Classed as a film noir, yet not quite that, but something sui generis, I think, The Night of the Hunter is so fraught with meaning and allusion, that I will just let Magaret Atwood describe it- she can do so much better than I can.
Those are the hands of faux preacher, Harry Powell, who tells the story of mankind with his two tattooed hands. He is a sociopath serial killer who gets close to widows with money by using his piety, his deep voice, and his very heavy eyelids to disarm them. Then he slits their throats. Oh for the days when preachers of the Lord were cast as figures of satire and disrepute!
The film is weird and expressionistic, dark and foreboding (as befits a noir), filled with intense, dream-like passages. In the images below, Harry reaches toward the light with his switchblade while his new wife, realizing he married her for money, opines that it doesn’t matter, because these events led her to her salvation. Then he stabs her – it’s almost a ballet. He tells folks that she ran off, no good strumpet that she is, and he drives her body to the bottom of the nearby lake. Then he plans on how to throttle the secret of her stash out of her two children.
The two children escape downriver on a skiff. When Harry wades into the water and fails to capture them, he lets out a blood curdling scream of anguish. The travel on the river evokes the American wilderness, Huck Finn, and, for me, a TV serialI saw as a boy about some young boys who stumble on a river to the beginning of time after gazing at the dinosaurs in the New York Museum of Natural History.
The frequent shots of reptiles, frogs, birds…going about their business in timeless indifference to the predicament of the children gives the journey the quality of myth, reinforced by the narrative allusions to Moses and Herod. (Not quite what you expect of a noir, right?)
In the end, the children find refuge with a truly pious old woman who takes in stray kids – it’s the depths of The Depression. Talking God-talk doesn’t prevent her from knowing a pious fraud, and facing him down with a shotgun until the law can come and take him away for a hangin’.
A happy ending? The boy tries to prevent the cops from handcuffing him because it recalls to his mind the image of his dead father being arrested after robbing a bank. Later, he refuses to speak against Powell in court. Odds are, the entire ordeal has messed him up for life and his respite is only temporary. Meanwhile, Powell is almost lynched before he can be spirited away for a proper judicial death by the the same narrow minded, credulous and pious folks who invited him into the bosom of their community at the beginning.
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) reminded me of Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel in a way. A group of middle-class people find themselves in a nightmare world bounded by the edge of a room, or railway car, from which they cannot escape. This one has a happy ending.
The movie gets off to such a slow and corny start, I almost gave up on it. There’s the rich playgirl, getting ready to return to London to settle down according to Daddy’s wishes, and marry a “check-chasing blueblood.” A pair of stereotypical, cricket-obsessed Brits who keep up a steady idiotic patter, a charming, handsome, and brash musicologist studying local folksongs, and a slightly batty old English lady governess. They are all trapped by an avalanche in a remote backwater of some fictional central-European country, waiting for their train connection back to England.
Once on the train, the playgirl and the governess become friendly, and when the girl wakes up from a snooze, the old lady is gone. Simply gone. Everybody claims to have never seen her! It becomes a somewhat labored cat-and-mouse game between the girl and the passengers: she trying to get evidence that the woman did exist; they implying or saying straight out that she’s crazy. A bit of physical evidence convinces the music man, and they make a team. It turns out that the passengers are in a conspiracy to abduct and kill the old lady with an elaborate switcheroo involving a fake medical expert, a nun in black high-heeled pumps, and an Italian circus performer. Then it gets weird.
After the heroes rescue the governess, the bad guys separate the train cars and direct the passengers and the engine onto a small line that runs into the forest. They stop the train and surround the car with armed men. After a failed ruse to get the passengers to disembark, they direct a fusillade at the car. Why are all these people suddenly fighting for their lives in the middle of nowhere, trapped in a rail car, simply because of some old lady?
A pretty woman with her lover, both fleeing spouses, demands that her man use his gun to defend them. He thinks it’s all insane – the only sensible thing is to surrender and explain everything. She grabs his gun and starts firing. The two Brits rise to the occasion, without visible emotion of course, and turn out to be crack shots. One grabs the pretty lady’s gun saying, “I’ll put it to better use,” and proceeds to pick off the attackers. With each shot, the woman starts with fear while he, surveying the situation, calmly remarks, “I’m sure that there’s a rational –bang!- explanation – bang! – for all of this.” Indeed there is.
