dismaying effect. Most of these gangsters aren’t actually very tough or especially good at their jobs—they’re mostly middle-age men whose days of roughneck street warfare and standover work are behind them. Amongst the younger ones, who include young punks with something to prove, and genuinely fierce warriors in need of a watchful eye, the slickest is the preternaturally cool Jimmy Lee (Louis Koo), who distributes bribes and collects debts whilst also attending seminars in finance. Small and large rituals—Teng Wai making tea for the uncles to seal their election decision; a later, full-on, religious-flavoured, blood-brother ceremony—define and seal their society. The power of ritual and tradition is simultaneously endangered, illusory, and still binding in subtle and supple ways. The governorship of the triad is established by totems and oaths, and but these are only emblems of real things, and the competition to command the emblems will finally express the reality of those symbols. As the film plays out, the meanings of those symbols become thoroughly apparent.
Election also hints at broader meanings through its title: the election, the illusion of democracy, is a sanctified ritual in the triad. But it’s only possible because of the mutual consent of powerful men, and To encompasses the history of Hong Kong and the relationship of Chinese society to centuries of hegemonic rulers both foreign and domestic. Simultaneously, what adherence to a creed means is taken seriously all the way through, even though the drama is driven by upstart Big D’s refusal to accept the rules, a breach of the creed. He threatens that if he doesn’t get his way, he will break away and form his own triad, a potent threat indeed as no one wants a war. The police know they can’t stamp out the triads, and are happy to act as something like referees in this game to reduce collateral damage; their attempts to corral the uncles before the situation combusts prove partly successful. In a moment that’s both ribald and telling, Long Gun, whilst berating Sam and Big D for failing to give a big enough bribe, orders a nubile young prostitute to jump up and down for him: those old farts are happy as long as their pockets are stuffed, their dicks are wet, and the world’s jumping to their regulated beat.
In the film’s sustained, exhilarating central movement, the battling factions and the police try to beat each other in ferrying the baton out of China, leading to the teeth-gnashing moment between two intermediate members. Kun (Gordon Lam Ka-Tung), functionary for a boss who’s signed on with Big D because he’ll sell their drugs at a higher rate, beats Lok loyalist Big Head (Suet Lam) with a log to get him to give up the baton, whilst Big Head recites the words of their triad oath, explicating the bizarre bond of corporeal grit and spiritual adherence that keeps the Triad bound together. But then Kun gets a call from his boss, telling him the plan’s changed: he’s now to make sure that the baton comes home to Lok, and he has to apologise to the bloodied, battered Big Head before immediately leaving with the baton, knocking over a policeman in his relentless drive back to Hong Kong. He then passes the baton on to motorcycle-riding, hard-as-nails kung-fu warrior Jet (Nick Cheung), who was first glimpsed in the film taking offence to Big D’s patronising jokes, which caused him to crush up and eat a ceramic spoon as a fuck-you to the wannabe overlord; we know then he’d rather die than let Big D get the baton. With Jimmy Lee, who manages to intercept him, they beat off a mob of his men, Jimmy stuffing one heavy into a barrel and stomping on the lid until he’s trapped like a Looney Tunes character and Jet finishing up with a machete jutting from his shoulder. But the pair’s grit sees them victorious and Lok gains the baton. It’s the most generically satisfying part of the film as a blindingly executed piece of action.
Terrific little details flitter by at high speed, like the “you’re full of shit!” look Jimmy wears in listening to Uncle Sam’s swearing he’s not going to gamble any more, or Teng recalling how the baton once had to be sprayed down with insecticide after the last election because the former holder was such a slob. There are points in Election where even fierce attention won’t really reward a first-time viewer. Many of the bosses and their henchmen are swiftly introduced and barely distinguishable, though that’s probably intentional. Lok’s supine calm and Big D’s hot-headed smarm are, on the other hand, very carefully contrasted to carefully manipulate initial impressions. Lok, with his calm demeanour and general reputation for honour and chivalry within the triad, seems by far the better man, yet one senses that Lok’s security in his sense of power gives him a great capacity for ruthlessness. This is proven when, to make sure Whistle doesn’t blab to the cops, he has Whistle’s son run down by a truck and threatens that his daughter will be next, causing Whistle to commit suicide by pulling out his own life support. Once the baton’s in Lok’s hands, he reaches out to Big D, bringing him into his plan to expand the Wo Sing’s turf by taking over another triad’s territory: Big D pretends then to make an alliance with that triad’s boss, Brother Dinosaur (Bo Yuen), only to team with Lok to kill him, Big D relishing stabbing and kicking the dying man. All suddenly seems right in the Wo Sing world again.
But To saves his most brutal and amazing flourish for the very end: when Lok, Denny, and Mr. and Mrs. Big D share a bucolic afternoon fishing, Big D, pleased by how things are going, suggests that he and Lok share the Wo Sing governorship as some other triad bosses have done. Lok says they’ll have to talk it over with the fellow bosses, and then, when Denny and Mrs. D are momentarily absent, he picks up a huge rock and bashes Big D’s head in with it. Mrs. D sees him and tries to run away, but Lok catches her, throttles her, and buries her with her husband in an unmarked grave, before calmly driving home with his son, who witnessed his violence, in glazed, silent trauma, into a blood-red sunset.
The ending is both a ruthlessly concise trash job on the veneer of gangland civility that brings to mind the climax of Scorsese’s Casino (1995)—indeed, the thought of Scorsese having remade this film rather than the far less inspired Infernal Affairs is a tantalising one—with its galvanising, surprisingly prolonged, and truthful violence, but it’s also a coldly logical culmination of all that has proceeded. Lok’s unremitting execution of his rival and his problematic wife is both power politics defined, and obedience to the creed of the triad. Big D has violated the society’s laws and defied the judgement of the uncles, and he pays the price for that violation in the same way that Big Head defended the laws: at the cost of having his body pummelled, but this time unto death. This hardly leavens the final disturbing vision of Lam Lok as a brutal psychopath, his son’s haunted look saying all that’s necessary about life in this world even as they slip back into their social roles. The savage excellence of this coda elevates Election far above the pack. l
One Sunday morning in May 2000, the Stephenses, a Georgia couple in their 60s who were vacationing in Jacksonville, Florida, left their room at a Ramada Inn for some coffee. They were confronted by a man who demanded money and, tragically, Mrs. Stephens was shot and killed. With little to go on besides a description of the killer—young, skinny, black, wearing dark shorts and a t-shirt, and carrying a Derringer-type weapon—police stalked the neighborhood near the motel for someone who fit the bill. Patrol officers spotted 15-year-old Brenton Butler, skinny and black, walking on the street and decided to stop him. They asked him if he lived in the area (yes) and if he would mind talking to the investigating officers to offer any information about the neighborhood he might have (no). Butler got into the squad car and was driven to the motel. Mr. Stephens took one look at Butler seated in the back of the squad parked 50 feet away and identified Butler as the killer. Police brought Butler closer to Stephens and asked him if he was sure. “Yes. I wouldn’t send an innocent man to jail.” That ended the police investigation. Butler signed a confession and was put on trial for first-degree murder and armed robbery.
When news of the arrest was broadcast, Jacksonville public defender Patrick McGuinness was driving to his office. He recalls thinking that this young man had thrown his life away and the life of his victim. But McGuinness would soon have a change of heart: “As I learned more, I became increasingly angry.” He and Ann Finnell, a 23-year veteran of the Jacksonville public defenders office, made righteous use of their anger to defend Brenton Butler to prevent a travesty of justice from taking place.
Murder on a Sunday Morning, winner of the 2002 Oscar for best feature documentary, poses the kind of story that must have had a natural attraction for French director De Lestrade, sharing as it does similarities with Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s classic tale of criminal justice run amok. Of course, the fictional Jean Valjean, who is hunted relentlessly by police inspector Javert when he escapes from prison, did commit a crime. But, his crime (stealing bread for his starving family) and his punishment (eventually, a death sentence when his escape attempts were taken into consideration) reflected a repressive society that was willing to condemn a man just for being poor and trying to take care of his family. In the Stephens case, Brenton Butler was brought into the criminal justice system for the crime of being black near the scene of a crime, thus, the more ironically apt French title, The Ideal Culprit.
