The Crooked Way (1949), with John Payne was surprisingly good, and it’s available on Youtube. Camerawork by John Alton gives it that heavy noir atmosphere that carries it through the weak places in the plot. Another army vet with a piece of metal in his brain who has no past, at least until it catches up with him in L.A. It struck me as a precursor to Memento, as I watched Eddie Rice/Ricardi grope through the present in search of his identity, constantly trying to figure how he should respond to the people who know Eddie, but are strangers to him. The film is quite brutal for its day, something that upset a lot of critics:
The Crooked Way races along as a melodrama should and it has more than enough plot to keep its hard-working actors going from one dangerous situation to another. But there is so much pointless brutality in it that one may seriously question whether the movie people are wise to go on with the making of such pictures. The human family may not be perfect, but why subject it to so-called entertainment that is only fit for savage beasts.”
Coming from Bosley Crowther of the NYTimes, this is a sort of back-handed compliment. Of course, he got the boot when he panned “Bonnie and Clyde;” too out of touch with the new sensibility, but the question does linger. Why, indeed?
No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)The Story of Temple Drake (1933)The Grissom Gang (1971)
When I first read No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) by James Hadley Chase, I had no idea what I was in for. After all, this is the crime novel that set George Orwell back on his heels, as he described in his famous essay of 1944, “Raffles and Miss Blandish.“
So much for Raffles. Now for a header into the cesspool. No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase, was published in 1939…
Several other points need noticing before one can grasp the full implications of this book. To begin with, its central story bears a very marked resemblance to William Faulkner’s novel, Sanctuary. Secondly, it is not, as one might expect, the product of an illiterate hack, but a brilliant piece of writing, with hardly a wasted word or a jarring note anywhere...
…The book contains eight full-dress murders, an unassessable number of casual killings and woundings, an exhumation (with a careful reminder of the stench), the flogging of Miss Blandish, the torture of another woman with red-hot cigarette-ends, a strip-tease act, a third-degree scene of unheard-of cruelty and much else of the same kind. It assumes great sexual sophistication in its readers (there is a scene, for instance, in which a gangster, presumably of masochistic tendency, has an orgasm in the moment of being knifed), and it takes for granted the most complete corruption and self-seeking as the norm of human behaviour.
I read the Orwell piece years ago, before I encountered Mr. Chase (whose real name is René Lodge Brabazon Raymond), so I read it over again after reading the novel and was puzzled by some of his remarks. A gangster has an orgasm before being knifed? I didn’t read that in the book. Did Orwell read the book, or just go on what he had heard about it? That was before I found out about the complicated publishing history of the novel, detailed in this exhaustive blog post. The violence and sex in the book caused such an uproar that subsequent editions toned down some of it, but Orwell knew only the Ur text. Chase himself, in the early sixties, revised the text to make it seem less dated, so there is a scene in which the gangsters sit watching large television sets, and another in which police helicopters take part in a rescue…while everything else is circa 1935! Getting a hold of that original edition is an expensive proposition, but I’m on the case! I’d also like to know the source of the title, but I’ll get back to that.
The central theme of the story is the rape/abduction of a young woman by disreputable thugs. The rape theme is ancient, of course. The word used to refer to forcible abduction, for purposes of gaining wives, concubines, or slaves, not the violent act of sexual assault, which may have followed the taking, of course. We have the Sabine women being raped, Zeus raping Europa,
Abduction of the Sabine Women – Nicolas Poussin
innumerable other seduction/rapes of women by Zeus, and perhaps most relevant, the abduction/rape of Persephone by Hades. For it is into a modern mythical/realistic underworld that Temple Drake and Miss Blandish are dumped.
Sanctuary (1931) by William Faulkner, is built around the stuck up, superficial flirt, Temple Drake, who finds herself abandoned to the desires of Popeye, a sickly, impotent, psycho, and his family of half-wits, booze runners, and semi-human beasts. Faulkner later claimed he wrote it for money, and quickly, and the first draft was rejected by his publisher as too indecent. He thought better of it soon after, but then Faulkner went to work again on the text: Today, it is possible to read the original text as well as the published version, shades of James Hadley Chase and Miss Blandish.
The book was praised by some, but for most, it was a moral outrage to be denounced and banned. However discreet and indirect Faulkner was in his prose, Temple is in fact raped by the impotent Popeye with a corn cob, a rather disturbing image when all is said and done.
