Category: film noir

Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1965): Part I: “There’ll be no later, this town is clean”

The Naked Kiss (1965) Shock and Shame, the story of a Night Girl.

Directed by the maverick auteur Samuel Fuller, with a screenplay by Fuller and black, gray, and white shades in the striking cinematography by Stanley Cortez

-(The Magnificent Ambersons 1942, Since you Went Away 1944, The Night of the Hunter 1955, Shock Corridor 1961), Cortez creates a sense of space that is almost surreal and disconnected from the outside world. The Naked Kiss stars Constance Towers as Kelly, Anthony Eisley as Griff, Michael Dante as Grant, Marie Devereux as Buff, Patsy Kelly as Mac, and one of my favorite unsung actresses Virginia Grey (The Women 1939, All The Heaven Allows 1955, Crime of Passion 1956, Backstreet 1961) as Candy.

Let me say that this is one of my favorite films. I think that it’s such a bold concoction of visual style, specific alienation that we as spectators experience along with Kelly our female Protagonist. The undercurrent of sexual pathology of a perverse nature and raw energy that fuels some crude reactionary moments on film. Normally I wouldn’t write about the ending of a film so as not to ruin it for the viewer, yet Constance Tower’s remarkable performance and Fuller’s raw cinematic veritae must be experienced, the story will not lose anything by my relating it here. I actually consider this part of my Women in Peril series, but more aptly put, it’s a womanhood in peril film.

Samuel Fuller’s B post-noir films are not like anyone else’s. Fuller’s work is often confrontational and visceral considered the kinkiest of all the B post-noir auteurs. Naked Kiss is his most potent work alongside his noir masterpiece Pickup on South Street (1953) starring Richard Widmark and Thelma Ritter as Moe Williams.


Alain Silver and James Ursini’s Film Noir Reader 2 “Fuller’s Naked Kiss “boldly offers a different kind of descriptive pause. Fuller takes on Patriarchy and directly assaults the spectator with a bizarre opening”

In their book they inform us that Fuller actually attached a camera to actor Monte Mansfield who plays Kelly’s pimp Farlunde, the guy she pummels in his swanky apartment right from the tip of the film. He has shaved off her hair and in retaliation she takes her primal vengeance out on his, beating him with her purse and high heels. Kelly only takes the money owed to her. The scene already prepares us, and what is created is an off-kilter and disorienting mood. The opening of The Naked Kiss is perhaps for me one of the most audacious beginnings to any cinematic work. It sort of punches you right in the face along with Farlunde.

The greater theme of the film is its narrative of women’s role within society. In a way not unlike Elia Kazan, Fuller has created a sociological framework, to lay out questions of what womanhood, as well as motherhood, means discursively. While at the end of the film, Kelly is relegitimized as being a savior and not a whore, she is still not allowed to live amongst the clean town’s people. She is still an outsider. Silver and Ursini also correctly bring out in their noir reader the fact that the context of the film is a “discursive-based attack on men and how they define women as well as the limits they place on them”. Also notable is the displaced female rage that only became better articulated later on with feminists during the 60s and 70s.

It reminds me while watching television’s soap opera junk food Peyton Place with its pillory that sits prominently in the middle of the town square as a reminder of New England Puritanical morals and the lurking hypocrisy in the shadows of quiet provincial values, that warn girls to beware of giving away their virtue. Betty Anderson (Barbara Parkins) learns this when she is condemned as the archetypal whore, the tainted girl who gave up her purity to a boy during a summer fling and then was thrown away like autumn trash. The pillory stands in the middle of the town, 200 years prior a woman like Betty had her head shaved bald, was locked in the pillory to be mocked, and then was driven out by the good town folk of Peyton Place. Much like Kelly who we first meet at the shocking opening of the film (one reason The Naked Kiss is such a uniquely memorable excursion for me) is completely bald and striking back at the man who took her hair, her power away.

The Naked Kiss written, directed, and produced by Sam Fuller, opens wide like a steel trap, with Constance Towers as Kelly viciously beats up a pimp Farlunde in his swanky apartment, smashing away at him with her handbag. Hitting his face and neck, it’s like watching a brutal choreographed dance. Fuller creates this wavering movement to give us a sense of the dizzying brutality. Farlunde begs “I’m drunk Kelly please,” “Enough Kelly please.” The savage jazz riffs underscore the bashing. Her wig comes flying off, and now we see a bald Kelly still attacking the man relentlessly. The jazz is coherent with the hyperactive saxophone.

Stripped of her hair looking like a mannequin (perhaps to show us Kelly as an “object”) she beats him till he staggers to the floor, spraying seltzer water in his face. He’s wasted by the beating, she rifles through his pockets and grabs some cash from his wallet. “Eight hundred dollars… you parasite… I’m taking only what’s coming to me.” She starts counting out bills, throwing them down upon his chest, “Fifty, sixty, seventy-five… I’m not rolling you, you drunken leech, I’m only taking the seventy-five dollars that’s coming to me.”

She crumples up her share, shoves it into her bra, and kicks him while he’s lying there. She stares at us like we’re her mirror. Gratified she puts her wig back on and the title rolls, The Naked Kiss. Sam Fuller’s story of alienation, gender subjugation, and the question of immorality and deviant sexual pathology, opens up in a big way.

