And unto us a son is born.

I was watching The Terminator 2 the other day since I’d never seen the whole thing.  Also, I watched the first of the series a few weeks ago, and that finally made clear to me why Arnold was a villain first, then a good guy, or machine.  As science fiction, it is ordinary, but as an action film, I thought it was terrific.  Of course, anything with a chase in the Los Angeles River gets my attention.

I also thought it was an entertaining re-do of the Nativity story, and I’m always up for that.  Some guy from the future comes back in time and impregnates an unwitting female, about as immaculate as you can get without actually doing it, because, you see, the father isn’t even born yet.  And John, the boy, is born to save man from the machines after Judgment Day falls upon them as a nuclear Apocalypse brought on by their own sinful pride in their technology.  John goes through a period of trials until he realizes his calling, in the desert of course.

So, does this make the Terminator robot a stand-in for John the Baptist?  He too gave his life for standing up to a prophet of evil.

Coketown Liebestod

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is generally classed as a noir, but it certainly did not seem like one for the first thirty or forty minutes: so much so, that I almost gave up on it. Instead, we are presented with a pretty standard melodrama of class, childhood oppression, and murder most foul hushed up in exchange for climbing the social ladder. At Film Noir of the Week, the reviewer says it sometimes seems like Grand Opera. (Its conclusion is close to Wagnerian.)  Despite its slow start, after the set up is over, the story takes a dive into pure, blackest noir, thematically, if not stylistically.  That is, the lighting, music, narration, and the like don’t have much to do with film noir, but the characters and the story…Yes!

The plot has many complications, but it is rooted in the lives of three youngsters in Iverstown, a mill-town, presided over by Martha’s mean aunt, who has made Martha her heir.  Martha is not grateful, because the aunt despises Martha’s dead parents: her father, a former mill worker, and her mother who was fool enough to marry him. Walter is the “scared kid with glasses,” desperately in love with Martha, and Sam is the rough kid from the poor side of town for whom Martha feels a magnetic attraction.  And so, one fatal night, Martha lets her Aunt have it, Walter sees all, Walter’s father hushes it all up so his son can grow up to marry Martha and finally bring some wealth and class into the struggling petty bourgeois O’Neil family.  Just one thing:  the kids think Sam saw it all before he hightailed it out of town, but he didn’t see anything in fact.

Walter does grow up to marry Martha, but he remains the scared kid with glasses, even as he is running for attorney general and getting tough on crime.  Martha calls all the shots – what she says in town goes, while Walter spends his free time in a melancholic, drunken stupor.  His election is a sure thing – no point in taking odds on it.

What makes this movie go is the characters, and the great actors who create them.  Van Heflin is Sam Masterson, the kid who skipped town, and ends up coming back after seventeen years, purely by accident.  He’s an interesting character:  sterling war record; wandering gambler; heart of gold, but he beat a wrap for manslaughter.  He’s no goody two-shoes.  He frequently twirls his fingers in an odd way when he’s conversing, which emphasizes his observing, somewhat aloof, outsider nature.  He’s not afraid to take a rough revenge on a private dick who tried to scare him out of town on O’Neil’s orders.  And he seems to be irresistible to women:  O’Neil’s secretary just melts under his gaze.

Toni (Lizabeth Scott playing an innocent this time) is one of the girls drawn to him.  He meets her coming out of the building where he grew up.  She’s not quite as pure as she seems, but a nice kid, and he’s the perfect gentleman, it seems.  She has parole conditions to meet – he helps her out by getting her a room at his hotel.  Their rooms share a bath.  He recommends reading Gideon’s Bible, and he loves to quote the story of Lot’s wife:  a nice noir theme – don’t look back.  To me, this all seems pretty racy for 1946:  adjoining rooms after a cozy dinner, Toni rapturously showering, washing away her not so pleasant past and being reborn into a new future…with Sam.  Were they just reading, or like Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s poem did they read no more that evening..? Then Sam is awakened by two sleazy police detectives who are obviously working on O’Neil’s orders.  They’ve jailed Toni on phony charges – a bid to dig us some dirt on Sam.

Barbara Stanwyck is Martha, who is revealed during the film as a full-blown femme fatale, but one who plays it classy.  She doesn’t usually need to go for the throaty, seductive talk – she has the power and the money to get what she wants.  But she is also a prey to her own desires, and they are pretty strong.  She wants what she wants.