I think the theme of Popeye’s rape of Temple is echoed in the 1944 stupendous film noir, “Laura,” when Waldo Lydecker, gay or impotent, not sure which, tries a symbolic rape murder of Laura with a shotgun, but she’s too quick for him.
Whatever else he may have had in mind while he was writing it, the book does blow the lid off many aspects of Southern “gentility,” social hypocrisy, the criminal justice system, and maybe the whole idea of civilization itself, a pretty neat trick for any novel.
The novel has been adapted for the movies several times, but the most famous, or notorious I should say, since it is not well known, is the first, “The Story of Temple Drake” (1933), with a sensational Miriam Hopkins playing the flirty, clueless, seductive and stupid Temple who falls into the world of a bunch of backwoods bootleggers dominated by a slick city gangster named Trigger. This film has brilliant, dark, expressionistic cinematography, and the rape scene by Trigger, standing in for the Popeye half-wit,is truncated with a scream, but the lead-in makes clear what is going on. Corn cobs are all around to clue in those literate enough to have read the original text. Hopkins said, “...if you can call a rape artistically done, it was,” but art or not, the film led to the Hays Code having real teeth so that subsequent films dared not go where Temple had gone. Linking all this together, Trigger was played by Jack La Rue, who reappears in the Miss Blandish film as the murderous Slim.
Miriam Hopkins as Temple awaiting her fate
Jack La Rue as Trigger
At the conclusion, Temple is called to testify in the murder trial of an innocent man whom she can clear if she reveals her dishonored state. After a struggle, she does so, and faints dead away. Faulkner’s Temple perjured herself, leading the innocent man to be lynched.
Fourteen years separate the Temple Drake/Hopkins film from the Miss Blandish/La Rue film, and in between, there was the super best seller, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a reworking of the Sanctuary story line. This was Chase’s very first novel, and though he was a Brit, he set it in America. That was part of what got Orwell seething; the importation of American low-class vulgarity into the British cultural landscape, but they loved it! The novel completes the transformation of the abductors from a community of backwoods low lifes to an urban crime gang, this time lead by a murderous woman, perhaps inspired by Ma Barker.
Early paperback, original text? (1941)
First American paperback, revised text
Different title, revised text
Another later paperback edition
In Chase’s story, some small-time hoods get wind of a roadside club where Miss Blandish (she’s never named, I believe) is going to go out slumming with her beau, while wearing her diamonds worth fifty grand. They catch up with the drunken partyers but the snatch goes bad when the boyfriend plays the chivalrous knight and knocks down a high-strung thug whose response is to beat him to death. Now with a murder rap hanging over them, the hoods run for their hideout, planning to extort a ransom for the girl, kill her, and make their escape. Their plans are derailed when some members of the infinitely more violent and competent Grisson Gang (Grissom in subsequent tellings, and hereafter in this blog) spot them, put two and two together, and trail them to their hideout.
The goings on at the hideout are grim – that’s where the masochistic crook has his pre-knifing orgasm – and the small timers are rubbed out by the Grissom Gang, led by the murderous, psychopathic, and emotionally childlike Slim. They return to their headquarters with the girl and the jewels. Ma, the brains of the outfit, realizes that the authorities have no reason to suspect their involvement; all the evidence leads to the small time thugs, whose bodies have been carefully hidden and the gang murders several inconvenient people who might have information tying them to the kidnapping. Ma executes a ransom collection for several hundred thousand dollars, planning to kill the girl upon receiving it, but Slim has other plans. Despite having never shown an interest in the opposite sex, Miss Blandish’s beauty has led him to an awakening. He wants to be her Beast…forever, whether she wants him or not. Ma is troubled by this new complication – killing the girl is so much simpler – but her murderous son is not to be crossed or the entire gang could be torn apart.
After beating Miss Blandish into submission, Ma instructs her in her new role in life, to please Slim. With the help of drugs administered continually by a former doctor in the gang, Slim has his sex slave. Ma disposes of the hot ransom money at a discount and seizes a local nightclub from its terrified owner, turning it into a “legit” front for their outfit, and raking in the real money. Miss Blandish is kept in a locked chamber where Slim visits her regularly.
All good things must come to an end. A pesky detective working for Mr. Blandish figures out what went down with the jewel snatch and kidnapping, and locates Miss Blandish. The Grissom Gang is expunged in a hail of bullets, but not before taking out a lot of coppers. Miss Blandish is freed, but throws herself out of a window to her death at the first opportunity. Orwell, perhaps speaking as a typical clueless male of his era, says that she had grown so accustomed to Slim’s caresses that she could not live without them, but to me it is obvious that Miss Blandish was psychologically devastated by her months of being raped, and ended her life out of shame and despair.