As Finnell eloquently puts it near the beginning of the film:
Officer Martin came in and candidly admitted that the only reason Brenton Butler was even stopped that morning was because he happened to be a black male walking in the neighborhood. Now think about that. That means for every African American in Jacksonville, Florida, if they happen to be walking down the street lawfully going about their own business, not doing anything wrong, that they are subject to being stopped and asked to get into a police car, and driven away from what they’re doing, and subject to being shown to the victim of a crime with the possibility that that victim would identify them under the most suggestive of circumstances, that being that they happen to be sitting in the back seat of a police car and most victims would think that they wouldn’t be sitting in the back seat of a police car unless they had done something wrong, right? So that’s where we are today in Jacksonville Florida, and I personally find that to be disgusting and reprehensible.
The film offers straightforward coverage of the pretrial preparations and trial itself from the point of view of the defense. McGuinness and Finnell are shown examining evidence collected at the scene of the crime, questioning the man who found Mrs. Stephens’ purse in a dumpster on his daily rounds of collecting aluminum cans for recycling, marking the time it would take for Butler to get to the crime scene from his home based on when his family saw him in the morning, and so forth—in other words, conducting their own investigation. The police didn’t check the purse for fingerprints, and they never recovered the murder weapon. Butler’s attorneys also tore into the confession, wondering why a young man on his way to fill out a job application at a local Blockbuster would bother after just making off with $1,200 of the Stephenses’ vacation money. Nothing added up.
De Lestrade takes us seamlessly through the knowledge and logic the defense attorneys used to reconstruct what happened after Mrs. Stephens died. Tourist killings in Florida were making the news domestically and internationally (no doubt, this is why De Lestrade learned of the case), and the police needed to put people in jail to protect the tourism industry. With a witness ID, the system could move swiftly to conviction and incarceration. Lazy, more inclined to believe a white witness than a black defendant, and skilled at getting confessions through intimidation from black defendants through a black enforcer, Det. Michael Glover, the police acted with impunity to railroad Brenton Butler. Their shoddy work and cruelty—including a beatdown by Glover of Butler—make McGuinness’ disrespectful attacks on their professionalism and character a pleasure to watch.
Particularly satisfying is McGuinness’ cross-examination of Det. James Williams, who wrote the confession that Butler signed, one that he claimed was in Butler’s own words but finally was forced to admit was his own creation. McGuinness relates in one of his typically interesting and caustic comments to the filmmakers that he and Williams talked before the testimony in the hallway. Williams, no fan of the public defender, sarcastically remarked on McGuinness’ smoking “another one of your cancer sticks.” McGuinness replied, “I always like a cigarette before sex,” accurately predicting that he was going to screw Williams in the courtroom.
It’s sad and sobering to see the Butler family deal with their ordeal. Brenton is stoic until his mother takes the stand to testify to his whereabouts on the morning of the murder. As she starts to cry, the camera moves to her son, his face wet and streaming with tears. His father prays with him from across the thick glass in the prison visitors room and says, “God don’t make mistakes,” a belief that many people, including me, would find hard to take given the circumstances of this trial. Frighteningly, the indifferent police work meant a real killer was still out on the streets able to kill again. Again, McGuinness makes this point for us. I admit, I’ve gotten so used to documentary directors narrating and inserting themselves into their films (the curse of Michael Moore), that I was jarred—in a good way—by De Lestade’s decision to let his subjects do all the talking for themselves.
Since Brenton Butler was tried and exonerated in less than an hour, we’ve seen some big changes in race relations in the United States. But the pushback has been hard, and this case is sadly echoed in the recently passed Arizona law that could see a lot of innocent people stopped, like Butler, for walking while Latino. The question of police torture and forced confessions is alive, if being given a low profile in the cowed media, in Chicago, as the trial of former Area 2 Commander Jon Burge for allegedly torturing more than 200 criminal suspects (many of them black) between 1972 and 1991, to force confessions is underway. The judge in Butler’s case, when thanking the jury for its service, called the U.S. criminal justice system the best in the world. That may be true on paper, and the judiciary worked in this case, but we’ve got quite a ways to go before we can truly claim that reputation.
The 1940s were an interesting time for motion pictures. The first half of the decade was given over to patriotic fare and escapist entertainment to aid the morale of a nation embroiled in World War II. In the aftermath of the war, as revelations of the depth of the horror in Europe and the Far East came home with the battle-scarred men, the movies took a turn to the dark side. Proto-noir films like Detour presaged the coming paranoia of the 1950s, and films like The Best Years of Our Lives and Gentleman’s Agreement were frank about postwar realities like housing shortages, scarce jobs, a growing awareness of bigotry, and veterans broken in body, mind, and spirit. Brute Force teamed Jules Dassin, a master of crime films, and Richard Brooks, a screenwriter whose uncompromising gaze filled theatres with such forceful fare as Key Largo, Blackboard Jungle, and Elmer Gantry, for a look at postwar crime and punishment. While adhering to the Production Code dictum that crime must not pay, Brooks and Dassin took a sharp detour from the early 1940s notion of clearly defined good and evil and punished both the convicted criminals and their lawless jailors, reflecting the shadow of the concentration camp on American psyches.
Brute Force centers its action on the convicts of cell R17 in Westgate Penitentiary, which is headed by career bureaucrat Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen) but run by a cop named Munsey (Hume Cronyn), whose slight body and soft-spoken manner belie his ruthlessness and ambition. When we first enter the cellblock, inmates are looking out their barred windows at a long car and saying their good-byes to one of the inmates. His stretch is up all right, but only because a hole 6 feet deep is waiting for him on the outside. Munsey had the older convict work in the dreaded drain pipe, where many convicts find illness and death.
As the car pulls away, a couple of guards escort an inmate who was absent from roll call that morning, Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster), back to R17. He has spent 10 days in the hole for carrying a shiv. The prison grapevine has fingered Wilson (James O’Rear) as the source of the planted weapon, and preparations are underway to see that he gets his. Despite Wilson’s petition for leniency to inmate power broker Gallagher (Charles Bickford), the instruction “Wilson, 10:30” gets passed around. Collins manages to be in Dr. Walters’ (Art Smith) office when Wilson is cornered in the prison license-plate shop by cons with blow torches and forced into the punch press in a scene of desperate brutality. Wilson is only one of the inmates whose death can be traced back to Munsey, who ordered him to plant the shiv on Collins. The captain has forced dozens of inmates to bend to his will, or take the consequences. One of the occupants of R17 will become his next victim, the warden will bend to a new get-tough policy handed down from on high or lose his job, and cancelled parole hearings prompt Collins, his cellmates, and even the compromise-oriented Gallagher to hatch an escape plan.
Brute Force has an interesting, if occasionally stylistically jarring device for taking us inside the lives of some of the cellmates. We flash back with them to the women they left on the outside and learn a little about their crimes. Tom Lister (Whit Bissell) feared his beautiful wife Cora (Ella Raines) would leave him because he was barely scraping by as a lowly accountant. By juggling the books, he was able to embezzle enough money to buy her the fur coat she’d always wanted, but police sirens interrupted their happy moment. Collins is worried about his wife Ruth (Anne Blyth), who he learns from his lawyer is not getting a cancer operation because she won’t act without him at her side. Collins’ flashback shows him stopping to see Ruth, a paraplegic, before pulling that “one last job” that does all crooks in in the movies. The most entertaining flashback is provided by Spencer (John Hoyt), a con artist who got conned by a beautiful blonde named Flossie (Anita Colby) in a Runyon-esque short story of pithy grace. Soldier (Howard Duff, in his impressive screen debut) just wants to get back to Italy, where he hopes his girl Gina (Yvonne de Carlo) is waiting for him—sadly, his flashback shows Gina shooting her own father to protect Soldier, and she is probably in jail herself.
It is in the prison where this film is most compelling. The grind of a convict’s daily life is shown in a bleak fullness that seems real. The prison is severely overcrowded, with six or seven men in a cell. The food served up in the mess hall looks fit to hang wallpaper, not eat. The oppressiveness of the surroundings is beautifully captured in the art direction of John DeCuir and Bernard Herzbrun: the barbed wire, the guns, the medieval drawbridge to the outside that only lets men out when they’ve finished their sentence, died, or are going to work in the drain pipe. While it doesn’t match the cruel conditions of Caspar Wrede’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, that film was made in the harsh winter of northern Norway. For a set-bound Hollywood production, Brute Force does a very good job.
Dassin puts the pedal to the metal when Munsey goes about uncovering Collins’ plan. He scores a rubber-hose beating of one of Gallagher’s men with the uber-mensch strains of Wagner, a decided contrast with the tasteful undertones of film scorer Miklos Rozsa. Cronyn conducts this beating shirtless, revealing some toned muscle on his formerly unimposing form and visually suggesting the physical ideal of the Third Reich. It’s a bit over the top for a scene that would have been just as effective by focusing on the stiff rubber hose and the steadily more battered face of Munsey’s victim, but cutaways to the cringing guards outside of Munsey’s office create a nice indirect source of unease.