Happily returned to London, the playgirl abandons her gold-digging fiancé and surrenders to the ill mannered, but charming music man in an embrace that is not what I expect from a Hitchcock film
Lots of commentaries on Fellini’s 1960 film, La Dolce Vita, make much of the fact that it contains many allusions to Dante. Is this surprising, that an Italian artist should do this? No more than that an English speaking writer would quote Shakespeare or the King James Bible.
A long film, a rich film, a simple story. A man searching for…a way out of the shallowness, ennui, and spiritual desolation of his life. A beautiful woman loves him, but maybe she’s the wrong one for him. She would need a little more sophistication to wrestle him to the ground, so he grinds her up and spits her out. He is disgusted by his “friends,” but who else does he have? The man he seems to admire commits a grisly suicide. His father? He hardly knows him, and genuine article that he is, he has a few of his own illusions to deal with. Maybe Marcello is just too handsome for his own good.
At the end, he encounters again the beautiful young girl from a little cafe he met earlier. A profile like an angel. She beckons to him, but he can’t hear her across the waves. He goes back to his degenerate orgiasts who are leaving the beach where they were gawking at an enormous “sea monster” the fishermen brought in. Might there be a shred of hope left for him?
The most famous sequence features Anita Ekberg and the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Another beckoning blonde, but his is no angel from an Umbrian frescoe. It’s a Swedish-American pagan goddessoffering erotic transcendence. At least until the municipal authorities turn off the fountain’s water supply…
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.
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.
Another Bunuel film: this one about a group of upper class (bourgeois) in Mexico City who come to a dinner party and can’t ever leave. They can’t leave the room – can’t step over the threshold to the next one where the front door is visible. Nor can anyone outside come in and get them. Nobody knows why.
Not all that unlike those discretely charming ones I was watching last week. They too are immobilized, in time, in the world, in their little world, and undone by dinner parties. As Bunuel said in the interview printed in the pamphlet that came with the Criterion Collection DVD, “I am a man of obsessions.”
While the guests are “trapped” in the parlor, they slowly descend towards savagery. The idiotic and not so idiotic pretensions of their upper crust culture fall away and are replaced by despair, hunger, the desire to find a sacrificial victim, and rank disgust with one another. Not a new theme, not a deep theme, but a good theme! And treated with humor and biting sarcasm by LB. Of course, lots of strange, inexplicable images too, like why did that guy tie a blindfold on a sheep that got into the room?
One other thing about the interview that struck me was that the critics often presented rather involved or esoteric interpretations of things in the film, asking for a “Yes, that’s it“, or a”No” from Bunuel. Most of the time it was a “no.” We are so eager to explain, or have explained to us the weird or the mysterious. Especially from artists, whom we assume must know what they mean and have a clear message (even if it’s a clunky Cold War political allegory that seems utterly incredible – one explanation of the bear’s antics in the adjoining room – he represents the USSR threatening the bourgeoisie!) More often than not, Bunuel said something like, “Well, I just wanted a strange image,” or “it just happened that way, and I really liked how it looked.”
This film came to my attention on reading the obituary of Karl Malden – it got his career off on its very long run. Elia Kazan directed, Carol Baker and Eli Wallach starred as well. Tennessee Williams provided the story of corruption, repressed, seething sexuality, vengeance, race relations, and a whole lotta other stuff.
Some discuss this film as a comedy, a campy masterpiece, but I see it as much more than that. It’s a finely wrought drama about three strong, conflicting characters in a moral quagmire. It has humor, but it’s kind of sad.
Archie Lee is married to Baby Doll – her daddy wanted to provide for her as he was dying. She wasn’t ready for marriage, so he extracted a promise from Archie not to touch her until her twentieth birthday. She sleeps in the nursery, in her old crib, in a broken down plantation mansion that Archie Lee bought to convince her daddy he was coming up in the world.
Archie’s plans to expand his business and restore the house fall victim to Mr. Vacarro, a recent arrival who bought up some old farms and cottin gin mills and cornered all the local business, including Archie’s. He’s not well liked, but he is respected for his business acumen. During a party he throws for the community to try and smooth over hard feelings, Archie, the only local planter not attending, torches his mill.
Vacarro vows to get his own justice. He contracts with Archie to gin his cotton, and then moves in on his “wife.” Does he want to sexually possess her, or just get her support for a legal action against Archie? In the end, he does both, but he doesn’t “touch” her either. He knows she’s “just a child” and he has some decency – but there is, as he admits to Archie when insisting that he “took nothing else from her,” an attraction between them.
