Krakatit (1949)

An anonymous man whom we will come to know in his fever dreams as the chemic Prokop (Karel Höger), is found ill and delirious on the streets of Prague. While the doctors are trying to save him, the audience becomes witness to what at first seem to be his memories, but what later on can only be read as the feverish way of Prokop's subconscious to ponder what his invention of a horrifyingly powerful (the film makes heavy atom bomb insinuations the novel it is based on couldn't have made) explosive he dubbed "Krakatit" (after the volcano, you see) means to the world and him.

In his fever dreams, Prokop will find himself feverish, frequently losing parts of his memory and doubting his sense of reality. He will be betrayed by a former colleague, have a bucolic interlude that sees him breaking a girl's heart because he clearly prefers less innocent companions, get into the hand of a foreign industrial power who wants to reinstate monarchy, exchange explosion metaphors with a femme fatale princess (Florence Marly), get roped into a capitalist conspiracy, and destroy large parts of the world.

I don't know much about Czech and Czechoslovakian film history, but I do know that Krakatit's director Otakar Vávra is quite a problematic case as the sort of opportunistic survivor character who'd take on the mantle of any ideology, and lick the appropriate boot to get his film's financed; Nazis, communists, he just didn't seem to care.

Of course, bad (depending on one's definition of "bad", of course) people can still make good art, and it's impossible for me to watch Krakatit (based on a novel by Karel Capek, who is an important figure in a type of early SF that always bordered on the Weird) and not call it good art, Vávra having licked Goebbels' s boots or not. Ideologically, the film makes it easy enough for a Western leftist (or pinko communist, for you American readers) like me to not get too annoyed with it. In Krakatit, the upper classes, rich people and especially so-called nobility are generally bad, building weapons that can destroy the world is not a good idea, and scientists should work to improve the life of humanity instead. It's not exactly the most complex view of the world, but it's also one I find difficult to disagree with very much as it is presented here; at the very least, it's far easier to stomach than Leni Riefenstahl glorifying the NSDAP or D.W. Griffith telling us how awesome the Ku Klux Klan is.

But really, it's not so much the film's ideology, nor its ideas about the responsibility of science that make Krakatit worth watching, but rather the film's visual power. Vávra has obviously drunk from the same well as the American film noir, transforming expressionist techniques into a thing of his own, letting shadows and abstract and consciously artificial framing choices become metaphors for its main character's state of mind. Unlike most American films of this style, Krakatit does explicitly position much of what happens in it as fever visions instead of just being feverishly, a-realistically intense. It's never clear how much, if anything, of what Prokop dreams has actually happened, and what is only metaphors and symbols for his fears, what expressions of a guilty and doubtful conscience. There is also a strong sexual undertone to everything in the film, be it explosions - all these eruptions clearly have something very sexual for Prokop - or Prokop just looking at women.

For the most part, Vávra handles this aspect of his movie very well, slowly easing his audience into the dream narrative with a comparatively naturalistic beginning that turns more and more symbolic and unreal the longer the film goes on, with plot elements that could be used as straight forward pulp adventure (there's the evil foreign - clearly German - power, two femme fatales Prokop has conflicted and largely unhealthy feelings for, explosions, a conspiracy of rich people) turned into something at once even more heated than pulp usually becomes, and more symbolic.

In its effect, Krakatit works splendidly as the metaphorical fever dream it is supposed to be, melodramatic, difficult and energetic like a serial that has taken a wrong turn some time before it could introduce a mad gorilla.

Technorati-Markierungen: czechoslovakian movies,reviews,sf,thriller,otakar vávra,karel höger,florence marly

Some Thoughts On Ace In The Hole (1951)

This is clearly another movie that's so much of a classic and that has been written about so extensively that there's no room for me to say anything new about it. Just as clearly, I can't let that stop me completely, for when have I ever been able to shut up about movies?

Anyhow, I'm not going to waste your time going into details about the obvious. The quality of the script (especially the fantastically sharp, darkly funny dialogue perfect for this, the least obvious of all film noirs), Billy Wilder's inventive and tight direction that makes a film that's nearly two hours long feel like seventy minutes, and Kirk Douglas' burningly intense performance, are as much a given as the whiteness of snow. Instead of the appropriate gushing, I just have two observations to make about the movie.