Lancaster, in only his second screen role, capably ushers in the new breed of physical, downscale leading men to come. Character actor Jack Overman plays a punch-drunk boxer in R17 so poignantly that he made me want to see more of him. Bickford doesn’t have a lot to do, but he’s authoritative doing it. Art Smith has the philosopher’s role in this film, and he plays it to the hilt. A drunk who has reached the end of the line working at the prison (did the prison drive him to drink or did drink limit his options to prison work?) he sees through Munsey’s plan to become warden and mocks his ambitions. He doesn’t wonder, as another character does, why men try prison breaks even though they are doomed to failure. The conditions under which the prisoners live say it all, and the film refers to real prison breaks that had been tried at San Quentin and other U.S. facilities. Interestingly, virtually all of the prisoners are Irish; the only other ethnic type called out in the script is a Caribbean inmate nicknamed Calypso (Sir Lancelot), whose off-the-cuff songs describe actions in the story. Prisons would never be this white again.
The climax of the film, of course, is the prison break attempt. It’s action-packed, thrilling, and very, very cruel. A mob of cons in the prison yard swarm guards and await their chance. It never comes, but the vision of a restless population of men must have shook postwar America by the nape of the neck. Dassin’s politics, evident in this film, proved sadly prophetic. The repression that came in the following decade forced him to flee the United States to escape the Hollywood blacklist so he could keep turning out great films like Brute Force. l
On Sunday, as the hubby and I were on our way into the AMC theatre for the day’s films, I spotted a weathered, red-haired man standing on the sunshine-filled sidewalk talking to some people. “Isn’t that the guy we saw last night in Chicago Overcoat, the detective?” I asked. Sure enough, it was. We waited patiently for said actor—Danny Goldring—to finish his conversation and then went up to him and thanked him for a great evening. He commented on how young and talented the filmmakers are. “When he hits 30, they’ll have to kick him out. Over the hill,” the veteran actor joked.
A homegrown production shot on the streets of Chicago, Chicago Overcoat is one of the hottest tickets at the festival. The advance word must have been out that this neat crime drama has all the goods. Chicago Overcoat is an amazingly professional directing debut for Brian Caunter, with assured handling of both actors and cameras, amazing cinematography and location choices, and great pacing. But it’s also clearly an homage of the neophyte filmmakers not to the crime capers of old, but rather to Quentin Tarantino. The hardboiled screenplay has an ironic, almost kitschy feel without taking much away from the reality of the characters, and it’s hard to ignore how much the lead character’s girlfriend in her synthetic black wig looks like Uma Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction. I hope Thurman, who is receiving a Career Achievement Award from CIFF, stops by to see this small tribute to her.
The film opens in Cook County Jail, where mob boss Stefano D’Agnostino (Armand Assante) is being held for trial on various racketeering charges. He orders his lawyer to have the witnesses silenced. D’Agnostino’s second in command, Lorenzo Galante (Mike Starr), reluctantly gives the job to 65-year-old mob soldier Lou Marazano (Frank Vincent), who has been itching to make some real money after spending 20 years performing small-time strong-arm jobs.
If it’s possible for someone to be nostalgic for contract murder, then Lou is. In fact, however, he’s nostalgic for the entire way of life that is disappearing among the 31st Street Crew of mobsters he calls his family. Respect, it seems, is sorely lacking. Particularly for him. This chance will help him repair his reputation, help his divorced daughter Angela (Gina D’Ercoli) make a new start with his grandson Michael (Robert Gerdisch) apart from his insolent ex-son-in-law Joey (Mark Vallarta), and get him to Las Vegas for a comfortable retirement.
Lou’s first hit is a cinch. The second, too, except that Lou returns to an old habit of his—sending flowers to the widow of the man he’s just killed. The return of the “Flower Man” has Det. Ralph Maloney (Goldring) hot on his trail, beginning at the shop where the flowers came from. He picks Lou up for questioning. Although he’s let go for lack of material evidence, the Cicero boys decide Lou’s a liability and order his death. You don’t want to trap an old dog with his own tricks, however. Lou’s seen it all, played every part (“I’ve been the friend” who suckers the victim), and he’s not going down—not to the cops and not for his family. “Fuck that! I’m going to Vegas!” But will he be able to stay one step ahead of the many people who want to take him down?
Chicago Overcoat is a fast-paced cops-and-mobsters film that gets a bit of star power from brief appearances by Assante and Stacy Keach, who took a day off his gig at the Goodman Theatre playing King Lear to shoot a short scene as a retired cop who worked on some of the “Flower Man” hits. But it is the yeoman actors playing yeoman mobsters and cops who fill the screen with anger, regret, petty politics, and longing that propel this procedural beyond caricature. Lou’s long-suffering girlfriend Lorraine (Kathrine Narducci) hopes Lou will see her as more than a shack-up and alibi, but seems to reach her last straw; odds are, though, that she’ll still be pining for him long after he’s gone. Goldring plays an obsessed cop with equal amounts of verve and defeat. His partner, Eliot (Barret Walz), is young, handsome, and in over his head. They make a perfect team.
But it is Frank Vincent as the cold-blooded killer who’s afraid his daughter will find out he let her son hold his tommy gun who moves like a well-oiled pistol through this film, driving the action, committing to acts of sudden violence that shock and delight us, remaining himself—a family man to his real family and a hard-headed pragmatist who kisses the past good-bye the way any self-respecting Sicilian mobster would. He narrates the film with a Mike Hammer sort of patois that is sometimes too glib, but always working to convince. I was especially tickled by a line Lou has when he meets an old friend who has baited the trap for his execution. They’re talking about the old days, and his friend tells him he hasn’t been the same since his wife split. “Maybe I should talk to someone,” says Lou in a perfect send-up of Tony Soprano, “let it all out.” Genius.
I don’t know if there are any tickets left for the last screening of this wild ride of a movie. I’d be very surprised if it didn’t get a DVD release. Look for it. You’ll have a great time. l
The history of Zoetrope Studios and Francis Coppola’s ill-fated efforts to build an independent studio into a real force after the unexpected success of Apocalypse Now (1979) is often used today as one of Hollywood’s key cautionary tales—or in the words of Homer Simpson: Never try. The vibrant and entertaining One from the Heart (1981), the flavourful Hammett (1983) and the aesthetically original Rumble Fish (1983) didn’t make money, which was kind of a problem considering they really, really needed to. Coppola, desperate for cash, was forced to sell off Zoetrope’s infrastructure. He was marked with a reputation as a loose cannon by studio bosses when he took up an offer from his old Godfather consigliore Robert Evans to come and save Kid Notorious’ splashy new production. This film, inspired by a picture-book history by Jim Haskin on the glory days of New York’s one-time congress of cool, the Cotton Club, was due to begin shooting in a scant two weeks. Evans’ off-screen travails, which included the murder of one of the financers, were like something out of the movie he was trying to make.
The major problem Coppola faced was that there was no ready, workable script to commence production with. Mario Puzo had written the first version of the screenplay, but Coppola quickly hired William Kennedy, author of the much-lauded novel Ironweed, to drum up a new script to be used in rehearsals. By Kennedy’s estimate, revisions during shooting would number up to 20 times, yet the problems were never really overcome. The film was a colossal flop, further damaging Coppola’s career. But The Cotton Club is a doggedly entertaining and interesting film that well and truly earns it place in Coppola’s cannon, with its high style and historically incisive bent.
The story revolves around the conflicts three real-life gangland personages: Owney Madden (Bob Hoskins), owner of the Club and the city’s rock-steady chieftain; Dutch Schultz (James Remar), the most predatory and unstable new operator; and Lucky Luciano (Joe Dallensandro), the nascent empire builder. Revolving around them are other partly disguised, historical protagonists: Bix Beiderbecke (with a dash of George Raft thrown in) reconfigured as Dixie Dwyer (Richard Gere); Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll as Dixie’s brother Vincent Dwyer (Nicholas Cage); Harold and Fayard Nicholas as Sandman and Clay Williams (Gregory and Maurice Hines); Lena Horne as Lila Rose Oliver (Lonette McKee); and Bumpy Johnson as Bumpy Rhodes (Laurence Fishburne, who’d later play Bumpy in virtually the same film under the title Hoodlum in 1996).