The Paul Dunlop score becomes more dreamy, with melodramatic strings and Kelly brushing her wig. getting it right. The credits roll and Kelly are applying her eye pencil transforming herself back into a woman and not a bloodthirsty she-devil. Now the blush is applied, the music fades back into the jazz number and we see Farlunde knocked out, lying on the floor. The saxophone is hurling trills at us, Kelly grabs a photograph down from a collection of beauties and she starts tearing it up to pieces, throwing them on the ground, the Farlunde stirs, coughs a bit, and starts to get up, Kelly slams the door.

As he starts picking up the debris Kelly has left in her wake he puts crumpled-up bills on top of a calendar and we see the date July 4, 1961. A quick cut, flash forward to a banner in the street touting August 12, 1963, and the melodramatic music is serenading us again. The camera pulls out for a wider angle, we can see the entire banner now, it reads 2 years later. August 12, 1963 Fashion Show for Handicapped Children Grantville Orthopedic Medical Center

The top of a bus moving through the street, a parked car, a mostly empty street, with a few people crossing it, and mulling about. This is the suggestion of a quiet, quaint American town.

Then a car horn toots, 3 men standing outside a Bus Depot, Griff (Anthony Eisley) says “Ten bucks, that right Mike?” Mike says “Why spend your own money on that punk?” Griff turns to the young man and says while stuffing it in his pocket “Here’s your ticket” smiles at him and shoves some money into his pocket as well. All the time the young man is looking down as if ashamed. He says “Thanks a lot Griff… I’ll pay you back.” Griff looks at him sternly, “I’m giving you a break, cause your brother was in my outfit… I don’t want to see you in this town again.” The young man looks down again.

Then a Greyhound bus pulls over to the curb. We see the marquee of the movie theater is playing Shock Corridor, a nod to Fuller’s other psychologically wrenching film about a newspaper reporter going undercover in a lunatic asylum, only to become one of the patients.

Continue reading “Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1965): Part I: “There’ll be no later, this town is clean”” →

They Live By Night (1948) Part Two “A woman is sort of like a dog”

They Live By Night (1948) Part One “This boy and girl were never properly introduced to the world”

It’s the first 10 minutes of They Live By Night that sets the stage for our ill-fated lovers. When Keechie comes out to the barn to get water, Bowie follows her, rattles some chains to make noise, and then he slumps down against the wall. When the headlights of a car startle him, he begins to whisper a little ritualistic number-counting verse to himself, a way to calm himself. Perhaps something he picked up in jail. Bowie is 23 years old and spent 7 years of it on the prison farm where he met Chickamaw and T-Dub.

He tells Keechie that he doesn’t really know how to talk to a woman. The old man Mobley shows up in a car with a woman. It’s Mattie, wife of T-Dubs brother still in jail trying to get paroled. Mobley is soused and nearly crashes the car, but smashes some crates and tires and damages the front tire. Mattie gets out complaining about the drive there, and the drunken fool who picked her up. “That’s the best you can send?”

They go into the cabin and leave Bowie and Keechie still in the barn. Keechie asks Bowie if he likes his old man. He says “Not much.” Then Bowie asks if it’s true that her Ma ran off, and she answers yes. He tells her his ma ran off with a guy who ran a pool hall. His Pa used to take him there. He relates to her a story of how one night, there was an argument, but there is usually an argument centered around a game of pool. This time his Pa raised his cue but the other guy had a gun. His Pa turned to him like he was trying to say something, his face went white like he was going to cry. “The blood running into his eyes” Then Ma went to live with the guy who killed him.

Here the backstory lays the groundwork for the couple, who never had a chance to live a normal life, with decent parents who could raise them with a moral code.

She asks why Bowie would run with men like T-Dub and Chickamaw, her uncle “lives for trouble” and is “wild” Bowie keeps a newspaper clipping in his pocket about a guy convicted of murder just like him, who had no due process of the law. The Supreme Court said, “Let that man out!” Bowie fantasizes about running away to Mexico. Dreams are all he has.

This is what Bowie is living for, the day he can afford the Lawyer in Tulsa, who can overturn his conviction and he can get himself “squared around” a significant phrase that will come back at the end of the film. The idea is that these young people are fueled by the desire to belong to the right side of society. Bowie and Keechie start to develop an obvious attraction to each other.

Mattie takes an instant dislike to Bowie and tells Keechie that he’s Jail Bait.

Chickamaw and T-Dub want to pull a big job in Zelton Texas, rob a bank. Bowie agrees to be the driver of the getaway car.

The day before the robbery, we see a large street clock, Bowie looks at it, always asking what time it is. He’s sitting in the car, we hear a train whistle blow. Then Bowie cases the bank. He purchases a beautiful woman’s watch for Keechie at the Zelton Jewelry Store. He doesn’t have smaller bills with him so the jewelry store owner will have to take him over to the bank to break the large bills.