Firstly, there's something poignant (and a bit depressing) about the fact that Ace in the Hole has become less of a black comedy (and believe me, this is just as much a comedy as it is a drama; the difference between a black comedy and a drama lies only in the ability of a walking dead man to have a bitter laugh at his own cost in the former) as the years have passed. In 1951, having an actual carnival raised at the location of a catastrophe must have looked like a slightly surreal exaggeration. Today, that sort of thing has turned from a metaphor into business as usual; black humour has become documentation.

Secondly - and this is what I love most about the film - I'm again and again impressed by how right Wilder and Douglas do by a basic plot that could (and by all rights should) have become either a mawkish melodrama, or a film so moralizing nobody'd ever be interested in actually listening to its morals. Instead, the film is subtle even when its surface seems to play by the Hollywood rules, and knows the difference between having a moral outlook (and the bitterness that can - really does more often than not in Wilder's films - come with it) and hitting an audience over the head with what it is supposed to think and feel. Things and people are complicated, even when you want to sneer at the fact.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,billy wilder,thoughts,drama,comedy,film noir,kirk douglas

99 River Street (1953)

After having lost a fight for the Heavyweight Boxing Championship very badly, Ernie Driscoll (John Payne) has had to stop with the only thing he's ever been good at, or risk going blind. Ernie's a cab driver now, and even though he's clearly unhappy with his new place in life and carries a frightful amount of pent-up rage inside, it's just as clear that he might well learn to cope with life as a normal working stiff in the long run.

His wife Pauline (Peggie Castle) is a bit of a different story, though. She feels betrayed by Ernie's failure, resenting him as much as her work in a flower shop. Unbeknownst to her husband, Pauline has begun an affair with the gangster Victor Rawlins (Brad Dexter), who has promised to take her away ride after he has finished a very lucrative job.

Exactly on the day the couple's flight is supposed to happen, things begin to fall apart. First Ernie realizes that his wife has been cheating on him for some time (and can obviously barely keep himself from going after Victor and Pauline with his fists), then the people Rawlins wanted to sell the jewels he stole on his big job to back off from the deal.

Through the expected complicated and slightly surreal plot contortions, Ernie soon becomes implicated as Victor's accomplice, hunted by the police, used by the people Victor was dealing with, and suspected of the murder of his wife (a murder he did not commit, but clearly would have liked to). Fortunately, and quite unlike many film noir heroes, Ernie has friends willing to help him clear his name, like the up-and-coming actress Linda (Evelyn Keyes) to whom our hero owes some of his problems.

I often have a hard time seeing 50s noir movies like Phil Karlson's 99 River Street as part of the same genre as their brethren from the 40s. Too large are the differences in aesthetics (the stark contrasts between shadow and light in the older movie have turned into the flat and often bright lighting in the newer ones, just as an example) and in philosophy (the older films being again much starker, more pessimistic and nihilistic in their world view, with happy ends that seem especially implausible, while the newer ones are on the surface more brutal, but also much cleaner in their morals and ideas). I rather wish the 50s movies (I am generalizing here, of course) had their own genre name, like "hard-boiled crime movie".

99 River Street's director Phil Karlson's is known as one of the better directors of the 50s style of noir, but the film at hand seems to stand directly on the line dividing both ways of noir. On the aesthetic level, Karlson sure isn't the type of director doing complicated or showy things with lighting or blocking, but the seeming bluntness and flatness of his style often hide some intelligent directing decisions. Karlson (at least in my experience) is a director whose films thrive on very controlled editing rhythms and camera movement that is much less sparse than it seems at first glance. The director also has a lot of trust in the abilities of his actors, using the close-up less as a rather trite dramatic device but to show as much of his actors' emotions as possible. Payne and Evelyn Keyes give Karlson the performances he deserves, based on the strange fluctuation between theatricality and naturalism that is so typical of acting in the 50s, yet still intense and believable in the larger than life way close-ups always suggest.

Karlson's direction and the acting combine to give the film a feeling of hardly constrained tension. For most of the film's running time, Payne is close to an explosion. His character shows a propensity for violence that makes him a somewhat uncomfortable protagonist, even in a film whose happy end pretends he's much more clean-cut hero than he actually is; it's not a stretch to imagine him actually killing his wife, which (I suspect) would have been the 40s noir way to go about this plot.

