In short: The Falcon in San Francisco (1945)

Gentleman detective Tom Lawrence (Tom Conway), also known as The Falcon (please do not expect wings, or Redwing), and his suddenly re-added to the series comic relief sidekick “Goldie” Locke (Edward Brophy and his very absent locks) are on their way to San Francisco for a nice relaxing vacation. Also, Goldie plans on talking some random woman into marriage, so he can lower his income tax payments. But while they are still on the train to San Francisco, our heroes stumble upon a new case. Since it involves an adorable little girl (Sharyn Moffett) and her adorable doggie who may or may not be held prisoner in their own home, as well as murder, Lawrence just can’t help himself and gets ever more deeply involved, vacations be damned.

Also appearing will be pretty women sinister (Fay Helm) and – hopefully - goodly (Rita Corday), and the wages of a rum smuggling past.

The mystery plot truly becomes astonishingly complicated in this little programmer directed by the often great Joseph H. Lewis. I’m still not sure if it actually makes any sense, but then, this is not supposed to be a rigidly structured fair play mystery. Rather, this is classic one damn thing after another storytelling where the entertainment value of any given incident is of much greater import than its logic. Which works out very well indeed for the film at hand, with nary a scene going by where Conway doesn’t have opportunity to turn on the charm or get punched, and much joyful energy is expended in coming up with the next complication for out heroes.

Lewis, while not quite in the hired gun auteur mode of his best films, lets things zip along as merrily as this sort of fun material needs, providing enough space for the – one supposes crowd-pleasing – cute little girl with cute little dog business but also moving on before the eye-rolls become too exhausting for the modern viewer. He’s pacing things so well, even some of the Goldie-based comic relief becomes actually funny. But then, when has seeing a guy going after women for all the wrong reasons getting put down by them ever not be funny?

That Conway in his eighth Falcon outing knows how to turn on the charm as well as a semi-boiled kind of toughness is rather a given.

Add to this some genuine location shots (soon to be economized out of the series by RKO), and it’s very easy to still have quite a bit of fun with this merry little mystery today.

So Dark the Night (1946)

Warning: even though I’m not explicitly going to spoil the ending, I’ll have to imply things!

Brilliant Parisian police detective Henri Cassin (Steven Geray, who was from Hungary in real life) has finally been talked into going on vacation, after apparently eleven years without one. Which might explain a lot of what happens during the course of the movie.

Cassin’s friends in the police have arranged a stay in a picturesque country inn, where the policeman should find all the peace and quiet his usually intense lifestyle doesn’t allow him. As it turns ou, the inn and the surrounding countryside are a pretty place indeed. Even better, the much much younger innkeeper’s daughter Nanette (Micheline Cheirel), does seem to be rather interested in our protagonist; though if it is actually him as a person or the idea of PARIS(!!!!) she’s clearly none to sure herself. Things do develop in the direction of an actual love affair, though there are problems, and not just that Nanette’s father isn’t terribly excited about his daughter courting a guy his own age. There’s also the little fact that Nanette is engaged to her childhood sweetheart Leon (Paul Marion), a local farmer. Though she says their love has always been a childish thing, she’s clearly wavering.

Eventually, the at first sceptical Cassin – who well understands about differences of age and culture but also can’t really resist a pretty young thing throwing herself at him for the first time in a life full of work and nothing beyond – and Nanette make up their minds to get serious and marry. But before that can happen, Nanette and Leon disappear, only for the girl’s body to be found strangled some time later.

Obviously, Cassin investigates the case himself, but the solution ever eludes him, as obsessively as he may work himself.

While the solution to Joseph H. Lewis’s noirish mystery and proto-psychological thriller may be a bit Freudian and implausible for today’s tastes, its actual execution as a movie is flawless. In a rather ironic development, given the film’s pretend-Frenchness, its tone and style somewhat prefigure what would become the French manner of the latter genre, particularly in pacing and tone.

I found myself rather convinced of the film’s moments of Freudian implausibility by Lewis’s – and his DP Burnett Guffey’s – staging of details large and tiny, an ability to suggest much of the film’s psychological structure via camera angles, the positioning of characters in physical spaces, and the succession of natural light and shadows.

In fact, prefiguring the sunlit noirs of the 50s, quite a bit of So Dark takes place by daylight in actual exteriors. Most of those later films don’t make use of movements from the real outside into interiors, artificial light and expressive shadows like Lewis does here, though. It is an approach that is all too fitting for a movie that’s very much about the gap between the rational mind and our desires, and a man’s inability to bridge this gap ending badly for others as well as him.

Very typical of the part of Lewis’s humungous output I’ve seen, there’s a great flow and sense of movement to nearly every scene, never letting the director’s obvious love for the meaningful and composed shot drift into the realm of the static.