T-Dub and Bowie return to the house where Mattie and Chickamaw are. T-Dub asks Mattie what’s going on. It appears there might be a sexual relationship between the pair. Chickamaw says “How long does a woman wait for one man?” Mattie gets upset “Listen you crumby one-eyed nut” T-Dub goes to slap Mattie but Chickamaw grabs him, and Mattie smashes a mirror. Bowie is spooked and says “That’s 7 years!” is there an emphasis on his superstition because he is uneducated and from a lower class?

 

On the day of the bank robbery, the same train whistle blows, the clock is standing in the same spot outside the bank, and Bowie is in the car waiting for the two men to give the signal, when the jeweler recognized Bowie and tried to strike up a conversation with him. When Bowie keeps telling him to “get away” and he doesn’t stop talking, Bowie pushed the man to the ground and he hits his head.

All 3 men are in the getaway car now, fleeing the robbery, back on the wide expanses of open land. Blue Grass music is playing on the radio. They pull off the road. Chickamaw pulls out a gas can and sets the robbery car ablaze. The radio starts to die out as the car is consumed by the flames until it sounds like a dying doo hickey.

They drop T-Dub off and Chickamaw says, they can start struttin’ and the one thing Bowie has to learn “is to look and act like other people.” Again we see the emphasis on trying to fit into normal society. They buy fancy clothes and new cars. On the way back to the house, an old jalopy cuts off Bowie and they crash the car. A police officer comes over to question them about how fast they were going and requests that they come along with him, and Chickamaw calls him “friend” and then shoots him.

Chickamaw takes Bowie, who’s sprained his back in the crash, to his brother’s place so Keechie can take care of him. Old man Mobley starts complaining about having to close the station, but Chickamaw says not to worry and shoves a wad of cash in Keechies blouse pocket. Her uncle Chickamaw has a very unhealthy boundary around his niece. He leers at her a good deal of the time and objectifies her, by calling her the girl instead of his niece. When Keechie hands the money over to her father, the old man says, “Girl that’s more money I’ve seen since we collected on that fire we had.” He takes the money, and we know that he’ll blow all of it on booze later on.

Bowie is laying face down on the bed. Keechie takes her hair down and starts brushing it. The first sign that she is embracing her sexuality, her womanhood, amidst this band of dirty thugs, her father included. Bowie awakens and is framed on screen behind a wrought iron bed, that looks like the bars of a jail. Noir characters are often trapped by framing.

Bowie asks Keechie “Who’s your fella…other girls have ’em?” she says “I don’t know what other girls have.” She rubs his back down with something, and the wind in the telephone wires from out the highway, makes an eerie noise outside. Bowie asks if she ever thinks about leaving town, most girls would want to go, again she says “I don’t know what most girls want.” Keechie has been so sheltered from the world. He tells her that he has lots of money now from the robbery, but this offends Keechie. He doesn’t mean to offend her, but she replies, “I’d do this for a dog.” Then he tells her to look in the side pocket of his shirt. She takes out the package and finds the watch he bought for her. She mentions that there is no clock in the cabin, though she wants to set the watch to the right time. Perhaps people who live outside of society have no sense of belonging so need to track the hours of the day. That’s the sense I got from all the references to time and why it was so important for Bowie and Keechie to know what time it was.

He puts the watch on her. She says she never saw any sense in having a fella, then asks him if he’s trying to say that he should be her fella. He says “I guess maybe it is.” This is a very sweet moment for the two of them. She tells him to stay until morning, by then her drunken father will have shot off his mouth all over town, so he’ll need to get away. She’ll go with him.

They leave on a bus. A baby crying incessantly, on a seat next to Bowie, but the mother could care less about quieting the child. They stop for coffee and notice a flashing neon sign Marriages Performed. The waitress pours more coffee and interjects, Hawkins class B, organ music, and everything for $20. She says the way people pop in and out of there you’d think they’re getting dog licenses. At that point, Bowie tries to tell Keechie that he’s no good for her. He’ll always be a black sheep. and she tells him “The only thing black about you is your eyelashes.” She saw the goodness in him from the beginning. After complaining about how awful that wedding place is, he asks her to marry him and they get off the bus, and enter Hawkins, to be married. The old man running the quicky ceremony says to Bowie “You don’t think much about the way I marry people” “I sure don’t” “Me neither but you gotta give people what they want.” Then he sells them a car and heads off for their honeymoon, at Lamberts Inn where they take a room all the way at the end, from Mr Vines and his little son Alvin. They set up a house there. And life seems quiet and “normal” like other people.

In the meantime, old man Mobley goes to the police and tells them about Bowie, kidnapping his daughter. Tells them where they can find him. “That boy belongs in the electric chair, and I’d like to be the one to pull the switch!”

Bowie asks Keechie about “these women who don’t wait for their men” and she gives him her philosophy. “Those women don’t love…woman only loves once. I guess a woman is sort of like a dog, a bad dog would take things from anybody, and he’ll bite anybody who tries to pet him. There was a man back up home, and after he died, his dog wouldn’t eat or do anything, and he died too.”

