In the realm of myth…

…we are everywhere at home.

Still riffing…

… on the sphinx…

A really fatal woman!

The Big Heat was enjoyable for its enveloping atmosphere of corruption and the psychological tension in Bannion, the hero.  Too Late for Tears [YouTube clip]is a treat because it features the most thoroughly characterized, and completely evil femme fatale that I’ve ever seen in noir.  She is played by Lizabeth Scott, who had a string of such roles.  She looks mean, even when she’s trying to be nice, and she has a voice even more husky than Kathleen Turner’s.

This movie wastes no time – the first scene has Scott and her husband driving to a dinner party when she starts complaining that she doesn’t want to go because the hosts will look down on her, they’re so snooty.  She finally grabs the wheel in an attempt to force her husband to turn around and go home, and he skids to a stop.  A car drives by and hurls a leather satchel into their back seat.  It’s filled with cash.  There you have it – her deep-seated psychological unease about her social position, her violence and impulsivity, and a pile of money to set them ablaze. 

After evading the crook who tries to catch up with them to retrieve what was supposed to have been given to him, the couple fights about what to do with the money.  He wants to give it to the police – she wants to keep it, spend it!  They compromise, and he deposits it in a locker at the train station, hoping she’ll calm down and give in. 

Nothin’ doing!  She starts spending money on luxuries, and hiding them in the kitchen cabinets.  Minks, dresses, accessories.  When he gets a call from his banker about the state of his checking account, he confronts her.  She reveals her deeply wounded childhood:  “We were poor.  Not hungry poor.  Middle-class poor!”  (That’s worse!)  People always looking down at them because they couldn’t keep up.  It’s what drives her, but hubby is a little too simple to see what a beast he has by the tail.  Dan Duryea, the crook who finally catches up with her to demand his blackmail loot is smarter.  He gives her the nickname, Tiger,  and he finds out he has her by the tail, and only barely.  Her lust for loot is terrifying.

Finally, near the end, she makes off for Mexico with the cash.  Hubby and the crook have been dealt with.  We see her checking in at a fancy hotel, and her delight at finally reaching the sphere where she belongs is almost girlish.  She is having the time of her life.  Crime really pays!  Funny, it’s rare in films that you ever see the bad guys enjoying their ill gotten gains.  Of course, her high time doesn’t last long.

Virtue’s Reward

   

One writer on this film, Fritz Lang’s noir thriller, The Big Heat, comments that it inverts the usual femme fatale narrative device and makes Bannion (Glen Ford) the male exterminating angel, shall we say.  I don’t see it quite that way.

Bannion is a police detective who works in a city totally in thrall to the local mob boss, and his commissioner is trying to get him to lay off a case.  Seems a cop killed himself because he couldn’t stand being on the take anymore, and he left a detailed letter for the district attorney.  His calculating wife sees a chance to ride the corrupt gravy train for ever, and instead of mailing the letter, hides it away and uses it to extort a monthly allowance from the mob.

If Bannion is un homme fatale, he’s an innocent one.  He just wants to get the thugs out of the city.  The bar floozy who starts him off on the case is murdered – she’s no. 1.  Tortured first by Stone (Lee Marvin in a ghoulish turn) who delights in using hot objects – cigarettes, coffee – to damage pretty women. 

The thugs decide to eliminate Bannion (as Stalin said, “No man, no problem.”) but Larry the hitman messes up again and ends up car-bombing his wife instead.  She loved Bannion – she’s no. 2

When he’s digging for leads in a bar called The Retreat, Bannion sees Stone venting his irritation on a girl in a crap game by burning her hand.  Nobody else seems to mind – it’s all good fun, but Bannion stands up to him and scares him away.  Stone’s girl (Gloria Grahame) is always twitting him and his thug cronies for being little men terrified of their big boss, so she takes a liking to Bannion and his virile self-confidence.  She follows him out and gets herself invited up to his room.  Maybe with his wife gone, he needs a little company, but he’s not interested.  When Stone finds out, he figures she gave something away to him and he scalds half her face with a pot of hot coffee.  She’s on her way to being no. 3, but it takes a while longer.

These three women are all beautiful and attracted to Bannion, at least enough to give him their confidence.  (No. 1 never makes a pass at him.  She just gives him a lead, which he rejects at first, because he thinks she’s a dishonest hooker looking to cash in somehow.  Perhaps we should call this flick, Bannion: Or Virtue Unrewarded.)  But before we see Bannion as the inverted femme fatale, let’s remember that he really doesn’t entice these dames at all, not on purpose.  But he does seem to be the figurative kiss-of-death for the young, beautiful, and female.