It's not as if 99 River Street's plot were very clear or simple, though. Like the old style noirs did, Karlson's film uses chance, and random, cruel twists of fate as if to demonstrate a universe that's not just indifferent to Ernie's plight but actively malevolent, giving him one bad, and sometimes more than just slightly surreal (especially in the scene - coming out of nowhere - where Linda convinces Ernie to help her get rid of a dead body, only to end in the reveal she's been playing him as part of an audition), roll of the dice after the next, with  some improbably trustworthy friends and his ability to fight through his problems the only things that are on Ernie's side - characteristically for the ideology of the 50s, all things Ernie's worked hard for.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,phil karlson,john payne,evelyn keyes,film noir

Three Films Make A Post: Prepare yourself for the HORROR of PSYCHO! The TERROR of EXORCIST!

War of the Arrows aka Arrow, The Ultimate Weapon (2011): I was all pumped to enjoy this South Korean historical action blockbuster thing, hoping for some hot archery action. And, as long as the film spends its time with scenes of people hitting each other with sharp and pointy objects and (even better) shooting each other with other sharp and pointy objects, all is well. Alas, writer/director Kim Han-min also feels the need to make very, very clear how cardboard cartoon villain evil the Mongol enemies of his hero are, so about half of the film consists of one scene of Mongols behaving demonstratively shitty after the other. So, as if one early scene of rape and throwing a baby into a well weren't more than enough to make that point clear, there's a never-ending - and after the second time or so, actually pretty boring on a narrative level - series of "OMG! Mongols are bad!" moments. Clearly, the Mongols weren't nice, civilized people, but it's one thing knowing and showing that, and quite another being as much of a racist prick about it as the director of War of the Arrows is. And while we're talking of being evil, what about the way women and the lower classes were treated in Korea during the Joseon era, Mister Kim?

I Wake Up Screaming (1941): This murder mystery is often cited as an important step on the way to the genre later interpreted as film noir, and yes, I can clearly see why that's the case. Many of the tropes of the non-genre are already here, as well as the narrative techniques that would dominate it. Unfortunately, I Wake Up Screaming is not yet willing to actually delve into the darkness the true noir would make its home in, and is made more frustrating to watch by it than a movie that didn't show all the enticing elements would have been. Despite its awesome title, I Wake Up Screaming just isn't ready to hit its audience where it would truly hurt or excite.

Un Flic (1972): Being outwardly exciting isn't anything you'd accuse the late period movies of Jean-Pierre Melville of, either, but where I Wake Up Screaming pretends not to know about inner abysses, Melville's characters know them so well they have internalized them, and been outwardly frozen in the process, leaving them as the living dead going through motions that could be interpreted as "cool" if trying to be cool weren't too outwardly emotional. In the wrong mood, one could surely argue that Melville overstretches this aspect of his worldview in Un Flic to the point where it could be read as self parody, but in the right mood it's just as possible to see the whole project of Melville's late films, and of Un Flic especially, as a way to make a state of mind people who have suffered from depression know just too well visible and relatable through the lens of an abstract crime film.

As a bonus, Un Flic, which happens to be Melville's last movie, is also the one where the latent homosexual undercurrents in the director's body of work get so close to the surface one would have to be blind not to see them; not surprisingly, the film already delivers its own backlash by making its main character (Alain Delon, of course) the sort of homophobe who really protests too much.

Technorati-Markierungen: south korean movies,american movies,french movies,kim han-min,jean-pierre melville,action,crime,film noir,mystery,alain delon,richard crenna,in short

The Argyle Secrets (1948)

Famous columnist Allen Pierce (George Anderson) is preparing to publish the contents of a stylishly bound collection of secret documents known as "The Argyle Secrets". Alas, before he is able to write more than the overture to what he thinks to be a pretty big journalistic coup, Pierce is struck down by illness and hospitalized. After a few days of the press besieging Pierce's hospital room, the columnist feels fit enough to talk.

First and foremost, Pierce wants to disclose the secrets of the Argyle Secrets to hard-nosed reporter Harry Mitchell (William Gargan) as a way to insure himself against attempts on his life, but while Pierce is still describing the book's cover to Mitchell, he dies without giving up too many helpful hints.

Mitchell's first thought when confronted with a dead man is obviously not to call a doctor to make sure he's really beyond help, but to hinder his colleagues from other newspapers from getting the scoop about Pierce's death before him. This sort of charming thing is quite typical for Mitchell, so it doesn't come as much of a surprise that long-suffering police detective Lt. Samson (Ralphy Byrd) is preparing to ask quite a few hard questions of him and does have little trouble imagining the dickish reporter a killer.