Chickamaw shows up “Aint you shacked up nice and cozy,” He asks for alcohol, but since there wasn’t any, he asks for candy and starts munching on it. Tells Bowie the newspapers are “plastered with his face.” Every time some dingbat robs a filling station, they say it’s “Bowie the Kid”, the Zelton bandit. “You’d have to have wings to be every place they say you did.”

Chickamaw and T-Dub are out of money and now want to pull another job. ” kid we got a bank in Cedars, just itching to be charged” Bowie offers half his loot from the Zelton robbery but Chickamaw strongarms him into coming along. “you know that’s friendly, real friendly…you aint gonna be handing me out no two bits at a time for ice cream cones, that doe you got where’d you get it?! working the shoe store, it takes 3 to pull a trick and you’re number 3, even if the papers say you’re number one.” T-Dub tells him later on that they took him out of jail over other men. Keechie is furious with Bowie for going along.

After the bank job, Chickamaw is gets righteously riled. T-Dub got killed during the bank robbery. Chickamaw tells Bowie that it “rips his guts out” All the papers do is talk about Bowie the Kid. He wants Bowie to stop for a drink, but Bowie refuses, Chickamaw grabs a pipe from the back seat and tries to hit him with it. Bowie orders him to get out of the car.

Bowie returns home that night to Keechie. “I guess you heard over the radio” “I heard T-Dub’s dead, Chickamaw was killed breaking into a liquor store…they say it runs in threes.”

She tells him she’s going to have a baby, no matter what. Bowie says “That’s right, he’ll have to take his chances just like us.”

They go out for the day and walk around the park like other “real people”, Bowie talks about going to Mexico again. they go out for supper and dancing.

A drunk stumbles into Keechie, so they decide to leave, but Keechie asks Bowie to get her some cigarettes. While in the bathroom getting the pack of cigarettes from the machine, a man crouches behind him and says “Bowie the kid” pulls the gun away from Bowie “Papers say you carry a .45” Bowie comes back “Papers say a lot of things.” The man tells him “We want you to leave town tonight, we don’t want any trigger-happy hillbillies around.”

There are no safe places for Bowie and Keechie to belong. They’re too innocent for the thugs like Chickamaw and T-Dub, yet they’re perceived as hicks by a whole other hierarchy of criminals. They Live By Night really is a story about human suffering and class disparity.

When the couple realizes that the plumber who came to fix the busted pipes in their place has recognized Bowie, they flee their little home and head out for the Prairie Plaza Hotel, a piece of property that Bowie remembers Mattie owns. Mattie is not happy to see Bowie, even though she finds out that Keechie’s ill and pregnant, unknown to the young couple, she turns them in to the police in exchange for her husband finally getting paroled.

Bowie goes back to the man who married them, asking about getting help to flee to Mexico, but the old man tells him that he’s a thief just like Bowie, but he won’t sell him “hope” when there ain’t any. Bowie realizes that there just isn’t a place in the world for “people like us.”

Note: the use of the metaphor of dogs is used a lot in the film– as obedience, faithfulness, and submissiveness. loyalty.

I won’t spoil the climax of They Live By Night, it is a poetic masterpiece of director Nicholas Ray

 

They Live By Night (1948) Part One “This boy and girl were never properly introduced to the world”

They Live By Night (1948) Directed by the great Nicholas Ray. Ray was responsible for one of my all-time favorite films with Bogie and Gloria Grahame, In A Lonely Place (1950), and he also gave us On Dangerous Ground (1952), Rebel Without A Cause, and Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar.

They Live By Night is an adaptation by Nicholas Ray from the Novel “Thieves Like Us” by Edward Anderson. Produced by John Houseman.

Farley Granger plays Bowie, Cathy O’Donnell is the simple girl Keechie, Howard Da Silva is the ruthless”one-eyed “Chickamaw, Jay C.Flippen is T-Dub, and all three men make up the band of criminals responsible for robbing “charging “banks, across Texas. Will Wright plays old man Mobley a drunk (Ben Weaver, cantankerous store owner in The Andy Griffith Show) Helen Craig, plays Mattie who is married to T-Dub’s brother who is stuck in jail, having difficulty getting paroled.

“This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in…

To tell their story…


Ray uses open vistas, the cars driving through open expanses of land, not the often dominating skyscrapers, or closely cropped staircases and framed structural shadows. yet a certain desolation permeates the screen. Textually and thematically, They Live By Night breaks away from the urban milieu and plants itself in the rural countryside, in contrast to other darker noir environs.

This is yet another RKO excursion into the noir realm that they became well known for.  RKO had been one of the original production studios from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Val Lewton had done his low-budget yet groundbreaking horror collection(I Walked With A Zombie, Bedlam, Cat People, Isle Of The Dead) while at RKO.

There is a sentimentality and romanticism surrounding our two lead actors, the young couple project innocent victims, who were just born into a bad station in life. We get the sense that had they have been given another set of circumstances in another place, their lives would have been so far contrasting to the lives they’re leading because Bowie and Keechie are both essentially good people. We also see the very plain and feral Keechie blossom into her sexuality, as Bowie awakens this primal undercurrent that’s been subverted by her sheltered existence.

The certain outcome they faced, was always inevitable because they never had a chance to rise above the choices they’d been given.