The contrast of brothers, Dixie and Vincent, Sandman and Clay, is right at home in Coppola’s oeuvre of familial love, creative partnership, and strife. Dixie, a talented cornet player and all-round charmer, catches Dutch’s eye one night at the same time both men also spy young flapper Vera Cicero (Diane Lane). Dixie escorts the boozy girl home and declines to ravish her drunken bones. Soon, both are taken in by Dutch—Vera as his mistress, Dixie as his pet musician and general dogsbody, each aware of their suddenly limited options despite standing to gain a piece of Dutch’s considerable action. Dutch is a volcanically temperamental go-getter, and when Owney, the last court of appeal in the Manhattan demimonde, attempts to force a peace on Dutch and rival Joe Flynn (John P. Ryan) at a swanky soiree, Flynn’s incessant swearing and racism drives Dutch to knife the Irish hood to death, infuriating Madden and kicking off a turf war with the Italian, Irish, and Negro gangs that Dutch means to win.
Vincent opportunistically uses his brother to get a job with Dutch, but soon enough becomes an independent gangster. He becomes infamous for a string of robberies and mob hits, one of which sees some youngsters accidentally gunned down, making Vincent persona non grata even in the gangland. The simultaneous tale of Sandman and Clay sees their tap act accepted at the Club, the most prestigious spot in town built around Negro art and artists who, farcically, can’t come in the front door. Sandman falls hard for gorgeous dancer and singer Lila Rose, but is persecuted by an apish, bullying supervisor (Ron Karabatsos) when he tries to romance her, and eventually falls out with Clay when he begins to work on making his own star rise. Madden eventually helps Dixie escape Dutch’s service and make it in Hollywood. He returns as a movie star ready to use his new status to pry Vera out of Schultz’s mitts just as Luciano is getting tired of the Dutchman’s antics and plans his elimination for the sake of general peace and Bumpy begins exerting some coloured clout to even the books in the Cotton Club.
After Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s cinema progressively became more formalist – experimenting with showy visual textures and low-key narratives, aiming for something close to a total cinematic stylisation, infused with an air of nostalgia and art-for-art’s-sake wistfulness. Apocalypse Now was utterly stylized, too, but its angry, violent engagement with a hot-button subject appealed. The new-age, old-style, inherently personal, romantic musical One from the Heart didn’t pack the same appeal despite the fact that it’s something like Coppola’s most personal masterpiece; The Cotton Club is many ways a follow-up, interweaving its melodrama with melody. The trouble is it neither gels as a work of sustained style nor as an epic melodrama: the distinct flavour of too many cooks making this broth is readily apparent.
The chief problem is one of focus, with theoretically crucial dramatic elements that never quite work; the central romance of Dixie and Vera never catches alight, their love-hate sparring more the spats of spoilt brats than destined lovers caught in the grasp of an ogre. Gere, at the height of his young, slippery charm, is fine, but Lane’s a flatly ordinary ingénue whose perfect jazz-baby face can’t disguise a lack of any projected character. Story threads that seem important, such as Sandman and Lila Rose’s romance, complicated by her desire to pass and make it in the larger showbiz world, don’t really go anywhere. Dixie hardly seems to notice or care when his rampaging brother is gunned down, without any commentary on familial fate realised as it was in the Godfather films. The subplot of Sandman and Clay is actually more vivid, but not given much time. One wonders how much coherence and substance hit the cutting room floor to get the running time down to a hair over two hours.
Somehow, however, The Cotton Club is a gift that keeps giving. It’s really about its marginalia, offering a cornucopia of images, homages and vignettes, and it can be regarded as a loose adaptation of the French classic Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), in the way it spins dramas around a performing venue, contrasts artists and gangsters as members of the demimonde, and sets up a power struggle of men over a woman who’s a general object of desire. Coppola views the racism and criminality that swirl around the Club with appropriately confrontational cynicism, but the film is more a celebration of cultural energy and awkward but vitality-inducing multiculturalism in melting pot New York. Dixie has sufficient chops as a cornet blower to be readily accepted by the black musicians he hangs out with, and eventually uses his clout as a movie star to break the Club’s strict colour barrier and sit in with the orchestra. Even the monstrous Dutch fancies himself something of a promoter of ethnic harmony. Moreover, Coppola adores and celebrates the old-school chutzpah of its musicians and dancers, leading to a finale in which the boundaries between art and life, realism and style, acting and dance, comedy and tragedy, melt away.
There’s nothing all that new about what Coppola was doing: many Warner Bros melodramas of the 30s and 40s, best typified by Casablanca (1942), sustained such a sublime interaction. Coppola pays homage to that film with the Cotton Club serving, like Rick’s Café, as a crossroads of society, using the musical acts to divide and comment upon the actions, sporting some terrific performances from the Hines brothers, McKee, and Larry Marshall’s awesome impersonation Cab Calloway. Coppola offers backstage sequences in the Club when Sandman and Clay audition, being as it is the place everyone wants to get into either as guest or performer, and very few succeed. But it’s over 40 minutes before the camera enters the Club through the front door and the panoramic spectacle of the place in full swing is offered, Coppola’s rapidly gliding crane camera roaming the space in a sequence that’s the near-equal of the similar Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas (1990). Thus the film’s most memorable sequences tend to be wondrous little throwaways, like when Sandman takes Lila Rose to a club for old dancers that results in a dance-off between the hoofers; Dixie’s mother (Gwen Verdon) casually schooling a girl in Central Station in a shuffle; Sandman and Clay reuniting through a tap routine that ends in the two halting mid-act and embracing; Bumpy’s brief soliloquy on the exigencies of survival as a black man; Diane Venora’s spot-on cameo as Gloria Swanson, telling Dixie he has It; the motor-mouthed commentary by a Hollywood boss and his Yes Man underling whilst watching Dixie’s screen test.
Best of all is the interaction between Owney and his hulking enforcer Frenchy Demange (the great Fred Gwynne), as when Frenchy smashes Owney’s watch when he thinks his friend failed to fork out enough dough to ransom him back from Vincent. Hoskins and Gwynne walk off with the film, though Remar’s weird Schultz is a worthy for this connoisseur of screen villainy, with his obvious social discomfort bubbling in all his scenes, his mouth twisting into a perpetual grimace of displeasure, his voice in moments of extreme outrage dipping into a low, troll-like croak. Around them bubbles an entirely notable cast, sporting the likes of Tom Waits (who had provided the soundtrack of One from the Heart) as the club’s gruff emcee, the amusingly cast Factory himbo Dallesandro, and future notables, like favourite nephew Cage, Lane, Fishburne, Jennifer Grey, Giancarlo Esposito, and daughter Sofia as a street waif. l
I’m not really a fan of detective/crime novels, though I have read a bit, but even I know that Jim Thompson and Donald E. Westlake are among the elite novelists of the genre. Both men wrote screenplays and have had their fiction adapted for the movies: Thompson’s includes The Getaway and Westlake’s include Point Blank, The Outfit, Payback, and most recently, The Ax. Pairing Thompson’s novel The Grifters with the screenwriting talents of Westlake and capping the whole thing off with the excellent and versatile British director Stephen Frears should have made for an amazing movie. The film of The Grifters stumbles but, ultimately, the power of Thompson’s nihilistic vision of society as played out by its bottom feeders makes the film a memorable, repeatable experience.
John Cusack plays Roy Dillon, a con man, or grifter, who keeps a roof over his head playing the “short con.” Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) is Roy’s girl, a part-time chippy who exchanges sex for rent with her reluctant landlord Irv (Michael Laskin). When we first meet her, she is trying, unsuccessfully, to scam a jeweler. Roy’s mother, Lilly Dillon (Anjelica Huston), puts the fix in at race tracks for her mobster boss Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle). These three people will form a triangle fueled mainly by their desperate need to survive. As the story unfolds, we will see that survival means different things to each of them.
Roy tries a con in a tavern—ordering a beer, flashing a $20 bill at the bartender, and then laying a 10-spot on the bar and collecting the change for a 20. Small-time stuff that usually works, but not always. One bartender spots the deception, grabs Roy’s hand, which contains the $20 bill, reaches back for a baseball bat, and smashes Roy in the gut. Roy limps home to the inept ministrations of Myra, who decides sex would be the best medicine in the world.
