Lilith Eternal

First there was the novel, Nightmare Alley, now available in a new printing from the NYRB.  Then the film, with Helen Walker playing Lilith Ritter, the female psychiatrist with ice water in her veins.  She sucks the life out of Stanton Carlisle, played by Tyrone Power, and throws away his deflated husk of a body.  He descends back into the muck from which he came and finishes as a geek, biting the heads off chickens for a living. It’s a faithful adaptation of the book.
  
Then there was Lilith, the uptight dominatrix of the TV sitcom Cheers, played by Bebe Neuwirth.  She has to be channelling Helen Walker!

After that, came the comic book adaptation of Nightmare Alley by Spain Rodriguez, published by Fantagraphics.

Lilith has Bebe’s dark hair…

… and is up-front about her needs…  The toe nail painting is a nice noir reference to Scarlett Street, by Fritz Lang.

And finally, we have the nifty neo-noir, Side Effects, in which Catherine Zeta-Jones , as Victoria Seibert, is definitely channelling all of the above.

The Killers

Nothing much to say about The Killers (1946), a Siodmak gem with Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster. This picture tells the whole story. He’s remarkable for his strong masculine appearance joined to an aura of total vulnerability and victimhood.

Kitty Collins looks nice even when she’s not being the fatal woman, or trying not to seem like one.

Big Combo Encore

I just watched The Big Combo (1955) again – one of my favorite film noirs.  (I talked about it earlier in this post).  Fantastic cinematography, and a great cast of characters.  It has a rich trove of noir themes, woven together with subtlety and skill.

One reason I like these old B-movies is that they work within a genre, with familiar situations and themes, and we usually aren’t very surprised by the plot developments. (Do we need surprise to enjoy something?)  We’ve seen it all before; we know how it will all end.  It’s familiar.  The repetition of stories and conclusions accumulates to give the latest one the force of myth.  No self-conscious striving after effect or novelty.  Not that the great ones didn’t innovate, but it was within the limits of the genre.

Cornell Wilde plays Lt. Larry Diamond, a man with a mission.  He wants to rid his town of The Big Combo, but the outfit is really just one single man, Mr. Brown.  He’s obsessed with Brown, a cold, murderous accountant turned mob leader (Richard Conte) because Brown has quite a girl – Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), a society chick who’s fallen pretty low down.  Diamond is in love with her, from afar; wants to save her, but she tells him there’s no saving her.  She’s lost in a maze, and all paths lead back to Mr. Brown.

She’s a bit of a masochist, this lady, but Mr. Brown also knows how to keep her satisfied.  Pretty explicit for 1955.

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This Diamond fellow, isn’t so pure either, despite his wish to be the knight to rescue Susan.  In fact, he has a problem with women in general.

While he longs for the cool blonde girl who loves classical music, he keeps his needs in check with Rita, a stripper at a club where he hangs out.  She loves him and will do anything for him, but she just ends up getting filled with lead by two thugs who think they’re knocking off Diamond when they break into his darkened apartment.  She was all dressed up and waiting for a big night with him after work… So, he wants the masochist who won’t have him because she represents something beautiful and pure to him even though she’s as deep in the mud as you can get.  And the girl who loves him with a heart of gold, he treats like a worn out bathrobe to throw away when he’s done with it.

But Susan is otherwise engaged.  Fante and Mingo, Brown’s thugs, always keep an eye on her comings and goings.  At least those two have a loving relationship:  they’d die for one another, but they end up double-crossed by Brown and dying together.  They aren’t effeminate like the flirty thug in Odds Against Tomorrow: their homoerotic bond is thoroughly masculine.  I think the filmmaker uses it to convince us that we really are in the underworld, where such deviant relationships are taken for granted.  Is this retrograde or progressive?  They are totally against the stereotype of homosexuals as weak and unmanly men.

The film makes use of the abuse of hearing aids as an instrument of torture.  Mr. Brown borrows the device from his No. 2 man and shouts and  plays loud music into it to show Diamond who’s boss. (He removes the aid from Mr. No.2′s ears when he kills him.  “I’ll do you a favor; you won’t hear the bullets.”  We see the shooting from the victim’s point of view, without sound.)

“First is first, and second is nobody.”  That’s his slogan, and he has nothing but contempt for Diamond whom he describes as steady, intelligent, and with a hankering for a girl he just can’t have.  A nobody.

Yes, that girl.  She’s at a club when she meets her old piano teacher.  The man is delighted to see her again, and eagerly asks how she is progressing with her music.  She has to break the news to him that she has given it up…such a wasted talent!  She asks him to dance with him while Fante and Mingo look on, making sure there’s no funny business.  Suddenly, she starts to swoon.  “I’ve taken some pills…I think I’m going to die!”  There it is, Sex & Death, Eros & Thanatos.  In her attempted suicide she looks just as she did when Mr. Brown was bringing her to an orgasm.

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Odds Against Tomorrow

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) out of Harry Belafonte’s own production outfit, and directed by Robert Wise, is a late noir with a black man as a lead.  He’s not just a figure in the background: he’s the hinge of the plot.  Not surprising since it’s Harry’s outfit.