There is so much of the narrative focused on what “other people normally do”, “to be like everybody else”. Our two young figures are trapped in a world, not of their own making.

Though most of the story is set in the rural countryside, which opens up the environment from the usual claustrophobic city scenes and defies the familiar mechanism of darkness, They Live By Night has an oppressive sensibility that makes the film a dark piece. The protagonist Bowie is still closed in by his situation.

Another departure from the more commonly seen protagonists with rough exteriors like Richard Conte, Robert Ryan and Charles McGraw, Farley Granger exudes a sexual ambiguity. Granger’s characters (Rope (1948), Strangers on A Train (1951), Side Street (1950)) have often been morally weak and susceptible to crime, not able to hold off temptation. He projects a sullenness, a softness that makes him appear the noir victim.


The divergence of the gentle souled Bowie with the cutthroat ruthlessness of his two treacherous partners in crime, set up the combustible dynamic that threatens Bowie’s safety from the outset.

As the lush and poignant music opens, it creates an unusual mood for us, not the typically hard-edged jazz thematic score we’re used to hearing with dark noir offerings. They Live By Night starts by serenading the sweet embraces of Farley Granger’s Bowie and O’Donell’s naive Keechie. The musical strings become threatening and the Titles roll as an old jalopy is driving eclipsed by the words They Live By Night.

It’s the 30s and two jalopies are speeding furiously down a desolate road. We see Bowie toss his shirt out of the car, and four men in the car, spin off the side of the road stirring up a dirt cloud, as they stop the car.

“I knew that tire had to go,” a farmer they’ve kidnapped says to Bowie sitting in the back seat. 2 men step outside of the car holding guns, one of them, Chickamaw wearing a hat says “You talk too much” The dusty isolation frames the men like a gray wilderness.

Chickamaw jerks the farmer out of the car as he begs, “Please mister please.” At first, Chickamaw holds a rifle up to his face as if threatening to shoot, instead he is forced to the ground out of our view, obscured by the car but we hear Chickamaw pounding on the farmer.  The music is serious, the horns play brutal tones, and then we see a concerned expression come over Bowie watching from his viewpoint, startled at the brutality he is witnessing. We get a glimpse of humanity in one of the 3 thieves.

We can’t see but we hear “Smack, smack” like pops and bones breaking. The picture, the photograph we see is so filthy, the environment itself so angry, like the dirt could devour all the men whole.

They toss the beaten man into the back of the car and Chickamaw says “Now what” T Dub replies “Now we gotta get to that brother of yours and get to that doe you got stashed away.”

The 3 men leave on foot we get an aerial view of them walking in the tall grass passing a billboard sign that says “Cosmo Nifties.” Bowie falls and grabs his foot. “How far we gotta go?” “About 10, 15 miles.” Bowie’s foot appears injured. The two other men tell him to hide out in the bushes beneath the billboard and that they’ll be back for him at night. They tell him to “take it easy son,” he says “I’ll take it easy. I gotta lawyer in Tulsa to see.”

It is night now. The Cosmo Nifties sign bares a sultry-haired beauty with a flower in her hair, the sign shapeshifts on the screen into a fence. Bowie is peaking through the fence, and a little scrappy dog comes into the scene, Bowie sits back down the little approaches him for food. But he suddenly sees headlights of a car approaching. he looks through the fence again. The fence, he is fenced in. We hear the twinkling song of night crickets, a truck pulls up and stops, the breaks screeching to a halt.

Bowie steps out from behind the fence, and we hear the truck trying to be started but stalling. The dog is following him. He asks the driver, “you having trouble?” a voice shaded by the dark and a hat answer back. it is the soft comeback of a female voice, this is Keechie.
“Could be” he asks “Who are you?  Do you live around here?” The crickets serenade the two veiled in shadow. Again the only two words she utters are “Could be.”

“You haven’t had a couple of visitors have you?” ” That wouldn’t be a sore foot making you limp would it?” “Could be” she says “I got some other stuff to pick up, get in or we’ll both get pneumonia” Her profile is solemn, and she looks down at the steering wheel.

She gets the car started and now her face is lit a little more, we can see she’s very plain, but very pretty, he comes around the side and starts to get into the car. A train whistle sings in the background. He looks at her “They sure took their sweet time sending for me”

Bowie asks “Who are you?” “they sent this for you, get in.” They arrive at a shabby place, in the car only the edges of their faces show light, like crescent moons, the rest is pure darkness surrounding them. They are staring at each other, she tells him “I’ll take that stuff, you go around the shed, through the trees, a cabin back there.”

He knocks on the door to the cabin, there are several men inside, one smoking a cigar opens it up to greet him with a smirk. Chickamaw says “Look who’s here” T-Dub sitting down counting money, says “Hello son,” Chickamaw says “You took your time gettin’ here… what are you and the gal been doin’, swimmin’?” “Say hello to Mobley, Chickamaw’s brother,” the old man says, ” I told you she’d find him… she’s a weasel that daughter of mine” “Sorry we had to keep you waiting son…had to be that way” Chickamaw gives Bowie a new shirt and says “here kid this’ll fit a lot better over that bandage.” He takes it, still very silent, Chickamaw slightly admonishing him says “You’re welcome.”