At the same time, Lilly gets a call to go to a racetrack in Delmar. Protesting that she never goes to California, she really can’t say no. She decides to drive to Los Angeles to look up Roy, who is not at all happy to see her. He maintains a cold, discourteous demeanor even as Lilly tries on maternal love for size. When Roy starts to run a high fever from his encounter with the baseball bat, she calls an ambulance. The doctor who greets the ambulance—Bobo’s personal mob physician—says he probably has internal bleeding and likely will not live. Lilly says, “You know who I work for. My son’s going to be all right. If not, I’ll have you killed.” Roy survives. Lilly is sent to La Jolla to do another job.
After he recovers, Roy decides he and Myra should go to La Jolla for the weekend. On the train, Myra observes Roy con some sailors in a rigged dice game. She confronts him later: “You’re on the grift, same as me.” He says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “Roy, you’re a short-con operator… and a good one, I think. Don’t talk to me like I’m another square.” She reminisces about her salad days on the grift, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in long-con investment schemes with her partner Cole (J. T. Walsh), who is now confined to a sanitarium for the criminally insane. She proposes teaming up with Roy. Remembering the man who taught him his trade warning Roy to stay away from the long con (“You don’t want to do jail time.”), he refuses.
Myra is determined, however, to get back in the money. She follows Lilly to the track and watches her take money and put it in a hidden compartment in her car’s trunk—she’s been skimming Bobo’s winnings. Lilly suddenly finds herself in deep trouble with Bobo, Myra moves in on the money, and it all ends with a confrontation between Roy and Lilly in Roy’s L.A. apartment a couple of days later.
Los Angeles is the American city that produces the most photogenic and evocative night images. One look at the lights from atop the hills around the city almost instantaneously evokes a seductive nightmare of vice, tawdry criminality, and corruption. The opening credits play up this association as the words “The Grifters” fuse with the background.
Frears likes to shoot reality pretty much as it appears, so he uses different devices to suggest shifts in each character. Angelica Huston’s blonde hair is so startling, so cheap, yet she’s a woman with a very nice figure who startles others as being too young to have a grown son. Her white suit glows in the Southern California sun, but soon she will be stained with blood, as we watch her switch to red.
Annette Bening puts on a stupid, Betty Boopish voice and dresses in the cheap, garish costumes of a tramp, with her long, faux-gold earrings suggesting a reject from a Vegas chorus line. She is enormously comfortable with her body; it’s Myra’s meal ticket, and Bening’s not afraid to show it off with an unself-conscious playfulness. The full-length shot of her sashaying toward the jewelry store owner, willing to offer herself in exchange for some dough to make rent is itself a jewel of cinematic power. This lively image will be echoed with a deathly one—the climactic shot of Lilly at the end of the film, stony-faced, appearing dead as she is lowered in a cage elevator.
In between are some fairly strained performances from Bening and Cusack. Bening has been called the thinking man’s sex symbol. She’s not convincing as a floozy in the first third of the film. This may have been by design, as signaled by Myra’s hammy performance as a woman of means faking her own death in her long-con game. Nonetheless, the high-tone character fits Bening like a glove, and the contrast is jarring. In the final act, she is pure animal, willing to stop at nothing to survive in the style to which she had become accustomed, thus redeeming the overall performance.
Cusack fares much less well. He’s a penny-ante con, therefore perhaps a bit more innocent than either of the women with whom he spars. Nonetheless, his disillusionment with life should have been stronger, his antipathy for Lilly more bitter. His performance is weak and tinny even though he’s given great dialogue to chew on. His “I owe you my life, Lilly,” has none of the foreshadowing he could have given it. Indeed, he admits on the DVD extra about the making of the film that his first day at work was almost a complete disaster. Frears, in this extra, is gracious to all of his actors by saying that you hire performers for what they are and shouldn’t try to change them into somebody else. Alas, the performers are charged with changing into their characters, and Cusack just couldn’t step far out of his naïve, teenage persona at times when it wasn’t called for.
When it was, however, he helped create the most electrifying scene in the entire movie, the climactic end when Lilly kisses Roy as a woman to try to convince him to give her his money to make her escape from a murder-minded Bobo. He responds briefly, then pulls himself away in horror. The incestuous undercurrents ripple a bit, enough for Myra to call Roy on them, providing a reason why mother and son normally stay a continent away from each other and why Roy calls her “Lilly” and treats her with a distancing disdain—his survival depends upon it. Thus, the explosion of passion at the end is earned and shattering.
The shining light in this dark tale is Anjelica Huston. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her perform with such intensity and shading, taking risks that most actors would never dare approach. Her wiry body, nervous smoking, and shaky stability vibrate and build throughout the film as though emanating from an animal that has been horribly abused and only knows how to cower or go for the throat. She seems to understand Jim Thompson’s world somewhere in her gut and is the single facet that makes The Grifters magnetic and watchable time and time again.
Try pairing The Grifters with House of Games for a night of con games.
The hubby is the person whose enthusiasm for Takeshi Kitano got me into watching the works of this film entrepreneur extraordinaire. Using the stage name—Beat Takeshi—he still uses when acting, Kitano was one half of a popular comedy duo in Japan. He turned to filmmaking in 1989 with the film Violent Cop (Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki), in which Kitano plays a cop who never met a rule he wouldn’t break to get results. Kitano frequently includes yakuza plotlines and characters in his films, but his seemingly endless imagination has never stopped exploring other ways of telling stories. The first Kitano film I saw, A Scene at the Sea (Ano Natsu, Ichiban Shizukana Umi), his third outing as a director, was a gentle, bittersweet tale without a yakuza in sight.
Fireworks has some of Kitano’s trademarks—seaside scenes, yakuza, his own ensemble of actors—but strongly references the events and aftermath of his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1995. The film focuses on policemen Nishi (Kitano) and his long-time partner Horibe (Ren Oshugi) and the course of their lives following violent encounters with a yakuza gang. Nishi is a legendary cop with a tragic life—after his wife was diagnosed with fatal leukemia, their young daughter died. He has had to go to a yakuza loan shark to help pay for her medical care. Horibe pities Nishi, cherishing as he does his normal family life.
One day, Horibe approaches the stakeout car of two cops he and Nishi are training, telling them they will have to remain on stakeout longer than expected because Nishi must visit his wife. Nakamura (Susumu Terajima) says he has a date waiting for him across town. Horibe releases Tanaka because he is a family man and takes the duty alone. As he sits in the car, he calls home and talks to his wife and daughter. He learns from his daughter that she has drawn a picture. Comically, he listens to her and then opens his notebook to look inside. This is the last bit of normalcy in the film. In a quick shot, we see a yakuza with his hand wrapped in a newspaper, pointing his gun downward. Switch to a shot of Horibe on the ground, his hands impotently pushing at the air to shield himself. Bang.
The film plays with time and characters in a seemingly random fashion. Nishi talks with a woman, asking how she is. As well as can be expected; she has a part-time job now as a clerk in a deli. We learn what has happened in Shakespearean style, as two incidental characters confound our expectations of what happened and relate that Horibe has been crippled and that his wife and daughter left him. Tanaka has been killed; Nishi was talking with his widow. Nishi is no longer on the police force, having resigned in the wake of Horibe’s crippling injury and Tanaka’s murder at the hands of the yakuza soldier being watched. The latter event is revealed slowly in flashback.
Nishi visits Horibe. The former partners stare at the sea, and Nishi asks Horibe what he plans to do. Paint, he says, almost at random. We see Horibe alone on the sand looking down as the water splashes at the front wheels of his wheelchair. Two parallel lines in the sand trail behind the rear wheels.
Nishi plans to take care of everyone, from providing for Tanaka’s wife and his own to settling his debt to the loan shark and setting Horibe up with art supplies. How he does this is interesting and not without consequences. His ultimate goal is to be left alone to spend all his time with his wife in her remaining days.
Fireworks takes us far inside Takeshi’s creative process. For example, the responsibility Nishi assumes for his extended family of police officers and their families could very well mirror his regard for his regular collaborators on the screen and behind it. Beyond providing for those affected by the fall-out of the yakuza shooter, Nishi refuses to put Nakamura in a difficult position when he has to track down Nishi for the murders of the yakuza loan shark and his gang. He maintains his honor, even though he must now be regarded as a ruthless killer.