The film is a cool heist story, with a smooth jazzy score, and lots of local NYC atmosphere.  Ed Begley plays Burke, a cop gone bad, looking to score a big one so he can live on Easy Street after getting out of the pen.  He’s staked out an upstate bank in New York that looks like an easy target.  Belafonte is Ingram, a nightclub musician with a bad gambling habit and a big, big debt to a polite but violent loan shark.  One of the man’s thugs is an openly gay guy who flirts with Ingram.  As one of the only club women who’s not trying to make time with him says, “That little boy is in big trouble!”

Rounding out the gang of robbers is Robert Ryan as Slater, a WWII veteran who fears getting old and irrelevant.  Shelly Winters stuck by him while he was in stir for killing a man in a rage, but he can’t stomach living on her wages; it makes him feel like a little boy.  Meanwhile, Gloria Grahame plays the weirdo downstairs who just wants to feel her skin crawl as Slater tells her “how he felt when he did it.”  Slater obliges, and makes her feel a whole lot more…

Slater is an out-and-out racist, and Burke has to hold him in line to keep the heist on track.  His bigoted comments are pretty raw for a 1959 film, and his sarcastic filth keeps the tension high.  When they are setting up the job in the small Hudson Valley town of Melton, NY, Ingram has the bad luck to be standing at the corner when there is a car accident.  A cop stops him and asks if he saw anything.  Later, the three men, all nervous, discuss their plan, and Ingram is afraid the cop might have gotten too good of a look at him.  Slater says, “Don’t flatter yourself, Ingram.  You’re just another black spot in Melton, even if you do wear $20 shoes.”

In the heat of the job, Slater loses control and refuses to give the getaway car keys to Ingram.  Because of this, a cop catches them, and a gunfight ensures.  Burke shoots himself after being downed: he won’t endure another stay in the joint.

Slater and Ingram start fighting with each other:  of course Ingram blames Slater for the debacle.  They race off in the night with the police in pursuit.  Ingram chases Slater into an industrial farm with big fuel tanks that is shown in an eerie light that makes it look like a Charles Sheeler realist Precisionist from the 1930s.  There are lots of odd zoom shots as the men run around, and scale ladders trying to get a shot at one another.  Finally, they face off, and va va va voom!  The whole place blows up.

A sardonic conclusion makes the racial equality point again when the clean up workers examine the charred corpses and remark that you can’t tell one from another.

How real is real?

Bart: … It’s just that everything’s going so fast. It’s all in such high gear, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like me. Does that make sense?
Laurie:  When do you think all this?
Nights. I wake up sometimes. It’s as if none of it really happened, as if nothing were real anymore.
Next time you wake up, Bart, look over at me lying there beside you. I’m yours, and I’m real.
Yes, but you’re the only thing that is, Laurie. The rest is a nightmare.

Those crazy kids from Gun Crazy (1949).

She only shoots people when she gets really scared, but I think she likes it more than she says.

Va va va voom!

Angel Face must be added to my list of film noirs featuring ladies with black hair, big eyes, who are out of their minds.  Robert Mitchum, cool, but not so smart, and Jean Simmons (she ain’t doin’ Shakespeare here) weirdly magnetic, do a pas de deux that ends up in reverse.  Not a very compelling storyline, but as the critics all say, Otto Preminger does it very well.  You can’t get that final acceleration out of your mind. 

Everything in their relationship is centered around this sports roadster and the throaty roar of its engine:  their meetings; their lovemaking; their future; his past; and the denouement.

Big Eyes, Black Hair, and Out of Her Mind

This is a post about one film, Where Danger Lives (1950), and by extension, all those  femme fatale sisters to Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue) that prey on weak, flawed, emotionally impotent young men.  Oh, and they’re nuts too.  I am thinking of  Ann Savage in Detour, Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and Ann Byth as Veda, the helium voiced neurotic daughter of Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford).

Where Danger Lives was directed by John Farrow, married to Maureen O’Sullivan, who has a small and awful part in the flick, and father to Mia.  The story seems too slow at times, and it almost veers into comedy on a few bits.  What stays with you is Margo’s character, her looks,  and the fantastic scenes with noirish lighting.

Robert Mitchum is Dr. Jeff Cameron, a fine young man who lives to help his patients.  The film starts with his tender ministering to a girl in an iron lung, and a young boy with a neck brace.  His girlfriend Julie (Sullivan) helps, and looks on approvingly. We hardly see her out of her mask.  A young woman is rushed in, an attempted suicide, and Cameron is put on the case.  The big hunk saves the helpless beauty’s life, but who is the strong one?

As she wakes from her stupor, Margo notices the big handsome guy taking her pulse, and she  instantly takes his, so to speak. Clasping his hand, she whispers sultry nonsense while nurse Julie gives Cameron the eye.  She takes off for home before Doc can look in on her next morning, and sends him a telegram, begging him to visit her:  she owes him an explanation.