T-Dub, asks old man Mobley, “A thousand dollars, is that enough for a used car?” “Could be, you can’t tell though, the way things are…” They are interrupted by a sound outside, he says, “Oh that’d be my daughter.” T-Dub rises to his feet and says ” Hello Miss Keechie.” Bowie puts on his clean shirt and looks up at her, holding groceries, a surprised expression, as she too looks back at him curiously.

T-Dub looks at Chickamaw and gestures that he wants some of the cash, so he starts shuffling money through his thumb and fingers to hand to the old man, “That’s five hundred more, that’s fifteen hundred for the car… can’t have you coming back in no rattle trap, not for this trip.” Bowie with food in his mouth says “Fifteen hundred bucks for a second-hand car?” T-Dub says “That’s right” Bowie comes back. “That’s worse than robbing a bank!” but T-Dub explains “They’re thieves just like us” (meaning old man Mobley and his daughter Keechie).

T-Dub sits and faces the old man Chickamaw, “Now don’t forget the clothes, and tell Mattie the first big doe goes to getting her man out of jail.. tell her that or she won’t come.” “I’ll tell her for sure… well so long fellars… I’ll try to get back here with Mattie before tomorrow night.” Chickamaw says to his brother the old man Mobley, “Say big brother stay sober” he puts his hat on and answers “Me?…oh I won’t touch a drop, not a drop” he says resentfully. T-Dub still sitting down says, “Of course, he won’t, we take care of our friends Mobley” The old man cries out “I know, I know that T-Dub, he turns to Keechie and asks if she’ll take care of the station, then says “so long.”

Chickamaw says, “Take care of the station he says, he hasn’t done a lick of work in his life…that brother of mine.” Close up we now see that his right eye is hazed over and blind. He starts grinning and laughing, “Did you catch the look on his face?”…more laughter, “he’s still trying to figure out where I had that doe hid.” He laughs even more sardonically.

Keechie looks so worried. We hear a noise, Bowie is fiddling with the small stove, she goes towards him and says, “Can’t you make that stove work?” but as she starts to move, Chickamaw grabs her by the arm. “He’d a grab you too wouldn’t he?” T-Dub says, “You show ’em how Miss Keechie” “That’s one machine he don’t know nothing about..” Bowie hands her a clean cloth and says “Here”, she smiles a little and says “Thanks.”

T-Dub says, “That boy’s some gallant eh Miss Keechie?” and Chickamaw says “Yeah, he’s got a soft heart…” takes the cigar out of his mouth, “and a head to match”

Keechie says “his head looks alright to me” She gets up and walks away.

Bowie says “That little girl don’t think any too much of what’s me I tell you.”

Chickamaw relates “Her ma was just the same way, always acting like she was the Queen of Romania!” just then Keechie steps back from behind the heavy floral curtain that partitions the room. Bowie asks curiously “Keechie’s ma?” Chickamaw tells him “Yeah, you know what she did?…she ran off with a fella, now they’re running a medicine show” Keechie throws down what she was holding and walks back through the partition.

Fade to Black

T-Dub says “No matter how, I tell you we’re short…we need another thousand dollars” Chickamaw replies while looking at a newspaper “Hey we’re in it… Prison Farm break, the escape of 3 lifers was announced today by Warden E K Lardub (of some such name) the fugitives have captured a farmer in their flight”, then Chickamaw gets angry and slams down the paper. T-Dub picks it up and continues to read, “Elmo One Eyed Mobley” aka (Chickamaw) mumbles and paces, “It’s always one-eyed something.”

T-Dub reading “RT Waters, farmer of Akota, gave a description of the 3 men who commandeered his car at the point of a gun.” Chickamaw pipes in still pacing with the cigar in his mouth, “I shoulda blast his head off with that gun.”

T-Dub sees that there’s a dance at a dance hall that used to be Chickamaw’s old stomping ground, he gets the idea that there would be enough for the take there to be a small cushion for the big Zelton job they’re planning on.

Chickamaw picks up the paper from the table and says, “Sunday night, yeah that…” Then he pauses, “That one eye!…they didn’t’ print a very big piece about us either.” T-Dub says “Don’t wish it was more than just 2 lines..newspapers raise more heat than anything Chickamaw In a few days, they’ll really have somethin’ to print about us?” Bowie says “Yeah” and Chickamaw continues, “3 boys like us, we could charge any bank in the country, any bank!, how many have you knocked off T-Dub?” “Enough,” Chickamaw says to Bowie “You’re in luck kid, you’re traveling with real people“ T-Dub puts his hand on Bowie’s shoulder, and Chickamaw says “It takes 3 to charge a bank…and we’re the 3 mosquitas.”

“We move fast” looking deep into Bowie’s face. “Can you take it? “me?” “You!” “Sure.”

Bowie “I can rib myself up to anything,” Chickamaw says “Maybe. You ribbed yourself up once to killin’ a man didn’t ya?” Keechie walks into the room just then and looks faintly startled, and disappointed, Bowie stares at her concerned, and ashamed, Chickamaw asks again “Didn’t ya?” then Bowie breaks his gaze away from Keechie and looks up at Chickamaw and says “Yeah… I sure did” then looks back at Keechie who now looks down at the floor and walks out of the room.