Our hero Mitchell isn't into that whole "answering police questions" thing, though, and goes on the lam to find the Argyle Secrets for himself. First step in his heroic quest is Pierce's secretary, who is easily knocked out by a punch to the face (Mitchell is something of a specialist in violence against women, we will learn) when she doesn't want to let the sociopathic reporter search her boss's belongings.

From here on out, Mitchell's search for the book brings him into contact with a bunch of other noir freaks with dubious accents: a big "Southerner" wearing a panama hat (Jack Reitzen), a certain Winter (John Banner) and his gangster buddies, and the mandatory femme fatale Marla (Marjorie Lord) who are all looking for the book, too.

Future black-list victim Cy Enfield's The Argyle Secrets (based on a radioplay that passed down some off-screen narration telling us exactly what we see to the film) seems pretty typical for a movie from one arm of the lowest budget part of what we now call film noir. Highly derivative of other films (in this case quite clearly The Maltese Falcon and its hunt of various shady characters for a McGuffin), graced with actors of mild talent (and no ear for accents) at best, and without the budget and time to realize more than three or four truly stylish scenes, the film has to keep itself interesting by just being the decisive bit loopier than its (slightly) more costly peers.

To achieve that, Enfield (who also wrote the script and the radioplay it's based on) begins by presenting his audience with a hero (and it's pretty clear he truly is supposed to be the hero and not just the protagonist; Fritz Lang, Enfield wasn't) who is just a bit more of a prick than your typical noir private eye or reporter - at least if you ignore films explicitly made to criticize the press. Mitchell isn't just a liar, he's a habitual liar; he's not only a guy who punches out women who haven't done a thing to him, he's also a guy whose encounters with the femme fatale can end with the most charming combination of strangulation and kissing. Honestly, it's only a question of time until the guy the audience is supposed to root for will start hacking up prostitutes.

Because one freak alone isn't enough for a good film (and because it's tradition to have more than one in your movie), Mitchell meets more people of his kind, all very peculiar types, rather overacted, and graced with fake accents too horrible to comprehend.

This being a noir - if a very cheap one - not everything what happens between these people makes much sense, and much of the film's plot could have been avoided if someone had just taken his time to wait for the postman. Said plot is mostly a case of throwing the freaks together, letting them interact violently and then going over to the next scene of loopy acting and slightly weird ideas. The characterisation swerves between noir standards slavishly reproduced because everyone does it, and moments of true strangeness like the already mentioned friendly strangling, leaving me with the impression of a film that very much likes to play with the elements it has been given, coherence be damned.To no one's surprise, this approach to plot and character turns out to be pretty much to my tastes; at least, there's seldom a boring second (for once, even the humour is a bit too strange to annoy me).

Last but not least, I have to mention the handful of scenes where time and budget allowed Enfield to do some rather interesting directing: there's a cheap but surreal dream/torture sequence that makes perfect use of floating upper bodies on a black background and a nicely done, and truly tense finale (well, finale dramatically speaking; there are still some pretty boring minutes of talky explanations to follow after it) in a darkened room with Mitchell using his brains and an iron grate to protect himself from sure death.

It's pretty difficult to disagree with a movie so obviously out to please me.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,film noir,cy enfield,william gargan,marjorie lord

In short: Jail Bait (1954)

Don Gregor (Clancy Malone), the son of a famous and well-loved plastic surgeon (Herbert Rawlinson) is working hard on becoming the black sheep of his family. Despite (or because of?) the incessant motherly preaching of his sister (Dolores Fuller), Don's running with a bad crowd, namely a gangster named Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell).

Just after Don's first real run-in with the police (as played by Lyle Talbot and a very young Steve Reeves) for illegal gun possession, he and Vic decide that now's the ideal time to rob some money from a nightclub. Not surprisingly, given the level of intellect the duo demonstrate, things go very wrong indeed. Don shoots the club's watchman (or a cop? or the film just pretends it's the same thing?) dead. He and Vic think they've also gotten rid of a witness in form of a nightclub dancer, but she's up and about soon enough, willing and able to identify Don to the police.

Afterwards, Don shows he isn't a completely hopeless cause. On Vic's insistence, the young man goes on the run from the police, but a stern talking-to from his dad convinces him that it would be best to give himself up to the police.

Alas, Vic has other plans.

Ah, dear Ed Wood, or rather, dear Edward D. Wood Jr. Supposedly the worst director in the history of cinema (as if there weren't many much better candidates for that title), he still managed to make a handful of highly entertaining films out of random assortments of actors and non-actors, cardboard, library footage, and the power of sheer enthusiasm.