After WWII, after Orwell had his hissy fit in “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” we get to a film treatment of the novel. The film is British, and most of the actors in it are as well, and they sound it too, despite that the film is set in the United States. Jack La Rue, the only American actor in the film, casts off Trigger to reappear as Slim, transformed into a slick urban gang leader in the prohibition era USA. Instead of playing with switchblades, he works out his inner demons by endlessly throwing a pair of black dice. In fact, “Black Dice” was considered as a possible name for the film, and it is the name the gang gives to the club they take over. But we are in a different moral universe with this film, derived from a successful stage treatment of the book, and one far removed from Faulkner and James Hadley Chase.
Yes, the Grissom Gang trails the small timers to their lair, there is a gunfight, and the gang takes possession of the jewels and the girl, but these two are already connected. The movie opened with Miss Blandish in the lap of society luxury, receiving yet another enormous vase of orchids in celebration of her engagement, but this one has for a card only a note with two black dice and the words, “Don’t do it!” She tells the servant to send them back. “There will be no orchids for Miss Blandish today.” The title of the novel is never explained in the text: I take it to be an ironic existential comment on her fate.
Linden Travers as Miss Blandish
Ma Grissom
Slim’s gang catches up with the small-timers
Miss Blandish at home in a different sort of society
Once Miss Blandish overcomes her shock at being abducted, she calms down and eventually realizes that Slim was the source of the orchids urging her to not get married. And now they are together! How exciting! She feels alive, truly alive for the first time after a stifling existence among the upper crust. Slim is not the deviant half-wit of the source texts, but a smooth operator, attractive, seductive, a bit violent at times, but wonderful to be with. In one scene, Miss Blandish says, “Oh, I know you’ve killed people. You’re cold, you’re hard, you’re ruthless — but …” All in self-defense: they embrace rapturously. Their lips crunch together in a heavy kiss that set a record for duration at that time in cinema. The end comes in the same way – slick or not, they are gangsters – and Miss Blandish kills herself, this time, for precisely the reason Orwell suggested: She cannot bear to return to society life and be without Slim’s caresses. I wonder if Orwell would have enjoyed seeing his misinterpretation of the novel’s text used to conclude what a number of critics have called the worst movie ever made?
At last, we come to “The Grissom Gang” (1971) by Robert Aldrich. (More than fifty years ago! Time for a remake?) We’re back in the USA, Depression Era, but the film is in painfully full color. Everyone sweats, a lot. Ma and her gang mean business, and Slim is back to being a sadistic, emotionally stunted mama’s boy, but he is humanized, a bit. The book’s plot has been snipped here and there to streamline the story, but the brutality of the gang is dark as the night. Mr. Blandish, payer of the ransom, is played by the Aldrich stalwart, Wesley Addy, and is given a truly nasty character more in keeping with the world of Sanctuary than Miss Blandish: He’d rather his daughter be retrieved dead than alive and thoroughly soiled by the ordeal.
Slim and Miss Blandish
Ma preparing for the end
Sweaty and angry Miss Blandish
Daddy Blandish reunited with daughter
Ma and the gang have died in a blaze of gunfire – Ma enjoying every minute of it – and Slim is trapped with Miss Blandish in a barn surrounded by the cops. He declares his love for her; after all, if not for him, Ma would have bumped her off long ago. But he does truly love her in whatever simple and twisted fashion is possible for him, and now it’s time for her to return to her home, so there’s nothing in the world for him but to go out and face the bullets and die. Miss Blandish, who has never become hardened to the killing around her during her ordeal, begs him not to go. “Don’t die for me Slim. I’m not worth it.” She realizes that Slim’s wretched love is the only love she has ever had, and she is grateful for it. But he does go, and he is shot to pieces.
Miss Blandish mourns her abductor, rapist, and worshipper
After gazing on Slim’s corpse for a few moments, Miss Blandish is confronted by her father who is clearly disgusted to see her in such a state. She tries to explain: “I was just trying to stay alive. He loved me…” Dad doesn’t understand. He stalks off, telling her that Mr. Fenner, the detective who cracked the case, will see to her. The final scene shows the two of them driving off in a car, she looks back at the barn, bewildered. They’re off to that hotel Fenner has arranged for her, away from the prying press. Will she jump out of the window as she did in the book? Aldrich doesn’t tell, but it certainly seems a good bet.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers: A shot to the gut in a Coketown liebstod, but there was no Wagner playing.