It’s the first 10 minutes of They Live By Night that sets the stage for our ill-fated lovers.

To be continued in Part II…

They Live By Night (1948) Part Two “A woman is sort of like a dog”

The Narrow Margin 1952: Nobody likes a fat man

The Narrow Margin (1952) Directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charles McGraw plays the sandy graveled voice of Detective Sgt. Walter Brown who’s reluctantly been chosen to escort a mob widow to the grand jury hearing in Los Angeles by train.

In the process of picking up Mrs. Frankie Neal, in Chicago, Walter’s partner is shot and killed in the darkly lit stairwell by a mysterious assassin played by Peter Virgo, the ruthless Densel, who wears a fur-trimmed coat.  This only causes Walter to further resent the woman he’s been charged to protect and see to it that she makes it to the trial to testify against the mob.

This noir film has a lot of familiar elements, gangsters, the train ride, the detective’s dilemma – as the die-hard cop fends off the criminal elements that surround him, and the wrong man/woman trope. The mobsters, Vincent Yost, Densel, and Joseph Kemp want to get hold of a valuable list of names that Frankie’s widow will bring to trial. Yost tries to bribe Det. Walter Brown, but he’s an honest cop who can’t be taken in.

The Narrow Margin also stars Marie Windsor as Mrs. Frankie Neal’s widow and Jaqueline White as the respectable Ann Sinclair, a classy woman, and mother,  traveling on the train with her little boy Tommy and their nanny.

Ann gets caught in the cross hairs of the intrigue when the gangsters mistakenly take Ann for Frankie’s widow. The majority of the film takes place on the train heading for Los Angeles. Don Beddoe plays Det. Sgt. Gus Forbes, “the fat man” who keeps getting in the way of Walter. He repeats the self-abasing proverb “Nobody likes a fat man” as he lumbers his way through the narrow passageways of the train en route to L.A.

Frankie’s widow Mrs. Neal is an obnoxious loud-mouthed dame, who doesn’t want to play by the rules and blasts her record player even after Walter warns her to hide out in the train compartment that the thugs think is empty. Marie Windsor reminds me a bit of the wonderfully quirky Ileana Douglas (Goodfellas, Six Feet Under, Cape Fear 1991). Douglas is the granddaughter of the great actor Melvyn Douglas. The fabulous actress isn’t a stranger to film noir, having appeared in some of the most underrated films of the genre, Force of Evil 1948 with John Garfield, The Sniper 1952, City that Never Sleeps 1953, and what I consider to be one of the top ten film noirs of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing 1956. Windsor is perhaps at her best in the role of the conniving Sherri Peatty who beats the spirit of her husband George (Elisha Cook) until he’s desperate to pull a heist that goes terribly wrong.

Walter: Sister I’ve known some pretty hard cases in my time, you make em all look like putty. You’re not talkin’ about a sack of gum drops gonna get smashed. You’re talkin’ about a dame’s life.You make think it’s funny for a woman with a kid to stop a bullet for ya, but I’m not laughing.

Frankie’s widow: Really well I don’t care, she got twins, you talk like you’d rather I got the bullet who’s side are you on anyhow?

Walter: Listen Jingle Jaw nothin’s happened to you yet has it?

Frankie’s widow: No, well it better not.

Walter: Well then shut up!

Impact: (1949) “This is for me and Irene sucker”

Impact (1949) Directed by Arthur Lubin Impact stars Brian Donlevy as Walter Williams a wealthy San Fransisco businessman who thinks his wife Irene played by Helen Walker ( great as the dark dominating force Lilith in Nightmare Alley) is truly the adoring woman she pretends to be. Here’s a great article from Movie Morlocks about the unsung talent of sexy Helen Walker.

Movie Morlocks.com a TCM site

Irene Gives her husband monogrammed shirts with his initials and calls him softy. She so adept at delivering the saccharine flattery of a doting wife. Unknown to the misguided Walter, she’s done the same monogram initials bit for her lover Tony Barrett as Jim Torrence a ruthless opportunist who has no hesitation in harming Walter to get what he wants.

Jim utters the iconic words from the film that reverberates in Walter’s head once he awakens from the nightmare, “This is for me and Irene sucker” just before he smashes the tire iron down upon Walter’s head.

Before the married couple are supposed to leave on a trip, Irene sets Walter up by feigning illness therefore not feeling well enough to travel with him. Instead, she sends her lover who is pretending to be her cousin Jim Torrence to meet up with Walter so he can give Jim a lift. Jim plans on bumping Walter off along the roadside and meeting up with Irene later at a Hotel under assumed names.

In a moment of sheer fatalistic retribution while speeding away from the crime scene Jim Torrance dies in a horrible head-on collision with a truck, which burns his body beyond recognition. After hitting Walter on the head with a tire iron he viciously throws him down the side of a cliff and leaves him for dead.