Then there’s Mrs. Duncan, the wife of the suicide, who entices him,  and she dies!  She’s no. 4, or actually no. 3, since Stone’s coffee gal comes for a visit with her “sister under the mink” and plugs her first.  Bannion, however, was completely taken by her fake distress when he questioned her immediately after hubby drilled his own head with a bullet.  Notice, she’s not a young, sexy, silky-skinned thing – she’s middle-aged. 

Finally, there is the interesting old lady who works in the junkyard where the mechanic who rigged his car with dynamite used to work.  She overhears his conversation with her boss who is tight-lipped, and she follows him outside for a surrreptitious encounter by a chainlink fence that sets him off with another lead.  Then she helps him nail the thug who planted the bomb by getting him to the door and making him drop his guard.  She’s too old to be in the sexual running, so she just does what’s right.

 

Free and open elections

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin – He was the author of the great anti-utopian novel, We.  Orwell admired it, and he thought Huxley had been influenced by (copied?) it.  He died in exile, after his letter to Stalin gained him permission to emigrate rather than remain the USSR without the permission to write.  Considering the contents of his 1923 essay, On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,  it’s a wonder he wasn’t just taken out and shot.

Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

Where the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma- a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatisation in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns: it only gives off warmth- it is tepid, it is cool.

The novel, We, is a memoir written by a prominent engineer in the glorious future One State in which human life is totally regulated.  Mathematics has trumped all poetry.  Individuals rejoice in their state as ciphers.  Sex is proscribed to limited “private hours” regulated by the Book of Hours, and access to sex partners is free, and regulated with a system of recorded pink chits.  The book is a little heavy with literary experimentation as it seeks to evoke the mentality of the future man who revels in his routine and lack of spontaneity, but it is prescient of so many things, in culture, in politics, and especially in the entire future of science fiction, that it amazes.  It also has a very sharp and dark humor.

They say that the Ancients conducted elections in some kind of  secrecy, hiding like thieves … Why would all this mystery be necessary?  Even today it is not understood conclusively; the likeliest explanation is that elections were connected to some sort of mystical, superstitious, maybe  even criminal rites.  For us, there is nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of:  we celebrate election day in the daytime, openly and honestly.  I see everyone vote for the Benefactor; everyone sees me vote for the Benefactor – and it couldn’t be any different, since “I” and “everyone” are the unified “WE” …And if you even suggest the impossible, that is, that there could be some dissonance in the usual homophony, then the invisible Guardians are here, among our ranks:  at any momen, they can stop ciphers who are falling into error and save them from their next false step – and save the One State from them.

Need I add that the “hero” is undone by love, by sex, by a femme fatale ?  At their trysts outside the glass wall of the city, in the museum of the Ancient House, she wears a yellow silk dress.  Her teeth are like daggers.  She scorns the One State, respects nothing.  She is irrestible to him, the engineer of the great spaceship Integral, the vessel that will bring the happiness of tyranny to other planets.  She drives him crazy…makes him…human?

La Torpille

La Torpille is the nickname of Esther Gobseck, the principal whore of  A Harlot High & Low (Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes) by Balzac.  Translated, it’s The Torpedo, an example of which – it’s a fish – you can see at the left above.  Touch it, and you get an electric shock.

Later, naval mines were called torpedoes – touch them, and you are blown up!  (Now torpedoes are self-propelled.)  In the case of Esther, any man who saw her, let alone touched her! was stunned, knocked out, and totally in thrall to her.  The elderly, ultra-rich, super-cynical banker, Nucingen, sees her by chance out for a walk alone in a Paris wood and is totally felled by love.  He who loves only bank accounts!

What might these women have looked like?  These images of fashionable, but respectable women from the 1820s give us a hint.

Prisoner of Love?

Just what was No. 6’s position on love? In the final episode, Fallout, he walks into the central chamber to the tune of The Beatles’ All You Need is Love. What follows is anything but a love-fest.  As with Once Upon a Time, which precedes it, there is nary a woman to be seen.  Strictly man (boy) stuff.

And what of romance, of sex? For such a good looking fellow, he seems rather uninteresting to the women, but they are all brainwashed, and he is uninterested in them:  He’s got escapin’ on his mind, and nothin’ else!  Of course, knowing that he was Mr. Drake/Danger Man/Secret Agent in a previous show only piques our curiosity about whether he will ever have an affair in The Village.  Or is he beyond all that?  (I believe there is a theory out there that he is gay!)