She builds her inheritance up into a gigantic financial empire.  She transforms the mansion into a place of white and pink instead of gloomy brown and black.  She holds her own against Sam’s attractions at first.  Later, she comes to Sam’s hotel to pick him up for a “business dinner,” and it’s like the scene in The Ten Commandments when Pharaoh’s wife visits Moses in his slave hut:  Oh, the furniture, the bottle of scotch!  Just how I imagined such an ordinary hotel room would be!

Kirk Douglas is marvelous as Walter, a man consumed by self-loathing and his hopeless love for Martha, whose love, if not her body, is unattainable.  She plays him like a fiddle:  alcohol is his solace.  Their relationship is one of submission, domination, and perversion.

The only romantic coupling (only implied, of course) that is wholesome, is that of Toni and Sam.  The violent sexual nature of the bond between Sam and Martha is displayed when they revisit the woods where they used to hideout as kids.  They find a campfire, which ignites old memories.  The conversation that ensues reveals to Martha that Sam knows more than she thought about a lot.  She isn’t happy.  Her passion aflame, she tries to follow through on it.

She’s no match for Sam, physically, sexually, or morally.  But he just can’t resist her.  A real film noir pickle.

As their combat becomes sexual conflict, then submission, her hand relaxes, and drops the fiery brand into the fire.  The flames rise up violently: the next shot shows the smoky ashes.  The deed is done, the battle over, for now.  The movement of her hand will be echoed in the Love-Death finale.

In this complicated story, things take a while to come to a head, but the three kids find themselves together again, at the head of those fateful stairs.  Drunken Walter falls, and Martha sees a chance to rearrange her living arrangements, if she can just convince Sam to go along.  It worked once before, long ago.

No dice.  Sam is essentially decent, and he leaves, intending to never return to Iverstown.  And he leaves Walter and Martha to their private hell.  Walter knows the score now:  he sees that Martha is really a sicko, but he loves her.  “Kiss me, Martha.“

He knows there is only way way to end this for both of them.  She feels the gun in her gut…and she does not fight it.  It feels right.  She pulls the trigger herself.

A puff of smoke.  She is done with this awful life.  She looks up, to the beyond, almost ecstatic.  The music swells.  It’s Tristan und Isolde in Coketown.

Sam hears the shot, turns to look back, sees the murder-suicide run to its conclusion.  He is sick.  Best to leave town, and not look back.

Dark Passage

Vincent Parry is on the lam after escaping from San Quentin where he was doing time for the murder of his wife.  Irene Jensen knows he didn’t do it, just as her father didn’t kill his wife, and she just happens to drive by during his escape from prison.  They become close.  He gets his face rearranged.  He goes to her house to recuperate.

The doc says he has to sleep on his back, with his arms tied to the bed to make certain he doesn’t turn over.  Good morning, Vince. Guess you’re feeling like you’d like to be untied now.

Engineers in Space

Apollo 13 tells the story of the unfortunate NASA mission as a straightforward disaster tale, anchored by Tom hanks as Jim Lovell, the resolutely understated hero.  I consider this part of my examination of The Engineer as Hero in movies:  a lot of pilots and astronauts are engineering graduates, and Houston Mission Control is a hive of that species.  Hanks plays the hero in Steve McQueen mode, but more approachable.  His values are rooted in family, and he reveals a streak of spiritualism when he recounts his lucky escape as a fighter pilot, “lead home” by a trail of phosphorescent algae in the wake of his mother ship.

The film was entertaining, but for me, ultimately a bit dull and flat: I am not engaged by celebrations of folksy heroism, and the fascination of space was lost in the Hollywood adventure story of man-and-machine, despite the commendable restraint exercised by the film maker.  Although this is clearly a celebration of  an American Everyman’s triumph, he leaves the sentimental gushing for the musical score and Lovell’s mother, who, on cue, declares that if “they could make a washing machine fly, my Jimmy could land it.”

I grew up watching space launches, building models of the LEM, and hearing the roar of what we thought were engine tests at Rocketdyne, in the industrial section of the San Fernando Valley. The gadgets and the stories were neat, but for me, the essential terrifying strangeness of space was what fascinated me.  David Bowie captures it in his song, Ground Control to Major Tom:

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here am I sitting in my tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do

Just guys floating in the cosmic void, protected by a little tin can. Ron Howard has made a movie that could have been on an ocean liner, a mountain top, or an airplane coming in for a dangerous landing.  The archive footage of Walter Cronkite’s wonderment at the moonwalk conveys more of the magic of the enterprise than anything else in the film.  2001 is still the standard for man in space as far as I am concerned:  The shots of the space craft careening wildly through space seem hokey in comparison to the eerie progression of Kubrick’s machines.