Star Trek: What are Little Girls Made Of? Another shot to the gut, no music, but the same lovers clutch ending in murder. No suicide though. Oh, and she’s an android.
Double Indemnity: Neff plugs Phyllis. “Goodbye, Baby.” Barbara Stanwyck again. No Wagner here, although his Prelude to the Liebstod was playing in the scene when Neff takes Phyllis’ stepdaughter, Lola, to the hills behind the Hollywood Bowl. Neff would have made it to Mexico except that he couldn’t resist coming clean to the dictaphone in Keyes’ office. The old urge to confess did him in.
Watching Star Trek is always an exercise in déjà vu, because I was nine years old when it premiered, and because just about everything in it is borrowed from something else. Maybe the borrowings are on purpose, maybe they are just accidental in the sense that some themes are always “in the air” at certain times, but the shows are always a bricolage of themes and images. Part of the fun…
In this episode from the first season, Kirk is trapped on a planet with a lost scientist who has transformed himself into an android to preserve his mind when his body was dying of frostbite. (Mind-body issues run rampant through Star Trek). It takes a while for the doctor’s true nature to come out, but he is surrounded by androids he has constructed as part of his insane scheme to overrun the universe with superior beings, you know the drill. Andrea is one of them, clearly designed for more than protection and conquest, much to the chagrin of the doctor’s erstwhile fiancee who has joined Kirk on his search for the missing scientific hero.
Ruk, an android surviving from the old days of the planet, looks like he escaped from a local production of Pagliacci, is played by Ted Cassidy, aka Lurch, who, it happens, lived just a few minutes from where I was growing up in Woodland Hills, and whose ashes (he died prematurely) are scattered in the house’s back yard. He is easily befuddled and tricked by Kirk’s superior logical wit.
Kirk on the run, after flummoxing Ruk, makes use of a handy phallic formation for protection. You have to wonder if he’s just playing hard to get. The episode is filled with “transgressive” same-sex kissing and fondling, as is the norm for Star Trek’s intrepid exploration of racial and sexual taboos.
The android love nest gets to be too much for Andrea, who “loves” her maker, and who can’t abide rejection. Another correspondence: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers comes to mind.
Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas (hey, another correspondence!) are locked in their love-death embrace in the finale.
Not exactly clear who pulls the trigger, but it’s curtains for the two of them, the only way it could be.
A final correspondence: As Captain Kirk is being duplicated into an android Kirk, he shouts out an insulting phrase about Dr. Spock being a half-breed, knowing that the android will then repeat the sentiments when he is sent to the Enterprise to impersonate himself. Of course, Spock, receiving the insult, realizes that the “Captain” is an imposter, and takes proper action. It’s all reminiscent of the “Rolo Tomassi” sequence in L.A. Confidential, the best part of that flick, I think.
Netflix classified The Lineup (1958) as a film noir, which it most certainly is not, but it’s pretty dark nonetheless, and a crackerjack crime film that I thoroughly enjoyed. Great location shots in San Francisco, an excellent high-speed chase long before McQueen did Bullit, a full rogues gallery of outlaw characters, and some great dialog: just hold on through the pretty dull first thirty minutes of police procedural until Eli Wallach, as hit-man Dancer, makes his entrance, and enjoy the ride.
It’s called The Lineup, because it’s based on a TV show that ran in the early fifties under that name. The episode with an actual lineup is quite a small part of the story. The film is an expanded treatment of one story from the series, and it’s directed by Don Siegel. One of the posters for the film says, “Too hot for TV!”
Before the credits role, we are in the action as a porter rips off a passenger’s bag, and throws it into a cab which then races away. As they say, a chase ensues, and the cabbie, after running down a cop who dies later, is hit by a lucky shot. The luggage contains a statuette stuffed with high-grade heroin, part of a shipment run by a secretive outfit headed by The Man. The Man thinks things out thoroughly, and he foists junk on unwitting overseas tourists who work as his mules without their knowledge. Once they reach the States, the gang gathers up their souvenirs in whatever way they must.
Here, the police do their work methodically, checking in with the head of customs, whom the Lt. initially blames for the cop’s death. After all, why didn’t they catch that heroin in the statue? The customs man shows a map and calmly explains that there is just too much territory, too many ships for him to handle. Pretty routine stuff, but I like the guy on the left, although I could not find his name.