No, I think No. 6 is ALL about sublimation. His sexual energy is channeled and diverted towards freedom, individualism, and escape.  He’s a bit of a crank – who has time for love?

Yet…his relationships with women are frequently his undoing.  He is betrayed by women, although it would be going too far to say that they are ensnaring him as les femmes fatales. The Girl Who was Death, being an obvious, comical, and throwaway exception…

In the early episode, The Chimes of Big Ben, he “escapes” with a companion.  They certainly seem to have a bit of flirtatiousness in their exhanges as they encourage each other during their long wait in a shipping crate, bound for the outside.  Of course, she’s in on it.

In one of my favorites, Many Happy Returns, he does actually “escape” and he returns to his house.  (The address on his door, of course, is NO. 1!)  He accosts the new inhabitant, a modish middle-aged widow, Mrs. Butterworth.  She isn’t taken aback at all, but is obviously attracted to him.   When he interrogates her about his Lotus  she drives up in to prove he is the real owner, she replies “Tell me all about your car.”   She likes having a man about the house, and she helps him all she can.  He is charmed like a little boy with an indulgent aunt.

Of course, she’s in on it.  She has a birthday cake waiting for him when he returns to his real home, in The Village.

In Change of Mind, No. 6 matches wits with an attractive woman who wants him for his mind, or rather, who wants to mess with his mind.  She subjects him to a limited form of lobotomy to remove his agressive tendencies.

Here they are just after the presiding surgeon gives No. 6 a post-op chat about taking it easy.  “I’ll take care of him,” she says.  As he walks past her, she turns her head quickly in a rapid edit, showing us her profile through the porthole window in the door.  Circles, spheres, everywhere…

Just a pair of good looking stars strolling down a clinic hallway…

Ah, perhaps we get an inkling now of what’s up…or what could be up.

The woman is played by the late Angela Browne, a big star on British TV.  She was no stranger to the real femme fatale character, as you can see in the links below:

How to Succeed at Murder

During a follow-up visit with No. 6, she actually comes on to him!

“So, do you like my dress?”

His reply:  “Much more feminine than slacks.”  Women don’t wear dresses in The Village – the fact that she does is a clear indication of her intention to seduce.

She’s been slipping drugs into his tea, but he knows it and doesn’t drink it.  By way of turning the tables, he goes on,

“If it’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s girls who don’t know how to make a proper cup of tea!”

To her annoyance, he carries on like a cranky old man about how one must make tea, all the while switching the cups so that she gets the drug.  It makes her quite loopy – they almost seem to be having fun!  Will he…take…advantage??? Not No. 6!!  Always the gentleman, he sends her on her way.

Later, he catches up with her, gathering flowers like Ophelia, on her way to report to No. 2.  He hypnotizes her – no, he won’t take advantage! and draws her into his counterplot against the nefarious No. 2

Prisoner fanatics can read the reminisces of the fetching Ms. Browne in this interview.

Point Blank

Walking, walking, walking…his name is Walker.  His wife won’t know what hit her.   I fondly recall this pedestrian passageway from the Los Angeles airport. Another weird view in a mirror.

    

  

Driving around sun-drenched LA.  Beauty waits for the Beast.  Another view in a glass.

The scenes from the movie trailer I remember seeing in 1967.  Bam, bam, bam…who knew he was shooting at an empty bed.  His target flew the coop long ago.  He really messed up her bed, and not with rough sex.  Is Walker shooting with blanks, as they say?

The obligatory after-passionate-sex scene when the couple usually takes langrous drags on cigarettes.  No smoke here, no fire.  Walker dangles his empty gun limply between his legs.

  

They sucumb to reverie…how they met.  “You were drunk,” she says.  She wore white.  And who are those thugs shadowing them all the while.  They sure “met cute.”

   

Yeah, but things didn’t turn out so great.  Life’s no picnic in southern California suburbia…

 

Wife’s dead, a suicide with pills.  Now he gets with her sister.  Nice scenery in Santa Monica.  Will she help him, he asks as he uses the scope to sight the penthouse where his prey is living?  Is it an accident that they are the same color?  A woman and a telescope, just a means to an end…getting that $93,000 he’s owed. 

 

They set up Walker to be shot by a sniper, but he’s too smart for them.  The bad guys get killed.  The wonderful L.A. River is the setting.  Thanks to the US Army Corps of Engineers for this splendid WPA Deco style set doubling as a public works flood control project.