Brave guys, those astronauts, and incredibly skilled and cool under pressure.  That’s how they picked ‘em.  And the presentation of the work of the engineers on the ground was fascinating:  the technology they had to work with is left in the dust by what a kid carries in his pocket today.   And the need to have thought out every contingency in advance, to have provided the pilots with manuals and pre-printed algorithms for calculating things that today a pocket calculator could do in a flash, and the enormous technical bureaucracy that supports this was nicely shown.

But maybe I’m the prisoner of my profession here.  I’d heard of the sequence in which the engineers figure out how to improvise a replacement air filter to keep the pilots alive as a thrilling and brilliant passage, but it seemed to me that they figured out the problem exactly the way you’d expect a bunch of committed, smart engineers to do it.  Engineers love to jerry rig stuff just to get it working.  It’s called ingenuity.  Still, you do get the sense that it took guts to think they could carry this sort of thing off.  And for what?  To show the Russians, of course.

The film endorses the heroic view of NASA, and seems wistful that the public lost interest after Armstrong walked on the moon.  The reduction of the program by budget cuts is presented as a foolish tragedy of policy myopia.  Lovell justifies continuing the program after Armstrong by asking what would have happened if no one had followed up on Columbus’ voyage.  Well…ask a Native American that question… Lovell believes it though, and one of the more affecting moments of the film is when he realizes he will never walk on the moon, and we see his dreams of what it would have been like.

There’s hardly any relationship between the moonshots and 1492, however, other than the skill and courage of the men involved. Columbus sought land, gold, and slaves.  Lovell sought personal and patriotic fulfillment.  The justification for NASA after beating the Russians was only science, and robots do more of it better, and far more cheaply, without heroics or tragedy.  We have enough of that on Earth anyway.

Slightly Scarlet?

Why, oh why is this film called Slightly Scarlett?  With two bombshell redheads, Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl, Technicolor that seems almost lurid at times, and enough sin for a few films, Positively Scarlett would have been a better name!  Based on a James M. Cain novel, and released in 1956, it stars John Payne as the man in a full-blown noir maelström.

First a cranky note about preferences:  I know that The Postman Always Rings Twice, perhaps the most famous Cain-film noir adaptation, is revered as one of the greats, but I found it pretty tame and weak.  Then there are a lot of films that are billed as ‘noir’, at least on Netflix, that seem to me hardly to make the grade.  Union Station, with William Holden, is one of these:  Black and white, police work, suspense, but basically a procedural melodrama.  The only noir aspect, remarked by many, is the singularly rough treatment given the crooks, including a staged near-murder of one of them to scare him into talking.  In the end, the good guys win, everyone is happy, the crooks are dead.  Not in Slightly Scarlett!

Maybe it’s the Technicolor that causes the filmmakers to go slightly round the bend.  Think of Leave Her to Heaven, another color-noir that is mind-boggling.  John Payne also starred in Hell’s Island, a crazy and enjoyable color romp through the catalogue of film noir themes.  As for Scarlett, my Encyclopedia of Film Noir refers to it as ‘one of the most bizarre noir films‘ made while the Hollywood production code was in force, and it identifies many of its strange elements as the result of attempting to accommodate the censors.  That, and the director Allan Dwan’s taste for perversion.

Dorothy just got out of jail and there’s sister June to greet her.  Ben Grace is spying on them with a whopper of a lens. He works for the local mob boss, Solly Caspar, and he’s trying dig up dirt on a mayoral candidate running on a clean government platform.  June is the pol’s secretary and, platonic, love interest.   All Ben gets is some female cuddling.   What was Dorothy doing time for, I wonder?

How does June afford that house on a salary?  Solly was probably onto something thinking there was some hanky panky with Mr. Squeaky Clean.  When Dorothy gets there, she goes right for the booze, and something seems fishy between the girls.  We learn that June is a completely co-dependent family member, enabling Dorothy’s dispsomania, kleptomania, and nymphomania.  Maybe Dorothy doesn’t need a shrink…maybe she’s just bad!

Solly gets steamed watching that mealy-mouthed reformer call him names on the nightly news!  He’s angry that Ben didn’t get any material to use against him.