Horibe is a stand-in for Kitano after his motorcycle accident. Months of recovery left the director time to learn how to paint. (All of the art in the movie is by Kitano.) We see Horibe regarding bunches of flowers and picturing animals and people with flower heads. The images are beautiful, alive, and meaningful, a reaffirmation of sorts of Horibe/Kitano’s desire to live and create. At one point, Horibe takes up a pointillist technique, producing an image interesting like Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of the Grande Jatte.” He refines this technique by substituting words for dots; the image at the beginning of this review has the Japanese pictogram for “star” forming the points of light in the sky. The bold, red word across this impressionistic landscape is “Suicide.” Horibe finishes the painting by splashing red on the canvas to resemble a blood spatter. This canvas certainly communicates not only the despair of many of the characters in Fireworks, but also that of Kitano as he mends and must come to terms with his disfigured face and noticeable limp. It also gives a graphic example of the rather pointillist construction of this film, in which the story assembles into a coherent whole from the out-of-sequence slices of life Kitano films.
What lends the efficiently violent Nishi, and this film, its sad tenderness is the relationship between Nishi and his wife Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto). Miyuki seems like a true innocent, enjoying simple pleasures like fishing and putting some wilted flowers in a vase and scooping water into the vase with her hand at the edge of the sea. The couple’s relationship is telegraphed in many intimate scenes. Nishi puts a sardine-sized fish on a stick and cooks it over a fire. He says, “Italian-style cooking,” and they both laugh, no doubt at some private joke this comment evokes. However, we don’t hear Miyuki speak until the very end of the film; rather Nishi “translates” her off-screen comments in his dialogue. He asks her why she wanted to see snow as they drive along a road plowed through a good 6 feet of snow. He stops and says, “Can’t you hold it?” Miyuki runs off into the snow, only to fall into a drift in one of the small comic moments Kitano peppers throughout the film.
Fireworks is an odd work that mixes almost cartoonish violence, comedy, and deep feeling to create a compelling and affecting film. “Beat” Takeshi Kitano is a wonderfully bold and original voice in world cinema who deserves your attention. l
Before Richard Fleischer made some of his varied and iconic films—Fantastic Voyage, The Boston Strangler, The New Centurions, Soylent Green—he learned his craft and showed his great potential in the B-movie market. Luckily, Fleischer was tapped to bring another great story by Detour writer Martin Goldsmith to the screen. Although he didn’t have the services of Goldsmith to write a screenplay quite as smart as Detour, Fleischer brought a bit more money and greater skills than Edgar G. Ulmer could have to the task. The result is The Narrow Margin, a taut, cat-and-mouse game played on the claustrophobic cars of a California-bound train.
Charles McGraw brings his noirish toughness to the role of Detective Sergeant Walter Brown, who, with his partner Detective Sergeant Gus Forbes (Don Beddoe), is charged with bringing an important witness in a mob trial safely from Chicago to Los Angeles. The witness is the wife of the defendant, Frankie Neall. Marie Windsor’s Mrs. Neall is tough, frightened, and a real handful. As Brown and Forbes escort her from her guarded apartment, her large-beaded necklace breaks. The beads tumble down the stairs, with a few landing at the feet of a shadow—a man in a fur-collared topcoat holding a gun. Forbes heads down the stairs first with Mrs. Neall close behind. Not close enough, however, for the gunman, who fires, hitting and killing Forbes. Brown gives chase through the city streets, but the gunman escapes. A heartbroken Brown escorts Mrs. Neall to Union Station, angry that Forbes died for a lowlife chippy like her.
It doesn’t take long for Brown to spot the gangsters who intend to ensure that Mrs. Neall never makes it to Los Angeles. Pencil-mustachioed Joe Kemp (David Clarke) keeps a bead on Brown, watching to see which car he boards. Brown evades him by hiding behind a cart of luggage; unfortunately for him, Kemp spots him through the train windows. Kemp and his partner, the efficient and evil Vincent Yost (Peter Brocco), set up in their compartment and make plans to intercept Brown and take out Mrs. Neall.
Mrs. Neall is confined to her compartment, of course. Brown goes to the dining car and is seated with a pleasant and attractive blonde named Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White). He orders “the same as she’s drinking,” and she proceeds to spill her drink on him. After this meet-messy, she comments on how jumpy he is. He distractedly chitchats with her, all the while watching Kemp at another table. When Kemp stands up to go, Brown abruptly leaves.
Various moves are made in this game, from Yost offering Brown a considerable sum of money to turn his witness over (plying him with a photo of Forbes’ grieving family who, he reminds Brown, have just lost their breadwinner) to reading each other’s telegrams. Brown inadvertently has more and more contact with Sinclair and her son, putting them at risk. A huge passenger (Paul Maxey) blocks passage through the train cars in a couple of amusing scenes, but soon becomes a player in the game. As the miles tick away, the gangsters become more determined than ever to hunt down and kill Mrs. Neall, and Brown, if necessary. At the same time, Brown’s growing concern for Mrs. Sinclair has him take his eye off the ball, endangering all of them.
The film’s vérité techniques are handled extremely well, adding to the suspense. For example, at one point, Brown asks that an urgent message be telegraphed ahead to one of the train stops. The hubby and I both gasped when a lineman hooked a large, metal ring holding the message with his arm as the speeding train passed by. Another example in the trailer below shows Brown and Kemp in a surprisingly violent fistfight that clearly had the camera operator scrambling to keep out of the way and hold focus.
The film was marred by a plot twist that made one particular action unbelievable, and the script laid it on pretty thick about Brown’s anger at Mrs. Neall. Why Marie Windsor had to play most of the film in a lace negligee is beyond me, too.
These flaws were easy to overlook given the film’s especially strong performances, particularly Paul Maxey, who went from affable to outraged, and Windsor, who colored her gangster’s moll with just the right shade of nervous fear at what she was about to do. Jacqueline White, in her last screen performance, was calm, bemused, and discreet in opposition to McGraw’s anger and nerves. The pair worked well together, though I didn’t feel the attraction that I think Fleischer intended to inject into the relationship. Even Ann’s son Tommy (Gordon Gebert) was pretty good, mainly avoiding a cloying juvenile performance.
If you’re in the mood for trains, dames, and danger, The Narrow Margin is the film for you.
This week, the world lost two of its greatest film makers—Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Both were men of enormous vision, skill, and influence, and their films will pass down through the generations to enlighten new viewers and inspire the giants of cinema’s future. How lucky for us. And how lucky for them!
My words now are not for the much-lauded who saw their ambitions fulfilled over the span of long lives, however, but rather for those directors who died too soon, who hit walls in making and distributing their films, whose output—visionary as anything by Bergman or Antonioni, but not as formed—was, is, and will be ignored and possibly lost. There are a lot of talented film makers in this group. Barbara Loden—who died at the age of 48, having been unable to get another film made after Wanda appeared and disappeared—was one of them.
Some people may know the name Barbara Loden. She was a pin-up model and actress whose best-known performance today is as bad girl Ginny Stamper in Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. Loden also was Kazan’s long-time mistress, and eventually married him. Kazan helped open some doors to get Wanda made, but apparently didn’t lend a hand again to help her realize her other projects. Among the many honest things Wanda communicates about women’s place in society in the 1960s and the crushing effects of economic constraints on the human spirit, is an ambivalent, but no less cutting, indictment of traditional men like Kazan. Maybe that’s why he never helped her make another film.
According to Wanda’s cinematographer Nicholas Proferes, the idea for the film came when Loden read a newspaper article about a woman named Wanda Goranski, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in a bank robbery. Apparently, when the judge sentenced her, she thanked him. Loden, who had grown up dirt-poor in Marion, North Carolina, connected with both the boldness and self-effacement Goranski exhibited in this newspaper account. Although the film is set in Pennsylvania, Loden wrote the screenplay with her own experiences in mind.
The film opens on a coal-mining operation. A long shot of the coal fields gives way to closer shots of large machines grasping and moving mountains of coal. Then the scene shifts of the interior of a house in which a baby is crying, a toddler is moving around, and a worn-looking woman just out of bed is in the kitchen, trying to prepare food and quiet her infant. On the couch is a figure under rumpled blankets. It’s Wanda (Loden), who stretches absently as she watches her sister (Dorothy Shupenes) and registers the dirty look her brother-in-law (Peter Shupenes) gives her as he leaves for work. “He hates me because I’m here,” Wanda says. It sounds like she’s felt this way before.
Back in the coal fields, a ghostly white figure moves across in an extreme long shot. It is not until the figure nearly reaches its destination that we realize it’s Wanda, dressed in a cotton blouse and slacks, with her hair in curlers. She asks a mentally challenged man who is collecting coal in a bucket for his own use to lend her a little money. His relationship to her is not made clear, but he gives her a dollar. She uses it to get on a bus. She’s late to her own divorce hearing in town.