  

Waiting in the hillside villa for the big guy, Chris wonders, “Does this guy feel anything?”

  

While he waits, a little TV.  Part of the weird and sardonic social satire this movie contains.

  

Chris collapses after pummeling him, and leaves.  But not before she sets the kitchen buzzing with multiple appliances running riot just to annoy him.  The effect is of a poltergeist loose among consumer heaven.

Men without power

From Detour. Ann Savage plays a real piece of work.  She develops feelings for this poor guy whom she holds prisoner for a while with a secret she hangs over him.  He doesn’t reciprocate, but he does kill her, accidentally.  He never does get to see his girlfriend in L.A.

Lee Marvin, Walker, in Point Blank.  Sharon Acker, in full 60’s starlet mode, as his wife.  She dies – kills herself with pills.  He shoots a lot, but doesn’t really kill anyone.  This picture says a lot about their chemistry, and maybe why she left him for the hood he wants to kill.  He’s more interested in getting back his $93,000 than her.  Some viewers suggest that Walker is actually dead and is dreaming the entire movie before he dies..?  There does seem to be a lack of…potency…in evidence here. The women he loves all seem to have silver nail polish…

A quieter moment on the road

Drainage on my mind…

The other night, I caught the tail end of a special on the The History Channel called “The Sewers of London.”  Wow, that must have drawn quite an audience…but I was watching.  It described the horrors of cholera and typhus in London before the scientists had sorted out the causes of these scourges.  The miasma theory (infection borne by odor) which was wrong, but which nevertheless motivated great public works that led to spectacular gains in public health, dominated the medical establishment.

The Great Stink of the the mid-19th century in London arose from raw sewage dumped right into the Thames, the source of the city’s drinking water.  The theory of water-borne disease was not accepted, and Pasteur’s germ theory was not developed yet.  Get the stink away and the cholera will leave – it was common sense!

Enter Mr. Bazelgette, heroic engineer of the Victorian Age.  (Alas, we  have these giants  no more!)   He built a huge gravity drainage system that directed the city’s sanitary waste to two large pumping stations, from which it was lifted into giant holding reservoirs.  (They must have been a frightful sight when full!)  When the tide on the Thames was going out to sea, the reservoirs were emptied into the river, and the sewage was carried downstream, away from the city.  “The solution to pollution is dilution,” as they say in the engineering world.  Today, the beautiful Thames Embankment, imitated the world over, including in New York City’s Battery Park developments, sits on top of the massive gravity sewers designed by Mr. B.

Around the same time, Doctor Snow made his famous map, dear to epidemiologists and cartographers, that showed the incidence of cholera in a neighborhood he studied.  He inferred correctly that the cases were all linked to the source of their drinking water, a local pump.  To test his notion, he dared to remove the handle (take note, Mr. Dylan) and the frequency of cholera deaths in the area dropped suddenly.  Case closed!  Disease is carried by…something…in the water, not by smell!

Which brings us to Alida Valli, the woman at the head of this post, the love interest of Harry Lyme (Orson Welles) who meets his ignominious end in the sewers of post-war Vienna in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. I heard about this film from my mother, at a very young, formative age. Was I, perhaps, conditioned by what Pynchon calls the “Mother Conspiracy, ” just as poor Slothrop was? Is that why I now make my living fiddling with drainage systems and subterranean infrastructure? Well, leaving aside my hydraulic-psychoanalytics(and Freud was, I recall, very fond of hydraulic metaphors) it’s a great film.  And if you think I’m the only one who spins strange associations off of this film, read this appreciation of Ms. Valli.

I recently saw Valli in another film, Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, a not-so-great film in which she plays a wonderful femme fatale. Yep, she did it, she get’s hanged.  The film’s location shot of the court struck me as it showed the corner blasted away from a bombing raid – it was shot in 1947.

And on the subject of sewers and culture, check out:

• He Walked by Night - Richard Basehart kills and is killed in this Los Angels noir featuring a climax in the storm sewers
• V by Thomas Pynchon – Benny Profane searches for the albino alligator rumored to lurk within the New York system
• Need I say it, Les Miserables, which includes an entire chapter devoted to the history and importance of the Paris sewers, and includes some deprecatory words on the modern ones
• Various memoirs of the Warsaw Ghetto – hiding and escaping in sewers was common
• Adolf Loos’ emphasis on plumbing as the standard by which civilizations are to be judged
• Gibson’s novel featuring The Stink, The Difference Engine
• Huysmans’ soul searching

There are other items I’m sure…send me your finds!