Our first glimpse of the bad guys, Robert Keith as Julian, and Eli Wallach as Dancer. Julian is Dancer’s handler, coaching him on ‘delivery’ verbal and ballistic. He wants Dancer to improve his grammar so as to be able to move more easily among his victims. Their first dialog is a discussion of the subjunctive. Dancer is incredulous that anyone would say, “If I were…,” rather than “If I was…” He’s not alone, but Julian is firm with him. After the fiasco with the cabbie, The Man brought them in to clean up things.
Julian knows that Dancer is a cold-blooded psychopath, filled with hate. he says as much to another gang member. Dancer later reveals that like everyone else, he had an old man once, except that he never knew him. Is Julian his father-figure, or is there a homo-erotic attachment here..?
Sandy is “their boy,” designated driver, except that he has a liking for drink. Julian slaps his bottle to the ground, and calls him “Dipso” from then on. But Sandy has a souped-up auto, and he can drive it, fast!
The three get to know one another on their way to get initial instructions on who the marks are they have to see to retrieve the smack. The information session is placed down by the docks.
I love the way Siegel took advantage of the location to add this bit of action: as the car drives up, the boat is pulling out to sea.
One of many nice SF shots, as Dancer gets his info – he never writes anything down – from the contact.
The one to see is a seaman on the boat who was given a hollowed out antique horse. They are told to find him in the steamroom in the Seaman’s Club. Two guys in a locker room…wearing hats. Dancer is convinced that this whole job is going to be a sticky one because the first shipment went awry, while Julian insists, no, it’s going to be an easy one. All done by 4:30pm.
Dancer undresses to go meet the man, and Julian offers to fold his clothes. He tells him “Go easy…,” but the contact figured out that he was being used as a mule, so he asks for a few grand to make it worth his trouble. Did they think he would believe that line about just carrying some art to a friend in the city for a favor? Big mistake for them, and for him too.
Meanwhile, the police trudge on…
…while Dancer explains the facts of life to the upstart seaman. He does it silently, shall we say. Their driver asks if he really had to kill the guy, and Julian responds, “When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” Bob Dylan may have taken note.
Next up, a set of fancy cutlery with powder stowed in the ivory handles needs to be repossessed from a rich pillar of society. The butler is not comfortable with the story of an accidental mix up of shipments. Dancer tries to talk his way out using his newly acquired gift for upper-class gab, but is not successful…
Get your hands off that silverware!
The butler runs to call the man of the house, but Dancer nails him. It looks as if he’s shooting wild until you realize that you only see the butler in a mirror on the wall.
Time to get out of there, and another SF location shot…
The final mark is a woman who was on the boat with her daughter: the stuff is stashed in the kid’s doll. They catch up with them at the aquarium. That Julian, he must love kids!
Dancer does a fine job at trying, but not too hard, to pick up the woman. She has a sad story about hoping that her divorced husband would have the decency to meet them at the dock to see his little girl, but no dice. He’s lonely too… He’s pretty convincing. Good enough to get her to an accept an offer of a drive with his friends to her hotel so she doesn’t have to bother with all those packages.
Once in the room, when mom leaves for a moment, they go for the doll, not the kind you carry around all the time. The stuff isn’t there, and under threat of death for her mom, the kid reveals that she found the powder and used it to freshen up the doll’s face! “That’s the most expensive face powder you could have used, kid.”
Well, all the veils have fallen. “Get out, now!”
Julian does not like being told what to do by a woman, no sirree bob!
But he’s not about to let the enraged Dancer finish the conversation by shooting the two females, although that’s what Dancer is set to do. Interesting logic here, and strangely compelling: The Man is going to be mightily upset at getting a short shipment, and will likely conclude that Dancer and Julian did a little business of their own on the side. That will not be good for the duo, who will be dead in short order, so Julian concludes that they must force the ladies to go with them, to meet The Man, so that he will see that their explanation, which would be hard to believe, don’t ya’ think, is for real. It’s their only chance.
So they all drive to the coast, to Sutro’s Maritime Museum, all that’s left of the legendary Sutro’s Baths, an early 20th century amusement center, and another great SF location. Julian waits in the car with the ladies while Dancer goes in to meet The Man. He is repelled by their weakness, and explains “that is why there are so few women in the crime world. You just don’t understand the criminal’s need for violence.” He’s very thoughtful…
Meanwhile, The Man doesn’t find his package, but sees Dancer watching him.