All the actors do a wonderful job, but Carol Baker, in her first big role, is remarkable. Malden is great, and a figure of pathetic fun, but she and Wallach are amazing in their sexual pas de deux. Much of the humor in their exhanges comes from her ridiculous affectations of proprietry, despite her obvious, wilting fascination with Mr. Vacarro. When he offers her a pecan nut he cracked with his teeth, she demurs, “Oh, Mr. Vacarro. I could never accept a nut that had been in a man’s mouth.” He replies, “You’ve got many refinements.”
Baker’s career was rocky, and she eventually left Hollywood for Italy. Before she left, her second husband fashioned her into blonde bombshell sex symbol, and she starred as Jean Harlow.
Some clips of my favorite scenes are linked below:
Odessa, USSR, c. 1929 as shown to us by Dziga Vertov. Another movie so famous, I’ve been hearing about it forever, and I finally watched it. I expected a socialist agit-prop documentary film, mixed with self-conscious avante garde sensibility, but I found a dizzying and exuberant – and self-consciously avante garde - portrait of the people of the USSR.
The film uses just about every special effect available at the time: freeze frames (I immediately thought of 2001, the final trip to Jupiter), split screens, double exposure, time-lapse photography, stop-action animation, slow motion, fast motion, unusual angles, and lots of clever editing.
I was struck by the playful self-referential nature of it all: The man with the camera who is everywhere, recording all of Soviet life (supposedly in candid takes, despite the enormous machine he lugs around) but he himself is recorded. We see him, walking around with his machine and setting up. We see him, on a motorcycle, racing around a track with a camera mounted on the handlebars filming the scenes we were shown just before and will see just after…and then we see a theatre, full of people, seeing the film that we are seeing! Don Quixote complaining about the stories he’s been reading about himself couldn’t do it better.
The film shows the Soviet man and woman at work, in factories and mines. (In one crazy scene, our camera man is wedged into a narrow mining passageway filming a worker…but who is filming him?) Most of the film, to my surprise and delight, is about life of the everyday. Women having their hair done, athletic events, people drinking at a bar (and the camera man rises right out of their beer mug!), giving birth, watching horses, riding motor bikes, traffic in the city, playing chess (with some nice reverse footage of a board magically setting up from a pile of chess pieces) and listening to the radio.
This last scene comes a minute or so after a picture of Lenin is viewed on the outside of a worker’s club. The only image of him I noticed in the whole film! Stalin?? None. How did this guy survive the 30’s and 40’s unscathed? (He died of cancer in the 50’s.)
A favorite passage of mine shows children, then freeze frames of their faces, sewing machines, a woman at a workbench editing film, the film we are seeing. She stitches the images together like a seamstress.
Some stills from throughout the film – click the images for enlargements:
If… , a film by Lindsay Anderson that introduced Malcolm McDowell to the world in 1968. The tale of a an oppressive English public, i.e., private school, and the violent rebellion it engenders, or does it? One of those films I’ve heard about for years, and finally saw. A film that is often referred to with terms like iconic of the 60’s.
In the lengthy notes with the Criterion DVD, Lindsay Anderson says that he didn’t intend this film to be like those other works of the 40’s and 50’s in which middle-class Englishmen reveal just how frightfully awful their childhood experiences in school were (cf. George Orwell and Roald Dahl). Well, that’s exactly how it appeared to me! McDowell comments that Anderson was a celibate homosexual – he never came out – so perhaps he was repressing more than his erotic urges.
The film is rather long, and nearly all of it is about the brutality, indignity and stupidity of the school social life, in which new boys are “scums” to be ordered around as slaves by upper-classmen, and a few “whips” rule the student body like dictatorial dandies, using the cane and other punishments to keep everyone in line. All of this is tacitly accepted by the school masters: no doubt they were brought up the same way. It’s all rather boring.
Still, I couldn’t get the film out of my head. Mostly it’s McDowell, as Travis, who is weird, confused, but basically humane, keeping his sanity by hanging out with two like-minded friends. He is the center of the film, with his adolescent glorification of violence and rebellion – pictures of Che and guerilla fighters are pinned up over his bed with the sexy girls – and his superficial praise of war. But what do you expect? He’s just a kid, trapped, by his parents and British society, in this idiotic, destructive system that explicitly glorifies, and trains boys for war.