That cat on the doorstep will be important later on…and not in a good way.  She looks healthy enough; so much so, Cameron forgets all about Julie.    Still, for the moment, he’s just being the doctor, trying to make sure she doesn’t try to kill herself again.  She’s so weak, needs his protection, his help…

Margo refuses to submit to proper care, so Cameron goes for the phone, and grabs her wrist when she tries to interfere.  You can tell by the look on her face that she’s thrilled to have her arm twisted by him.  ”You’re hurting me!”  She says it like an invitation to sex.  The good doctor still has a few wits about him, and he’s thinking, “What’s with this dame?“

We learn later that Cameron is not, repeat not a psychiatrist, so how could he tell that Margo is totally crazy?  Perhaps her eyes distracted him?  He’s a man who is easily diverted from the straight and narrow, a classic noir type.

Next thing we know, Cameron is walking through a club in a very long tracking shot filled with extras coming and going.

He sees Margo’s back, waiting for him in a booth.  Lots of shots with windows and mirrors in this one.  He bends over behind her to greet her…

She turns, and begins to slip the mink stole from her shoulders…

This action, as the mink drops away, is as close to stripping as you can get without actually doing it.

We learn that they have been seeing each other for a week.  She says her father insists that she leave that night for the Bahamas:  she must obey, or she’ll be cut from his will and have nothing!  He only wants her, of course.  Oh, it’s not to be. After a last kiss, he gets drunk, and gets an idea.

A totally drunk Cameron takes a cab to the house to retrieve Margo.  Claude Rains has one scene in this film, and he makes the most of it.  He’s Frederick Lannington, father…er…the husband of Margo, and he wants to tell Cameron what a “long road” he’ll be going down, with “no turning back,” if he runs off with her.  He sees right through Cameron, saying “her clinging vine act makes you want to protect her.”  Margo pulls out the stops, pretending that he bloodied her by ripping an earring off her.  Cameron responds on cue.

A fight ensues, and Lannington beats Cameron with a poker before he’s knocked out with a fist.  Cameron goes to get some water to revive him, but he’s suffering from a concussion.  He’ll be in and out of lucidity for the rest of the picture, a damaged, weakened male, in thrall to la belle dame sans merci.  While Cameron’s out of the room, Margo finishes off  hubby with a pillow

Only in his concussed and lust-besotted state would an intelligent doctor with a thing for helpless people listen to Margo’s pleas and decide to flee with her to the Bahamas.  She’s convinced him that he killed Lannington with his punch, accidentally, of course.

Their escape has several vignettes that border on screwball, and includes a lot of sharp characters and ironic misunderstandings. They flee the airport at the sight of some cops looking for Lannington (Cameron poses as him.) but they are only trying to deliver a bon voyage message.  Later, they narrowly avoid a police blockade, supposedly set up to catch them, but it’s just the agriculture department looking for contraband vegetable imports. They end up in a scruffy border town where they are ‘arrested’ by a bunch of cowboy types who inform them that because they are not wearing whiskers, they must make a donation to the local fire department…or get married.  They choose the latter.

Things don’t go well when they share a room.  Margo rips the power cord out of the radio:  she doesn’t want Jeff to hear the news – he’ll learn that she has a long history of hospitalization for mental illness.  She doesn’t like to be pitied!

When they finally make it to a seedy border town, they are tricked into giving up their last valuables to pay to be smuggled across the border.  Jeff begins to have his doubts, about her, and about whether he’ll survive his head injury.

He tries to talk sense to her after she finally admits that she killed Lannington.  He’s too weak to restrain her as she follows her own ideas, and decides to smother him the way she did hubby.

Margo thinks Jeff is dead, and she goes out to cross the border on her own.  She didn’t do the job right, though, and he follows her. She shoots at him, and is shot by the police.  Cameron gazes pitiably at her dying figure while the cops say he’s the accomplice.

Ha!  A final dollop of scorn from the dangerous woman as she informs the police that he could never kill anyone!  Didn’t even have the sense to know that she had done it!  (Ah…Jeff is in the clear now!)  No way he could ever have given her what she wanted, what she needed.  She loathes him. “Nobody pities me!“  She dies…

Steve recovers from his concussion, and in the last scene, Julie returns to him.  Uh…why?  Because somebody said they needed a happy ending.

I never posted about Mildred Pierce, so here are two images of Veda the Destroyer in all her glory.

Click for the action!

Miss Lonelyhearts

Nathanael West, born Wallenstein in NYC, died in a car crash in El Centro, CA, buried in Queens.  Two novels make his name:  Miss Lonelyhearts, the story of soul tortured by religion and self-contempt in 1930s Los Angeles, making his living ‘writing’ an advice column; and The Day of the Locust, a harrowing story of degradation and violence in Hollywood.  Both are great, but Locust is far the best of the two, I think. 

Funny, I don’t read West’s name in association with noir, but then, he is way beyond noir into his own vortex of human tragedy.  Noir is too ironic and entertaining for real tragedy, I think…

Story goes that he ran a stop sign and died in a crash, his wife died too, when he heard on the radio that his good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald was dead.  In El Centro of all places, and one that I actually visited.

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.