Ben has limits to what he will do, leading to a dressing down from Solly, who refers to him as ‘Genius,’ presumably because he went to college and speaks standard English.  Ben is a real noir type – Solly has his number:  “You’re not crooked, and you’re not straight.  You’ll take what crumbs you can get, but you don’t want any trouble.”

After humiliating Genius - Hey guys, remind me never to send my son to college…if I ever have a son!  Har har! – Solly shows how things are done by throttling the newspaper owner who supports the reform group.  Oops, he used a little too much force.  He’s dead!  Ben informs on him, and Solly has to skip town, leaving Genius to take over the rackets.

Will Solly gone, the Goo-goo get elected mayor, and Ben moves in on his secretary.  Tight clothes and lots of skin a part of the suburban scene, 50s style.  Check the view through the window.

Dorothy isn’t about to let sister have all the fun.

Just butting in…

Wow, that’s between a rock and a hard place!

Genius takes over the rackets, and does quite well with them.  He runs a tight ship, with a minimum of violence.  It’s just gambling anyway – somebody has to give people a place to have fun.

Ben gets wind that Solly has returned from being on the lam, and it’s time to scram.  There’s a lot of money in the safe at Solly’s beach house, enough for him to skip the country. The scenes of the ocean remind me of my childhood in southern California.  Dorothy tags along with Ben while he searches the place:  maybe he does a little exploring of her secret places too, but it’s only hinted at.   Dorothy is pretty looped, as usual, and with that interior, those colors! – who could blame her?  Anyway, she’s always running riot in somebody else’s house – her sister’s, Solly’s beach house, Solly’s mansion, now lived in by Ben – that’s what she likes to do.

She goes a little too far, playing the pretty mermaid with a harpoon gun.

One last shoplifting run and the cops are on to Dorothy.  She’s all set up to head back to the joint because this store detective isn’t taking any excuses – “She’s ill.  She needs a doctor! – from June.  Poor June – she’d ruin her own life to save Dorothy.  Maybe the morality squad just couldn’t stomach a really evil woman:  just say she needs a shrink and it’s okay for public consumption…

The latest run in with the law sends Dorothy over the edge.  She ends up at Solly’s beach house and finds him there, waiting to take revenge on Ben.  Meanwhile, he has a little fun with the fetching nympho, watching TV, running barefoot through piles of money… that sort of thing.

June shows up, and Solly is all set to plug her and dump her over the terrace into the sea.  After all, she must have been part of sending him on the lam so her boyfriend could be the Mr. Clean mayor.

Dorothy is just loving it!  She’d love to see Solly plug her sister – it would be fun!

Doesn’t work out that way…June shoots Solly with the harpoon, Ben rushes in to save the day, but he’s got to hold off the hoods until the cops arrive.  Solly tells his thugs to take care of Ben, but he taunts Solly for being not ‘big enough‘ to do it himself.  Do what?  Not big enough where?

Genius takes a few bullets in his body to protect the ladies.  Pretty masochistic.

As Genius bleeds on the rug, the cops and the mayor arrive.  Cops wear fedoras, pols wear homburgs:  I have both.  Mr. Clean and the cop confer.  June weeps over Ben’s not quite dead body.  Mr. Clean and June share an awkward moment:  can they get together again?

The ambulance takes Ben away and Mr. Mayor goes to retrieve hysterical Dorothy.  It’s all going to be okay.  June will be with the mayor, Dorothy will go to a mental hospital, Solly is headed to Alcatraz, and Ben… nowhere to be seen.

Pollack Paranoia

Three Days of the Condor (1975) is a conspiracy thriller by Sydney Pollack about a renegade CIA section.  There were a lot of movies then about that sort of thing:  Watergate; JFK’s assassination; Vietnam – any nutty theory seemed to have some traction.  Unlike The Parallax View of 1974 by Pakula, which is darker and takes itself much, much more seriously, I thoroughly enjoyed this film, while I found the Pakula number predictable and pretentious.  I guess I like Redford more than Beatty too.  (I still want to know how they filmed that scene on the Seattle Space Needle at the start of Parallax though!)

Redford plays Joe Turner, a CIA researcher who returns from a lunchtime errand with the office’s sandwiches to find everyone murdered.  Why would  anyone rub out a bunch of nerdy intelligence analysts?  He may be an egghead bookworm, but he’s also Redford, so he can fight and think on his feet like James Bond:  not quite believable.