Her husband (Jerome Thier) is anxious for the hearing to begin because he wants to marry the woman sitting behind him with his two kids as soon as possible so she’ll take care of them. Wanda finally shows up. He claims she abandoned the family. She does not dispute this claim and says that if he wants the divorce, the judge (M. L. Kennedy) should give it to him. She doesn’t even look at her children. “They’ll be better off with him,” she says when the judge asks her if she wants custody.
So what’s going on here? Mr. Goranski seems more inconvenienced by Wanda’s disappearance than anything else. He has already lined up a new caregiver and wants to make sure his life gets back on track. On the other hand, Wanda seems indifferent to her children, which he, at least, is not. She seems very emotionally disengaged and resigned to losing what she had. Did she really want it? It’s hard to know. Wanda doesn’t say her wants out loud very often.
The next scene is in a garment factory. Busy hands move irons and push cloth through sewing machines. We see Wanda enter the manager’s office. She tries to collect two days’ pay from the past week. The manager (Milton Gittleman) says she was paid. She reckons she was owed $24 dollars, but only got $9. The manager claims the deductions were government withholding. “They take out that much?” she asks. He assures her they do. She asks if she can come back to work. He says that they need people but not her—she’s too slow. She thanks him as she leaves his office. She knew what she wanted, but she didn’t get it.
She goes to a diner and orders a beer. A man (Arnold Kanig) in the diner says he’ll pay for it. We next see him trying to make good his escape from his hotel room the next morning without waking Wanda up. But she catches him and briefly pursues him out the door before he peels away in his car. So maybe she wanted him. Off again she goes.
Late at night, she walks into a tavern. The man in the bar says they’re closed and tries to push her out the door. She pushes back, insisting she needs to use the toilet. He waits nervously for her to come out as she takes her time washing her face and pushing at her hair. When she comes out, she sits down at the bar. The man comes around the other side. We then understand that he is not the bar owner but a man who came in to rob the owner, who is lying, bound and gagged, on the floor, out of Wanda’s view. Wanda asked the robber (Michael Higgins) for a beer. He opens the cash register and pulls out all the money. Then he draws her a beer. They leave together. After they have sex in his hotel room, Wanda asks Mr. Dennis if he’s married. “You have a ring,” she observes. He evades the question.
But they form an alliance. Wanda acts a bit like Mr. Dennis’ dog—obeying his commands about how to dress herself, begging to come back to him after he has thrown her out of the car for questioning what illegal doings he’s up to, scraping pickles off his hamburger. She never calls him by his first name. Dennis is gruff, but he’s a penny ante loser who robs a Goodwill drop box to clothe Wanda and grabs a suit for himself from an open car. He’d take tips off tables if he had the chance. He doesn’t really have a clue how to get by in the world. When he visits his father in Scranton, we learn that he’s just out of prison. His father refuses to take money, considering that it must have been stolen. He’s right, of course, but Dennis is hurt, nonetheless. The next scene shows Wanda and Dennis drinking near their stolen car. A remote-control model airplane is buzzing overhead. Dennis climbs on top of the car roof and dares the plane to come back and get him. This is all the fight he’s got in him? It’s starting to look like he and Wanda were made for each other.
The movie veers bizarrely into a Bonnie and Clyde plot in which Mr. Dennis plans a bank heist and enlists Wanda to help him grab the bank president’s family as hostages. When the bank president (Jack Ford) tries to take Mr. Dennis’ gun, Wanda hits him, grabs the gun, and jams it into his back. She ties up his family, Mr. Dennis places a suitcase full of explosive in front of them, and sets the timer. He, the bank president, and Wanda, leave the house to go to the bank. “You did good,” Mr. Dennis says to Wanda. The smile on her face shows exactly what a gift she’s gotten.
Of course, the heist goes horribly wrong, and Mr. Dennis becomes a suicide-by-cop. Wanda, shattered, wanders and ends up in front of a restaurant/bar that night. A friendly looking woman passes by her and says hello. Wanda does not respond. The woman climbs some stairs. After a bit, the woman comes back down and asks Wanda if she has anywhere to go. When the apparent answer is no, she steers Wanda upstairs to join a rousing party of her friends in the bar. Wanda sits, holding a beer, looking crushed, lost, and completely alone.
This film was shot in 16mm using a handheld camera, giving it a grainy verite look that has been compared with the films of John Cassavetes. Like Cassavetes, Loden shot some of the film near her home in Connecticut and treated the cast and crew like a family for whom she cooked. Why Loden didn’t follow in Cassavetes’ shoes and act to gain money for her projects is a bit of a mystery—though work for actresses has always been more dicey than for actors—but it seems that Wanda must have been a character close to herself.
Looking for some kind of validation, living at a time of few options for women, despised for walking out on family life, Wanda is a character seemingly moved by an irresistible force within to be something or go somewhere she feels she counts. The women who were at the vanguard of the modern women’s movement—often without realizing it—paid a heavy price. Wanda is horribly vulnerable, terribly beaten down, and directionless without society’s accepted paths to walk. She made Mr. Dennis take care of her in the brief time they were together, even if it was on his terms. Unfortunately for Wanda, the solution of making a man stand by you has proven over and over to be a sham. Sitting in the bar, surrounded by people who are connected and happy to be together, she looks like an alien, utterly miserable and completely unnoticed. What will happen to Wanda? l
Long before I knew there was a film called The Naked City I was a committed fan of a TV series that ran from 1958 through 1963 called Naked City. An important element of that show was its narrator, who took viewers through the procedures of a compelling crime case each week and spoke the words “There are 8 millions stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.”
The entire template for that popular series, which TV tried to revive in the early 1990s without success, was this unusual movie by one of the best crime-film directors around, Jules Dassin. Influenced by the Italian Neorealist style, the film’s producer, a former newspaperman named Mark Hellinger, was convinced that a movie filmed entirely on location in New York City would create a thrill in audiences unlike any they had yet experienced. And as the film’s voiceover narrator, he comes right out and says so.
In its opening shot, which would be reproduced for the TV series, an airplane flies over Manhattan, from the Battery, over Central Park, along the East River, and past other locations. Cameras at ground level show people going about their daily activities as Hellinger describes their doings—some with no knowledge that they are being filmed; some, characters in the screenplay; and then the money shot. A blonde named Jean Dexter is being murdered in her apartment—strangled unconscious and then drown in her bathtub. In this way, the film sets the stage for a police procedural that manages to capture both the methodical drudgery of investigative police work and the exotic thrills Hollywood is good at delivering to eager fans.
The investigation launches after Martha Swenson (Virginia Mullen), the victim’s maid, lets herself into Miss Dexter’s apartment, picks up a newspaper lying on the floor, rights some toppled knick-knacks, and tries to rouse her employer from sleep. She enters the bedroom, finds the bed rumpled but empty, then notices water on the floor. Martha peers into the bathroom, and then we get the stock close-up of her whipping her head around, eyes wide with horror, mouth twisted in a scream. Soon the police are on the scene questioning her.
In classic fashion, the veteran cop is mated with the new member of the detective squad. I absolutely love Barry Fitzgerald as Detective Lieutenant Dan Muldoon, the man who’s seen it all but hasn’t quite gotten used to it. The role shows that Fitzgerald, practically bleached of his actory colors by his sentimental rendering of Father Fitzgibbon in the Bing Crosby cornfest Going My Way, knew what he was doing. Even the few Irish ditties he sings while he’s washing up at home seem part of his character, not a page out of the Irish caricature manual. His young partner, Detective Jim Halloran (Don Taylor), is smart, good-looking, and completely comfortable wearing out his shoe leather walking from lead to lead throughout Manhattan. A short scene of character-building shows him coming home to his wife (Anne Sargent), who has donned a sexy summer outfit to coax him to give their son a whipping for crossing a busy street alone. It’s a good sparring match, entertaining, and in keeping with the day-in-the-life style of the film.
As the homicide squad works the case, they turn up Dr. Stoneman, (House Jameson), a doctor who wrote a prescription for the dead woman; Ruth Morrison (Dorothy Hart), a friend with whom she modeled at a dress shop; and Frank Niles (Howard Duff), a man the maid said came by frequently to visit Miss Dexter. They also are searching for a Mr. Henderson, described as a tall, thin, older man, possibly from Baltimore, who called on Miss Dexter and apparently gave her expensive jewelry, according to the maid, who saw a drawer full of jewels in the murdered woman’s dresser. All of the interviewed people say they’d do anything to help capture Dexter’s killer.