Dancer sees that he sees him, and goes over to make the drop, a bit short, it’s true, and to explain the situation.
The Man doesn’t care for explanations. “You’re dead,” he says. “Nobody sees me. You’re on borrowed time now.”
His last words – Julian likes to record the last words of their victims in a little book he carries – are “Get out!” Then he slaps Dancer hard.
Dancer won’t take that crap. He pushes him off the ledge onto the rink below. It’s a great scene.
Sandy is a driving kind of man, and his skills are now in demand since the cops have finally caught up with the three crooks.
The pursuit scenes through the streets of SF are surprisingly effective given that they were all done in a studio in front of a projection screen.
Sandy can drive, but he doesn’t always go the right way. They end up at an elevated dead end on a freeway under construction. Love that!
Dancer is not impressed. “Get us out of here if you want to live!”
Sandy does a quick turn, and complies…
…but he gets caught in an off-ramp going nowhere, and can go no further. Dancer conks him over the head; Julian tries to surrender, but Dancer will have none of that!
Put those last words in your little book!
The cops get Dancer, Mom and daughter are okay, and it’s all in a day’s work for these two unexciting guys.
With time, it gets harder to locate those old noir films that are really good: there are a lot of mediocre ones! So, it’s always a pleasure to stumble on a real find – Black Angel (1946)is one. The title doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story – the angels are all blonde – but don’t let that bother you. And it starts with a fantastic shot that takes us up off the street and through the window of luxury apartment way up in the sky, but still down in the dirt, of course.
A beautiful singer is murdered; a man, her ex-lover, is seen leaving the apartment. He is caught and convicted, destined to fry in the chair, but he didn’t do it. Catherine (June Vincent), his beautiful wife, stands by him, even though she knows he was cheating on her. She is the model of middle-class suburban virtue.
Mavis Marlowe, the dead woman, was quite a dish (Constance Dowling), and a real piece of work too. She was blackmailing a few guys, including the one who is fingered for her death. He didn’t want his sweetie to know he had been philandering.
Martin (Dan Duryea), is her husband, obviously estranged. She won’t give him the time of day. They used to be a hit singer/songwriter/piano player team. Catherine enlists Martin in her quest to free her husband, and they present themselves as a nightclub act (she used to sing) to Mr. Marko (Peter Lorre) who might have something to do with Mavis’ death.
Marko is a sleazy guy, and he was being blackmailed by Mavis too. With that face, he must have done it.
He’s no fool, and very suspicious too, but he likes Catherine. Likes her act, which does great, and likes her, a lot. He even saves some champagne to share with her for a “special occasion”. She doesn’t look pleased at what’s coming, but a girl has to do what she can for her hubby on death row, and it might allow her to get into that safe in Marko’s office for some clues. She’s made quite a transformation from Mrs. Homemaker…
There are many plot twists in the story, and the ending is a bit contrived, depending on a convenient alcoholic blackout, but it is tremendously entertaining. All the actors are great. (Once Catherine gets more interesting so does Vincent’s performance). They all have things to hide, and the only one who is a straight-shooter turns out to be the criminal.
Another installment in my highlighting of engineers as characters in cinema:
Phantom Lady (1944), directed by Robert Siodmak, doesn’t seem to be available anywhere but Youtube, so there I watched it, fortunately, on a large screen. The image above shows the phantom lady with the male lead, Alan Curtis as Scott Henderson. He’s just been dumped by his rich wife, who was also carrying on with his best friend.
His wife is found murdered, and Scott is fingered for the crime. He is remarkably passive about it all, but he is saved by his chipper secretary, “Kansas”, played by Ella Raines. (I read her voice was dubbed – couldn’t she do Kansas?) The scene where he throws in the towel after losing his appeal is pure Expressionism.
As noted, Kansas is of stronger stuff, and she tracks down everyone associated with the events of the fatal night, eventually finding the killer in a scene that surely inspired the finale of Jagged Edge many years later. Would you mess with Kansas? She has a remarkable clean, strong look to her.
The reliable Elisha Cook, Jr. came down from his Sierra hideaway to do his bit in the film as a hop-head drummer with the hots for Kansas, all tarted up to gain his confidence. Her legs incite his drumming to an orgasmic crescendo, but she keeps her cool.