The film is sometimes realist, sometimes comically satiric. It shifts at random from color to black and white. Dreamlike scenes are interspersed without explanation, e.g. the school mistress walking naked through the boys’ dormitory while they are away.
In the end, Travis and his confederates smoke everyone out of the chapel during an assembly and then open fire on them from a roof. The military men in the crowd return fire. The film ends with a close shot of McDowell gunning away. Shown realistically, the sudden cutaway at the end leaves us concluding it was a dream. “What I would do to these sods if…”
Many have commented on the “political” nature of the film, but I can’t see it. Nobody in it rebels against the system in reality. It’s a story about successful of indoctrination of youth. After all, Anderson himself commented that there is a lot of “affection” for the school in it.
The hangman of the film’s title is Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s top men, No. 2 in the SS, put in charge of the occupied city of Prague. He was killed by a British commando team in 1942, and the Germans shot 1600 people and destroyed Lidice in retaliation. At the time this movie was made, according to Wikipedia, the actual story wasn’t known, and the film makes it the act of the local resistance movement.
The film was the work of the Expressionist master, Fritz Lang, with Bertolt Brecht and others helping out on the writing. It’s a long film for that time, over two hours, and it’s filled with shadows, menace, brutality, and a bit of Hollywood wartime feel-good sentimental patriotism. Mostly, it’s scary and claustrophobic. It tells a story of the assassin attempting to elude the Nazis, torn by his duty to the underground and the knowledge that the Germans have arrested hundreds of innocent people to shoot in batches until he is discovered.
The Hangman of Prague makes his entrance in the beginning, shown as a strutting peacock and a sadist. At first, I thought I was watching Klink from Hogan’s Heroes. In general, the Gestapo are shown as brutal, sadistic, and full of themselves. We get a close-up of one looking at himself in a mirror while he squeezes a big pimple on his face during a break in his desk work. The depiction of interrogations, though without much explicit violence, is chilling. One old lady is made to stand by a chair that is designed to come apart if she puts her weight on it for relief. The film is filled with sick little details like that.
The most interesting character in the film is Inspector Gruber of the Gestapo played by a well known Jewish character actor of the day. Gruber is a sexual libertine and a heavy drinker. In contrast to many of the Nazi villains who are uptight sadistic militarists, he is earthy and almost casual in his mannerisms, but he is very clever.
Here we see him at work in his office. No uniform, sitting down and giving orders, a modest (venus pudica) nude in the background. He is on a long leather couch. Could this office be the commandeered space of a psychoanalyst?
With business over, Herr Gruber gets down to business with his secretary who was behind the screen.
In Lang’s earlier classic, M, the image of a balloon floating upwards was used to indicate the murder of a child. There is a similar use of images to indicate or punctuate actions in this film, as well as to build character. In this image, Gruber is shown pulling us his socks and tieing his shoelaces – a frequent action for him. It distinguishes him yet again from his fellow Nazis, always so spit-and-polish. Here, he does it front of a naked statue, in a place that doubles as a workplace and a place of sexual indulgence.
On the track of the assassin, Gruber breaks in on a couple in the midst of a tryst, or so it seems. (In fact, the woman is pretending in order to hide a fugitive.) Gruber is not put off by her state of undress – he rather enjoys making her uncomfortable while he thoroughly ransacks the room. He also enjoys the possibility, slim he thinks, that he has simply blundered into an adulterous rendezvous. It’s all the same to him!
Later, Gruber carouses all night with some prostitutes, and forces one of his suspects, the actual fiance of the young woman, to join him. He thinks he can wear him down with drink, women, and jealousy. (The guy isn’t in on what his girl is involved with.) The lipstick on his cheek jogs his memory about a detail in his meeting with the girl and he’s off to get her. He knows she’s involved in the plot!
He finds the real killer of Heydrich, a local surgeon, but the doctor kills him before Gruber can turn him in. Like the balloon floating upwards, his hat, falling to the ground and rolling about under the table on which he is being throttled to death indicates his end. His left foot dangles nearly to the floor, its sock and part of his calf visible. When his body if found in a cellar coal heap, planted there to pin the blame for the assassination on a collaborator, only his calves, shoes and socks are visible.
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.
Posted by lichanos 
Posted by lichanos 
Posted by lichanos 