He forces Cathy (Faye Dunaway) to shelter him, she falls for him, of course, and they sleep together.  The next day, she’s feeling a bit skittish.  He tells her, “You don’t have to help me.“  She replies, “Oh no, you can count on me, the old spy fucker…“  He’s annoyed.  A funny bit; part of what makes this thriller a little quirky.

The film is shot in New York City, and it’s a real treat to see the locations.  It’s NYC in the 70s, the NYC I remember, even when I’m walking around the spic-and-span streets of today near Central Park – The NYC of humungus cars lumbering down potholed streets, garbage on the sidewalk, and grime.  Several of the shots of CIA headquarters in NYC are in the World Trade Center, a deliciously sick irony, given the fate of those structures and the CIA ineptitude that helped bring it on.  Here, the Hoboken train station take on a noir/Casablanca atmosphere as Turner walks away from Cathy, maybe to his death.

Cliff Robertson (sporting a massive, windblown rug) plays Higgins, the CIA guy trying to get Turner:  is he on Joe’s side, or does he put The Company first?  Here he stares at a primitive version of Google Maps trying to locate Joe from a phone call, but Joe was too clever to be tracked.

Joe finds the CIA guy who rubbed out his friends so that a secret rogue CIA plan to invade the Middle East wouldn’t be uncovered.  Turner realizes it was all about oil.  Sounds familiar.  The 1973 oil crisis was a recent memory.

John Houseman is the old CIA hand who craves “the clarity” of yesteryear.  Max von Sydow is  Joubert the hired murderer who has found clarity in “the precision” of his work.  He doesn’t have to worry about which side pays.  He has found peace.  He and Joe have a little man to man outside of the renegade’s house.  Joe seems cool with the fact that Mr. Death (yep, Max has a lot of experience with The Grim Reaper) knocked off his colleagues:  he’s a bit overwhelmed by it all, and asks for a lift to the train station.  This was another of the enjoyable, unpredictable elements in this film.

Joe is not quite through with The Company.  He meets Higgins again, who tries to justify the whole dirty business, although, of course, that renegade went too far.  They have a little debate about democratic accountability with Turner taking the high road, “ask the people what they want,” and Higgins telling him that when they are out of gas, hungry and cold, they will just want the ‘authorities’ to get it done, and not ask why.  He has a point, doesn’t he?

The moral ambiguity of the ending, the unresolved romance, the unknown future of Joe Turner is what makes this movie really fun.  Joe tells Higgins that the New York Times now has the whole story.  He thinks that will protect him:  he doesn’t quite trust Higgins to be gentle with him, despite Higgins’ show of concern for his welfare.  After all, Joubert told him not to trust anyone.  Higgins is aghast – another Pentagon Papers debacle – but as Joe walks away, he calls to him.  How far can you walk?  “How do you know they’ll print it?“  “They’ll print it,” shouts Joe, but he doesn’t seem totally convinced.

Sydney Pollack turns up at the end of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s final work, and a terrible disappointment to me.  He gives the low down to Tom Cruise who cannot fathom the corrupt orgy he’s witnessed.  Pollack tells him that the high and mighty, the secret governing class, they do things you wouldn’t believe, if you only knew.  Yeah, yeah, I read the papers, we know.  It’s a pretty silly denouement.

Oops…what if they don’t print it?

Love and Death

Reading through What Is to Be Done?, I found myself remembering Woody Allen’s film, Love and Death, from 1975.  The stilted dialog and philosophical expositions in the novel are so wooden, they seem like the parody of Allen’s film.  I am amazed at how much of the film I remembered, but I thought it was much funnier this time around, despite the fact that when I saw it, I was in my Russian Lit phase.

It’s a wild parody and pastiche of 19th century Russian literary themes, primarily Tolstoy’s War and Peace and various Dostoyevsky works, with visuals that humorously echo Ingmar Bergman.  In the scene above, Allen, a new recruit, shamed into enlisting to fight Napoleon, is upbraided by a black drill sergeant.  He goes on to inadvertently save the battle by being shot out of a canon into the French generals’ tent.

I even found Diane Keaton, an actress to whom I usually react as to the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, very entertaining.

Watch the Skies!

The Thing from Another World (1951), is a film that influenced a lot of sci-fi movies that came after it.  I don’t know if there are any similar ones that preceded it, but it surely was the mold for much boring and formulaic stuff that I watched as a boy.  The TV  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea comes to mind with its standard ‘monster epic’ plotting:  strange, destructive things happen; monster revealed and monster rampages; solution found, monster killed – all is well.  But The Thing, however preposterous it is as a sci-fi story, is a wonderful entertainment because of its characters, pacing, and dialog.