Scott Henderson is a civil engineer, with dreams of building cities, dreams that excite the love and admiration of Kansas. (He’s too dull to notice her crush on him.) He wants playgrounds and sunlight everywhere. There we have the civil engineer as hero motif, still with some life in it in the 1940s.
Scott’s nemesis and friend, played by Franchot Tone, is an artist, an artist a bit too preoccupied with the power of his hands to create…and destroy. In a moment of candor, he derides the ambitions of his friend as paltry concerns with sewers and pipes, and whatnot.
Thanks to the savage guy, I have another cinema oddity to savor and comment on – Shack Out on 101 from 1955. Everyone who comments on this film, including me, agrees that it is bizarre. And strangely entertaining, despite the incredible stuff it contains. Most call it a red-scare noir, but I don’t quite see the noir aspects of it, except in a very watered-down state. I can say, however, I know of nothing else like it!
Nearly the entire action takes place in a run down diner on Highway 101 – once again I find myself thinking of the classical dramatic unities! Anything on the beach of southern California gives me a nostalgic tug, but there are precious few outside shots in this film: just a few scenes on the beach, including the opening which is much talked about.
We see a woman in a bathing suit lying in the sun at the surf’s edge; then we see Slob (Lee Marvin), talking into a cellphone…oops, that’s a shell-phone! No, he’s just listening to the sea in a shell, with the coastal bluffs as a backdrop.
Then he swoops onto the woman and kisses her as she violently resists him. It’s all in “fun,” they know each other, and he’s just giving her a major hard time and tease. He runs off laughing as she fumes. When he reaches the porch of the shack where they live and work slinging hash, he takes her underwear off the clothes line and grinds it into the dirt. This will occasion much talk indoors about how he is now obligated to buy her, Kotty, a new petticoat, the meanie!
Slob’s faux assault on Kotty prefigures some brutally real violence between them later on, but for now, the movie moves on between comedy, farce, and absurd Cold War espionage. Slob is part of a spy network, passing on secrets gleaned from fellow travelers at the nuclear research lab up the road. His boss, George (Keenan Wynn) is not part of the ring. Nor is George’s friend Eddie, a traumatized WWII vet who can’t get over his experience on D-Day. The two of them actually have some pretty affecting straight talk about what that’s all about. Through it all, some mighty strange stuff plays out on stage at the beanery.
George and Slob get into comparing their physiques during a work-out.
Marvin is all over the place in this film, really hamming it up at times. Here he reveals to George that what he really desires is a “nice, big neck.”
They go on to comparing their legs, and ask an impartial judgment. Didn’t that sort of thing start a long war in the old days?
Kotty knows better than to pick a winner, and besides, nobody has better legs than she does. That’s that!
George is determined to get Eddie to beat his fears of blood, violence, adventure, and even killing of fish (!) that the war left him with. He’s planning a snorkeling adventure in Mexico which they act out in front of everyone present. Yes, they do look like aliens…
Meanwhile, Kotty has a romance going on with the professor from the nuke lab. At first, it seems that he is in with the spies, but of course, that’s a cover. He tenderly supports Kotty’s ambitions to take a civil service exam so that she can get a desk job in the government doing something important. Boy, have ideas changed!
Being sort of noir, there’s a mirror, a double-identity. And that hand! All the passion of Venus is there!
Cut from the love scene to Slob and his courier in the kitchen. Right after the kiss, the guy shoves a fish at Slob’s mouth.
Here’s where it get’s pretty weird. We are definitely into homo-erotic territory here – look at the grins on their faces as they agree to start up their favorite game…
Nothing these guys enjoy more than a little dance with a rag while they take turns pummeling each other.
About this time, Kotty realizes that something is going on around here. These “truck drivers,” always teasing and coming on to her, have awfully soft hand for working slobs.
Eventually, she has a confrontation with Slob when he realizes his cover is blown. Now the violence is for real. First he threatens her repeatedly with a nasty knife, but she’s tough – she doesn’t blink. Then – incredible! – he throttles her and smashes her head out of the window. Then he starts garroting her with some underwear! After all the kooky stuff in this film, this scene is genuinely shocking.
Of course, the good guys win in the end. You knew that already, right?
Is not each one us a society’s child? Society made Eddie a killer, and then crucified him for it.
You Only Live Once (1937) is the second film by Fritz Lang after he came to America, and a pretty bleak job it is. Yes, I’d call it early noir, but it is also drenched with religious imagery. Henry Fonda plays Eddie Taylor (E. T. – that’s important in the film) and Sylvia Sydney looks gorgeous playing his faithful, too faithful, wife, Jo. He’s a good guy who’s gone wrong, and paid for it. Now, he wants to go straight, Jo waited for him during his three-year stretch in the joint, but society won’t give an ex-con a break. They’re doomed, and you know it.