Howard Duff plays the spoiled rich kid gone bad with devious precision. He is an incredibly convincing liar. Even after Muldoon quickly and accidentally learns that he has lied during his very first interview—Niles says he barely knows Morrison, then she walks into the interview room and identifies him as her fiancé—he, and we, continue to get ensnared in his web of intrigue. Eventually, it all comes down to a neat conspiracy and a man who plays the harmonica, capped by one of the most exciting chase sequences in film history—one that may have inspired Jimmy Cagney’s run up a gas tower in White Heat just a year later. All along the way, Hellinger interjects comments about what someone might be thinking, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, as though he were sitting in our heads and narrating our thoughts.
Some people have called this film a noir, but the femme fatale is the murdered woman, and to me, that’s not noir. Additionally, there is no web of fate drawing unsuspecting pigeons into its trap. Instead, we have several career criminals drawing an amateur, but willing, man (Duff) into their ring and entrapping another in a blackmail scheme. Therefore, what we have is a straight-up detective story handled expertly by Dassin, a director of cracking noirs who made it big in Europe under his own name after he was blacklisted; his masterful Rififi (Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes, 1955), a French noir that plays more like a crime caper, captures some of the attention to detail of actually doing a job found in The Naked City, but from the criminal’s point of view.
Hellinger’s narrative grounds this film solidly in the work-a-day world, capturing the motives and movements of its members. But it is the location shooting that really gives this film its vitality—the vitality of New York itself. The kids playing in the water released from fire hydrants are real. When the murderer jumps over fences and darts down alleys with Halloran in pursuit, they’re real fences and alleys. Whether we wish to believe in the robbery ring, which seems to come right out of central casting, we have to admit that this film makes it seem that crimes like these happen in neighborhoods like this.
As much for its time-capsule depiction of New York as for its other fine attributes, The Naked City has received a fine Criterion Collection release. Enjoy this story in 8 million from the Naked City and all the extras. l
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After he recovers, Roy decides he and Myra should go to La Jolla for the weekend. On the train, Myra observes Roy con some sailors in a rigged dice game. She confronts him later: “You’re on the grift, same as me.” He says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “Roy, you’re a short-con operator… and a good one, I think. Don’t talk to me like I’m another square.” She reminisces about her salad days on the grift, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in long-con investment schemes with her partner Cole (J. T. Walsh), who is now confined to a sanitarium for the criminally insane. She proposes teaming up with Roy. Remembering the man who taught him his trade warning Roy to stay away from the long con (“You don’t want to do jail time.”), he refuses.
The shining light in this dark tale is Anjelica Huston. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her perform with such intensity and shading, taking risks that most actors would never dare approach. Her wiry body, nervous smoking, and shaky stability vibrate and build throughout the film as though emanating from an animal that has been horribly abused and only knows how to cower or go for the throat. She seems to understand Jim Thompson’s world somewhere in her gut and is the single facet that makes The Grifters magnetic and watchable time and time again.
One day, Horibe approaches the stakeout car of two cops he and Nishi are training, telling them they will have to remain on stakeout longer than expected because Nishi must visit his wife. Nakamura (Susumu Terajima) says he has a date waiting for him across town. Horibe releases Tanaka because he is a family man and takes the duty alone. As he sits in the car, he calls home and talks to his wife and daughter. He learns from his daughter that she has drawn a picture. Comically, he listens to her and then opens his notebook to look inside. This is the last bit of normalcy in the film. In a quick shot, we see a yakuza with his hand wrapped in a newspaper, pointing his gun downward. Switch to a shot of Horibe on the ground, his hands impotently pushing at the air to shield himself. Bang.
Horibe is a stand-in for Kitano after his motorcycle accident. Months of recovery left the director time to learn how to paint. (All of the art in the movie is by Kitano.) We see Horibe regarding bunches of flowers and picturing animals and people with flower heads. The images are beautiful, alive, and meaningful, a reaffirmation of sorts of Horibe/Kitano’s desire to live and create. At one point, Horibe takes up a pointillist technique, producing an image interesting like Seurat’s 
These flaws were easy to overlook given the film’s especially strong performances, particularly Paul Maxey, who went from affable to outraged, and Windsor, who colored her gangster’s moll with just the right shade of nervous fear at what she was about to do. Jacqueline White, in her last screen performance, was calm, bemused, and discreet in opposition to McGraw’s anger and nerves. The pair worked well together, though I didn’t feel the attraction that I think Fleischer intended to inject into the relationship. Even Ann’s son Tommy (Gordon Gebert) was pretty good, mainly avoiding a cloying juvenile performance.
Her husband (Jerome Thier) is anxious for the hearing to begin because he wants to marry the woman sitting behind him with his two kids as soon as possible so she’ll take care of them. Wanda finally shows up. He claims she abandoned the family. She does not dispute this claim and says that if he wants the divorce, the judge (M. L. Kennedy) should give it to him. She doesn’t even look at her children. “They’ll be better off with him,” she says when the judge asks her if she wants custody.
But they form an alliance. Wanda acts a bit like Mr. Dennis’ dog—obeying his commands about how to dress herself, begging to come back to him after he has thrown her out of the car for questioning what illegal doings he’s up to, scraping pickles off his hamburger. She never calls him by his first name. Dennis is gruff, but he’s a penny ante loser who robs a Goodwill drop box to clothe Wanda and grabs a suit for himself from an open car. He’d take tips off tables if he had the chance. He doesn’t really have a clue how to get by in the world. When he visits his father in Scranton, we learn that he’s just out of prison. His father refuses to take money, considering that it must have been stolen. He’s right, of course, but Dennis is hurt, nonetheless. The next scene shows Wanda and Dennis drinking near their stolen car. A remote-control model airplane is buzzing overhead. Dennis climbs on top of the car roof and dares the plane to come back and get him. This is all the fight he’s got in him? It’s starting to look like he and Wanda were made for each other.
Looking for some kind of validation, living at a time of few options for women, despised for walking out on family life, Wanda is a character seemingly moved by an irresistible force within to be something or go somewhere she feels she counts. The women who were at the vanguard of the modern women’s movement—often without realizing it—paid a heavy price. Wanda is horribly vulnerable, terribly beaten down, and directionless without society’s accepted paths to walk. She made Mr. Dennis take care of her in the brief time they were together, even if it was on his terms. Unfortunately for Wanda, the solution of making a man stand by you has proven over and over to be a sham. Sitting in the bar, surrounded by people who are connected and happy to be together, she looks like an alien, utterly miserable and completely unnoticed. What will happen to Wanda? 
In classic fashion, the veteran cop is mated with the new member of the detective squad. I absolutely love Barry Fitzgerald as Detective Lieutenant Dan Muldoon, the man who’s seen it all but hasn’t quite gotten used to it. The role shows that Fitzgerald, practically bleached of his actory colors by his sentimental rendering of Father Fitzgibbon in the Bing Crosby cornfest Going My Way, knew what he was doing. Even the few Irish ditties he sings while he’s washing up at home seem part of his character, not a page out of the Irish caricature manual. His young partner, Detective Jim Halloran (Don Taylor), is smart, good-looking, and completely comfortable wearing out his shoe leather walking from lead to lead throughout Manhattan. A short scene of character-building shows him coming home to his wife (Anne Sargent), who has donned a sexy summer outfit to coax him to give their son a whipping for crossing a busy street alone. It’s a good sparring match, entertaining, and in keeping with the day-in-the-life style of the film.
Howard Duff plays the spoiled rich kid gone bad with devious precision. He is an incredibly convincing liar. Even after Muldoon quickly and accidentally learns that he has lied during his very first interview—Niles says he barely knows Morrison, then she walks into the interview room and identifies him as her fiancé—he, and we, continue to get ensnared in his web of intrigue. Eventually, it all comes down to a neat conspiracy and a man who plays the harmonica, capped by one of the most exciting chase sequences in film history—one that may have inspired Jimmy Cagney’s run up a gas tower in White Heat just a year later. All along the way, Hellinger interjects comments about what someone might be thinking, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, as though he were sitting in our heads and narrating our thoughts.
Hellinger’s narrative grounds this film solidly in the work-a-day world, capturing the motives and movements of its members. But it is the location shooting that really gives this film its vitality—the vitality of New York itself. The kids playing in the water released from fire hydrants are real. When the murderer jumps over fences and darts down alleys with Halloran in pursuit, they’re real fences and alleys. Whether we wish to believe in the robbery ring, which seems to come right out of central casting, we have to admit that this film makes it seem that crimes like these happen in neighborhoods like this.