Jail Bait surely is no exception. As should be obvious from its plot, the film is Wood's attempt at making a film noir (depending on your definition of what a film noir is - if Phil Karlson's hard-boiled crime movies don't belong under that description for you, Jail Bait won't either), though one of the often quite flatly lit variation. Wood's idea of plotting being what it is, the film's third act suddenly turns it into something of a horror movie, but that's the sort of randomness that makes Wood's movies so much more interesting than - say - those of Larry Buchanan.

On a technical level, I never found Wood to be all that bad. He's obviously conscious of the concept of camera movement, actually uses editing to set up dramatic scenes and so on and so forth. Sure, Wood has the strange proclivity to concentrate on people's backs instead of their faces during dialogue scenes, and the characters tend to stand around as stiffly positioned as if they were action figures, but honestly, when you've seen some of the stuff I've seen by now, Wood's a pretty great director.

It certainly helps that all of the film's technical flaws aren't just bad in a boring way, but of the slightly loopy sort that tend to make a film just more entertaining to watch.

More or less the same goes for the acting: Fuller, Rawlinson and Reeves (who, by the way, has a short beefcake moment for the ladies and gents looking forward to that sort of thing) are all dreadful, but they are all dreadful in various perfectly interesting ways. Farrell's surprisingly enough even quite good as a pulp gangster.

My favourite parts of Jail Bait, though, are the weird contortions of its script. It's not just the film's bizarre and random turn into an unexpected direction in its final act, there's also Wood's brilliant talent for writing highly peculiar dialogue lines - in this case hidden away between some pretty nice hard-boiled one-liners, actually - that make less sense the more you think about them.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,film noir,edward d. wood jr,dolores fuller,steve reeves,timothy farrell,in short

In short: Phantom Lady (1944)

After an argument with his wife, engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) meets a mysterious woman (Fay Helm) in a bar and spends the rest of the evening with her. She seems to be just as hurt by something as he is, so he is willing to accept her refusal to tell him her name. When he arrives back home, a few cops and a strangled wife are waiting for him. The lead investigator, an Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez), seems quite convinced that Henderson is the killer. The engineer's alibi isn't as good as one would expect - anyone who has seen him together with the woman now denies ever having laid eyes on her, and that's enough to convince this film's justice system to sentence a man to death.

Only Henderson's assistant Carol (Ella Raines) believes in his innocence. The young woman is going to do just about everything (including flirting with Elisha Cook, jr.!) to help the man she secretly loves. Unfortunately, the real killer has no qualms about silencing a few people more if necessary.

Phantom Lady by Robert Siodmak is a very fine adaptation of a Cornel Woolrich novel. It's quite a bit friendlier than its source, but it is still a very fine and quite dark work that would recommend itself alone through its use of female characters as something a little different from the usual noir femme fatales. Carol is somewhat frightening in her perseverance - sure, she does everything she does for a good reason, but people are still dying around her, a fact she's obviously willing to accept.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,film noir,in short,robert siodmak,ella raines

The Whistler (1944)

Earl Conrad (Richard Dix) has been suffering from a severe depression since his wife died in a maritime disaster. He feels so guilty for her death he just wants to die. Well, what better way to kill yourself can there be than hiring a professional killer to murder you?

Shortly after he has arranged the contract through a middleman, he learns that his wife isn't dead at all, but just in Japanese captivity and on her way to be shipped home. Conrad now desperately wants to live, but it's not that easy to call the hit off, for his middleman got himself shot by the police directly after the deal was perfect and the killer (J. Carrol Naish) is not of a very sound mind, either.

 

The Whistler is the first of six movies based on an Old Time Radio show. The titular character is just the narrator of the piece, although he still gets to do a little whistling.

It is also an early directorial work by William Castle, years before he perfected his matinee cinema formula. The film is another example that shows how underappreciated a director Castle was. His style lacks some of the more obvious flashiness other noir films showed, but Castle shows himself perfectly able to turn a rather pedestrian script and very bland work by his protagonist Richard Dix into a wonderfully effective little thriller. The rest of the cast (especially always dependable J. Carrol Naish as the psychotic killer) does a fine job to let the shady part of life during World War II come to life and the movie doesn't overstay its welcome with a running time of barely an hour.

Very much recommended to friends of suspense movies of the era.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,film noir,william castle,j. carrol naish