Jo’s friend is a good-hearted lawyer who gets Eddie a job as a trucker when he’s freed, and he also carries a torch for Jo. In the film, he seems to be a direct mouthpiece for Lang’s views, sometimes lambasting the authorities for their brutishness and prejudice. He hopes for the best for Jo, when she and Eddie tie the knot on his release.
Eddie is a romantic, and of course that will screw him up good, but first he and she have a delightful honeymoon at a cozy motel, which has a lovely garden.
The lovebirds are watched over by two frogs who don’t appear to be mating themselves. At one point in the story, when Jo believes Eddie is on his way to the chair for a crime he did not commit, she sends him a message – “I still remember the frogs.” Only Fritz!
Those impassive guardians of the night watch as Eddie picks her up, kisses her, and mounts the steps to Calvary…oops, I mean their bedroom. It’s a foreshadowing of the final sequence when he carries Jo through the woods, both of them riddled with bullets, to their final rest. Pietas come to mind, as well as the finale ofFarewell to Arms.
Eddie is late on a truck run because he makes a detour to take Jo to look at a house, a real fixer-up-er, that he and Jo can live in now that they are married. Naturally, his boss is not understanding, and he humiliates him with insults when he begs for another chance, telling the boss that his friends tempt him with easy money from safe bank heists, but he wants no more of that. No dice – the boss fires him, after forcing him to wait while he has trivial phone conversations with his wife about social arrangements. “Straight society sucks,” is the message. Eddie delivers a knock-out blow to the boss’ chin and says, “And I wanted to go straight!…”
That scene is the set-up for one of the most outrageous plots twists I can remember, at least of those that work! Eddie appears to have caved in, returned to the life of crime because society just won’t give him a break. Once a con, always a con… He’s arrested for a deadly bank job in which six men died from poison gas used to incapacitate the armored car guards. His hat, with his initials, was found on the scene, and was used to identify him since the robber wore a full gas mask. He is sent up, and sentenced to die.
Jo believes in him, and she carries a heavy load because she urged Eddie to turn himself in, believing he would get off with a fair trial. We figure she is just taken in by Eddie’s lies because she loves him: so taken by love, that she agrees to smuggle in a gun to him. The plot is foiled by a crude metal detector, but the good Father takes the blame to get Jo off the hook. He takes her aside and chides her: that arch looks like it’s ready to crush them with its institutional weight.
We too are taken in, but by Lang’s audacious plot twist that makes us complicit in society’s unfair pre-judgement. Until it’s too late, we believe Eddie did it. By then, Eddie, caged like an animal for slaughter, has lost all ability to judge the odds, let alone right and wrong.
With the aid of a friendly con, he makes a daring escape, using the fog and the all-too-bourgeois prison doctor as a shield.
Eddie reunites with Jo, who, this time, won’t urge him to turn himself in, not when she learns he shot Father Dolan on the way out. She figures she’s as guilty as he is because it was she who urged him to surrender in the first place, when he wasn’t guilty! They run for it, like those Gun Crazy kids, like Bonnie and Clyde, and even, maybe, like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath.
They have a brief rest, before journey’s end. Idyllic…
Eddie knows they’re doomed. How could it be otherwise? He’s serene, and she loves him. They’ll go together.
They hit a roadblock, take some heavy fire from Tommy guns, and crash. Eddie stumbles into the woods, carrying Jo in his arms. The trooper lines up his gun with the two in his sights… Is it just me, or is that not the cross I see there, completed by Eddie? He is the sacrificial lamb for our social sins.
Jo, dying, tells him she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
He knows what he must do. He must kiss her dead lips, and then he will be free.
He sees the gates to freedom opening before him, and he hears the voice of Father Dolan repeating what he said during the breakout, when Eddie shot him – “You’re free! The gates are open!”
The title of this post is a reference, of course, to Society’s Child, a hit song from 1965 written by Janis Ian when she was fourteen (!!) and performed live on TV when she was sixteen. It’s the story of a white girl in love with a black boy, forced to break off with him because of her parents’ disapproval and peer pressure. She knows it’s all wrong but what can she do? She’s just society’s child.
Posted by Lichanos 
Journey to Perplexity 