Anyway, just what thing from another world are we talking about?  Men from Mars and women from Venus?  The captain and the fetching assistant in the North Pole station have some romantic missteps from a drunken bar encounter to put behind them:  he suggests that she tie up his wandering hands, and she agrees.  “I’ll bring a rope, ” he says.  He does, and they’re loving it!

The captain’s a crack officer – he leaves off the sexy hijinks to do his duty and check station security.  After a bungled attempt to lift a flying saucer out of the ice – they burned it up by accident – they retrieved the alien pilot from the ice and brought it back to their station.  A negligent guard covered the iced-alien with an electric blanket to hide the ugly sight, but the blanket was on!  Oops again.  The alien broke free as its ice block melted, and proceeded to escape, loosing an arm in the process.

Examining the arm, the chief scientist realizes that the alien is a vegetable.  There’s a metaphor there somewhere.  He is enthralled by the idea of an anthropoid being reproducing with the more efficient botanical method, rather than the messy, chaotic, and uncontrolled sexual technique we inferior humans employ.  “No emotion at all!“  It also turns out that the alien is sustaining itself by drinking the blood of sled dogs it kills.

The characters make many snappy references to army bureaucracy, at one point lampooning the complex and long-winded army regulatory memoranda by which they are supposed to abide, while they repeatedly bungle their work, and the garbled radio messages provide a humorous counterpoint.  A directive to keep the alien prisoner arrives just after it escapes.   At one point, the men point out that according to Army documents, UFOs are simply an illusion, an example of mass hysteria.  Carl Jung agreed.  The men chuckle.

The scientist is a stock character, so wrapped up in his intellectual passion – “It doesn’t matter if we die, we must communicate with it!” that he achieves a sort of comic grandeur.  Of course, his sexual frigidity – the comely assistant is his amanuensis, that’s the only way he uses her – is a funny contrast to her penchant for bondage games with the captain.

How do you kill a vegetable?  The woman supplies the answer:  boil it, steam it, fry it… When will we properly value women’s work as homemakers?  The scientist tries to reason with the green giant, offering himself as disciple to the greater wisdom of the alien.  Mr. Vegetable replies, humor again, with a grunt and a shove.  Then he’s fried, or is he being crucified?

The newsman is finally given permission to broadcast his inspiring scoop to the press, and he concludes with the warning to all Earthlings to “watch the skies.“  Indeed.  The Russians are coming – it’s the Cold War after all, and things are seen in the skies.

Hell’s Half Acre

Hell’s Half Acre is the red light district in Honolulu in this 1954 noir with a nice helping of sleaze.  The good guy isn’t so good – he deserted and is thought to have died at Pearl Harbor.  He made a lot of loot with some criminals in a syndicate during the war, but he’s paid them off, and now he wants to stay straight running his thriving tiki joint night club.  He has a new identify, but his old partners won’t leave him alone…and then his wife, to whom he was married for three days before shipping out, recognizes his voice on a kitschy luau recording, and comes looking for him to find out what’s what.  Elements of The Third Man, but pretty improbable.  The slime ball characters make it worthwhile watching.

The wandering wife is drugged and ends up in a strange bed, naked.  The drunken slob across from her will make sure she doesn’t try anything funny.  She knows who killed the good/bad guy’s girlfriend.

The wife of the drunken slob has a thing for the killer:  interracial sex adds spice, but we don’t actually see them kiss.  She’s a real piece of work, this dame.

The wife gets her clothes back, but she also gets the attentions of the awakened drunken slob.  She can see what he’s thinking, even if she did just wake up from a drugged stupor.  Well, Mr. Slob get’s his, shot down by the police in a drainage ditch – another nod to The Third Man?

Well, anything with a drainage theme has got my attention!  When she hears the news that slobbo-husband is killed, she’s overjoyed.  That marriage wasn’t working.

Bang, bang, bang, filled with holes, hee, hee!

Finally, Mr. Good/Bad guy has to take a lonely walk to the front of his tiki lounge where his killer ex-partner waits to gun him down.  It’s certain death, but it has to be that way.  The melodramatic cliche is given some zip by the camera work showing the walk from his point of view in slowed down motion.  Is he thinking,  “This is the last time I will step past these potted palms and crummy looking monster clam shells, not to mention those tiki lights I always hated..?“