This combines well with the already mentioned sense for the importance of little details, be it in the way the camera is angled upwards or downwards in dialogue scenes, or in the shifting of an actor’s shoulders.

That the solution to the mystery plaguing Cassin makes more sense on a metaphorical level than one of actual human psychology matters very little in a film shot as artfully as this one; Freud read as the stories a man told himself about the world does after all make for pretty great fiction, too.

Terror In A Texas Town (1958)

While the name of the little town Prairie in Texas shows a distinct lack of imagination, what is going on in it is has certain aspects of a fever dream.

Once a peaceful place, Prairie is now on the brink of the special brand of lawlessness the laws of capitalism bring. A certain McNeill (Sebastian Cabot) has somehow finagled himself into possession of the land grants for most of the outlying farms around town, never mind that the so-called squatters have been living there for decades. Now, McNeill wouldn't like to be called unnecessarily cruel, so he pays off the farmers to make them leave and lets his men burn down a farm or two if their owners aren't compliant.

That's not enough to get rid of the core of the local farmers, especially the Swedish immigrant Hansen (Ted Stanhope) and his friend and neighbor Pepe Mirada (Eugene Martin), so McNeill decides that it's necessary to make an example out of someone.

He hires an old acquaintance, the run-down gunman Johnny Crale (Ned Young) to do the deed. Crale himself is at the end of his own line. Psychotic, bitter and nearly made obsolete by the the changing times, he obviously sees McNeill's job as a last chance, but as a last chance to what is never really clear. It could be dying, or it could be getting rich, and I don't think Crale himself knows. The gunman is traveling with his girlfriend Molly (Carol Kelly), who loves him as much as she hates him and herself and would like nothing more than see her man give up on the outlaw business once and for all, but he is never going to listen to her.

Crale kills Hansen without much trouble. The old man tries to defend himself with the harpoon he used in his earlier life as a whaler, but to no avail. Without Crale's knowledge, there were witnesses to the murder. Mirada and his little son have seen everything. They have also found out why it is that McNeill is willing to pay people off instead of just driving them away - there's oil on the land!

Mirada's pregnant wife convinces him to keep his mouth shut about everything he has seen. She prefers to have a living father for her baby.

A week or so later, Hansen's son George (Sterling Hayden) arrives in town. He's just coming to visit his father, but when he hears of the old man's death, and sees how little the sheriff - who is of course owned by McNeill - or the other locals do about the murder, he decides to stay. At first, the inquiries of the somewhat slow seeming stranger don't lead to much, yet his stubbornness and honesty do finally lead him on the right track. McNeill tries to pay him off, but he could as well try to stop a train with his little finger.

In the end, there will be another duel between harpoon and gun.

In an earlier review, I called Joseph H. Lewis a director who had obvious talent, but didn't manage to use that talent well enough to actually make completely satisfying movies with it. After seeing Terror In A Texas Town, his last film, I have to take that back.

Based on a pseudonymous screenplay by the black-listed Dalton Trumbo, Terror is as good as a film in the B-Western sub-genre of the High-Noon-alike gets. As someone who is less than enthusiastic about the original, I'd even say it surpasses High Noon effortlessly. But I would say that, wouldn't I?

Terror removes the whininess and the loud moralizing inherent in the High Noon formula and replaces them with characterization of surprising depth. It's not just that the characters are psychologically sound, which is certainly nice and all, but also potentially boring, it's that they all are highly interesting, dragging some of the more beloved cardboard character types of the Western into the third dimension. The lack of moralizing here is just exceptional, giving a sympathetic view not only of the film's hero, but also of the sadistic monster that is Crale and the Western's favorite victim, "the fallen woman".

Additionally there's the human and decidedly non-racist portrayal of non-Anglo Americans, usually characters at best degraded to comic relief or ignored. You could start to believe America was built by a bunch of immigrants.

All of this is made even better by the fact how just plain peculiar the film dares to be, in small plot details like Crale's non-metaphorical iron fist as well as in bigger ways like its deconstruction of the High Noon formula that is less trying to be cynical than to put the emphasis on the character types who usually don't have a voice.

On the visual side, Lewis applies every camera trick he can afford, using everything from close-up shots of sweating people that prefigure the Spaghetti Western to unusual camera positions to make his film a slightly disorienting experience - at least seen in context of a more typical American B-Western style.

For once, everyone in the cast seems to be in on the sort of film they are doing, and acts as if his or her life depended on it. You could probably criticize Sterling Hayden's Swedish accent, but I don't think that's of too much importance for the big picture.

"The big picture" being this: Terror In A Texas Town is a brilliant, one of a kind film.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,western,ned young,sterling hayden,joseph h. lewis,reviews