Deep, deep, deeper…

Audition, is a very creepy film by a Japanese director known for creepiness, Takashi Miike.  A middle-aged, middle-class widower wants to remarry, so his cut-up of a friend in the entertainment business suggests they do an audition for a maybe real, maybe phoney show.  He meets the girl of his dreams, an aspiring actress who wants the main part.

Problem is, she’s a bit of a nut case.  The film is a little of Fatal Attraction, Psycho, and a whole lot of other horror films thrown together, but it’s paced surely, and it is actually quite restrained in its use of violence and gore, despite what you may read about it.  I mean, during the final scene when the lovely naif shown above is torturing her victim and severs his foot with a tourniquet wire, they don’t show the foot, blood, or anything.  How’s that for “art?” 

It is rather difficult to watch, but not as disturbing as what you might think from the reviews, just a different arty-Japanese twist on an old theme of the avenging femme fatale.  As she pushes the needles into the paralyzed body she’s tormenting (the drug prevents movement but not the feeling of pain) she says, “Deep, deep, deeper…” But then, maybe I just have a thick skin, heh, heh, heh…

There are all sorts of ways you could interpret this film:  misogynistic, sadistic, subversive of traditional male sexist values, kinky-erotic, whatever.  The director denies them all. 

I was most taken by the portrait of the main character, a regular guy with a little too much of the traditional romantic in him who got sucked in way, way over his head!

The Flesh, the Devil, Greta & John…

From the  Garbo silent film, “Flesh and the Devil.”  Greta plays a femme fatale whose first victim is Leo, an army officer from a castle nearby.  At a ball…

…he sees her again, he’s done for now!  “May I have this waltz..?”  She says yes, and glides towards him like a vampire going for the neck…

After the dance, the slip off into the garden for a while.  The scene, technically advanced for the day, is lit by matches and moonlight.  He tells her the obvious – “You are very beautiful.”  She makes a moue and says, “You are very young…”  They do the cigarette exchange drill before the inevitable passionate kiss…followed by a period of …bliss.

Some shots from their illicit domestic ecstasy – does he not know she’s married?  (Of course, why should he care..?  He’s an officer!)  Garbo’s glittering dress, painted lips, and her tangled clutch with John Gilbert (her lover in off-screen life) creates some of the silent screen’s more memorable images…but the husband intrudes, and a duel is scheduled.

Oh dear…Leo killed the husband and had to flee the law.  His friend Ulrich obeys his parting words and goes to her to see that she is taken care of…Of course, Ulrich is rich…if she needs anything at all, please just call…How can she fail to give him the privilege of lighting her cigarette?  He fumbles with several matches, but succeeds at last.  He’s finished!

In the end, Ulrich and Leo are reunited in undying friendship, with the fatal woman out of the way thanks to some conveniently thin ice that shattered and swallowed her up as she rushed to prevent them from shooting each other in yet another affair of honor…

Give my love to the sunrise…

Elsa’s farewell to Michael – she looks glamorous even when she seems to be really dying.  How many times do you see that in an old ‘B’ movie?  This is after the famous shoot out scene in the house of mirrors, a location that reflects (no pun) the nature of Michael’s befuddled nature throughout the film.  He knows he’s been taken for a chump.  A wonderful femme fatale noir flick, and the local scenes in Frisco’s Chinatown are another entertaining piece of it.  Not to mention watching Hayworth running through the market streets in high heels and furs and speaking Chinese!  She is the Lady from Shanghai, after all.

In noir, everything is foreshadowed, pre-ordained, determined.  Michael rescues Elsa from some clumsy thugs who jump her while she’s riding in the horse drawn carriage  in which he first saw and spoke to her in Central Park.  Later, saying goodbye after declining to work on her yacht because he suddenly discovers that she’s a married woman…

…he hands her the gun he found …”Would it be this you’re lookin’ for?  You were smart to carry a gun, traveling alone in the park.  But if you knew you had the gun in your bag, why through away the bag?”

“I meant for you to find it…I don’t know how to shoot.”

“It’s easy.  You just pull the trigger.”

It’s all summed up in Michael’s monologue on sharks, inspired my Melville?  Inspiration for Spielberg’s Quint’s tale of the Indianapolis?

And of course, pull the trigger they do in the fabulous and famous shootout in the crazy mirror room of the funhouse.