But Walter awakens bloodied and dazed climbs onto the back of a Bekins truck and winds up in Larkspur Idaho where he takes a job as a mechanic working for a war widow, the exquisite Ella Raines as Marsha Peters. Ella is even sylph-like in her greasy mechanic’s jumpsuit and cap.

Walter is hired at the gas station using a fake name, and while Marsha is beloved in the community she is not a very good mechanic so Walter takes over for three months, living as a roomer at Marsha’s kindly mother’s home. Walter becomes part of the community, as a volunteer fireman, and starts to relish leaving the big city life behind and the double-crossing wife Irene for this quaint existence in Larkspur.

Walter is assumed to be dead, which is all over the newsprint and later his wife Irene is sent to jail accused of plotting his murder, being hounded by Lt.Quincy played by Charles Coburn.

Walter reads the news, anticipating his revenge now with Irene sentenced to death, and he and Marsha begin to develop feelings for each other. When Walter tells the truth to Marsha..she insists that he do the right thing and go back to San Fransisco and show that he’s still alive.

Ironically, the police then believe the yarn that Irene spins that it was Walter who murdered her lover and not the other way around. Now Marsha and Lt Quincy must track down Su Lin, the William’s maid played by Anna May Wong who isn’t sure if her testimony would either help or hurt the kindly Walter Williams.

While Impact has some of the essential elements of a noir film, it works really well as a MeloNoir, the merging of melodrama and noir together. Brian Donlevy gives a great performance as the paragon betrayed patsy by his ruthless wife Irene. Helen Walker is icy as ever and Ellen is just gorgeous sitting on the stoop in Larkspur.

The Narrator starts off the tone of the film by saying  Impact, the force with which two lives come together. Sometimes for good, sometimes for evil.


Visit this revised piece that covers Impact in more detail.

https://thelastdrivein.com/2021/11/27/31-flavors-of-noir-on-the-fringe-to-lure-you-in-part-2/

The Killers (1946): Brutal Noir- A green silk hankerchief with golden harps

The Killers (1946) is the quintessential existentialist film. Based on Ernest Hemingway’s 1920s short story as he was immersed in the pre-war existentialism of that time period, which fostered tales of crimes and violence. As the two French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton remark in their fantastic read and seminal work A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-153 the killer’s gunmen walking into the diner in Brentwood N.J. and begin complaining about the menu predates the dark Absurdism of the existential movement of playwrights like Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

It reminds me of how great directors like Quentin Tarantino pay homage to films like The Killers in Pulp Fiction, or the work of Samuel Fuller who didn’t hold back on the vicious realism that was groundbreaking in its day.

According to the Electric Sheep blog, “The first twelve minutes of The Killers (1946) is a faithful (almost word for word) adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's much-anthologized short story. Two hit men enter a diner (shot to look like Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks "“ itself apparently inspired by Hemingway's story) typical Hemingway heroic fatalism.”

Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946): Brutal Noir- The First 12 Killer Minutes!

The Killers (1946) the original version scripted by Hemingway himself, was produced by Mark Hellinger (The Naked City, Brute Force, and The Two Mrs Carrolls– 3 of my favorite films,) and once again boldly directed by the great Robert Siodmak. With the rise of Nazism Siodmak left Germany for Paris and then for Hollywood. He’s singularly responsible for a great deal of the noir films that are so memorable.

In my opinion, Siodmak’s film is a meatier piece of work that rendered a more brutal impression than the 1964 version directed by Don Siegel.

Perhaps due to its more neo-gangster noir style, it gave it a liminal and evocative intensity. Siodmak’s Killers has a more violently surreal tone, than the stylishly slick and richly colorful pulpy Siegel version. The effective black-and-white environment of the 1946 Killers once again sets the stage for the players to live in a world that is condemned by shadow. While I love Siegel’s version, it does seem brighter and the world more aired out than usual frames of noir desolation.

Although I’m a huge fan of Angie Dickenson and she was incredibly lush and provocative in the role of Sheila, Ava Gardner’s Kitty Collins was more subtly carnal as the temptress who becomes Swede’s downfall. Siodmak’s version gives us the noir police investigation, there is pervasive Machiavellian cruelty, and the characters have more stratum to their personas. John Cassavetes is more icy while Burt Lancaster’s Swede is a very sympathetic yet imperfect man, that fatalistic heroism.

Burt Lancaster plays Ole “Swede” Andersen ex-boxer and con, Ava Gardner is Kitty Collins, Edmond O’Brien is  Jim Reardon insurance investigator, Albert Dekker is Big Jim Colfax (Dr. Cyclops) criminal mastermind and Virginia Christine is Lily Harmon Lubinsky (she cameos in the ’64 version as the blind secretary).

Sam Levene is Lt. Sam Lubinsky Swede’s old childhood friend Charles McGraw( The Narrow Margin) is Al the killer and William Conrad (Cannon tv series)is Max the other killer. The Killers also casts Jeff Corey as “Blinky” Franklin (The Outer Limits O.B.I.T.episode) one of Big Jim’s criminal lackeys with a “monkey on his back” implying that he has a drug addiction. And Vince Barnett as Swede’s devoted and world-weary petty thief Charleston.

The film opens with Miklos Rozsa’s ominous brassy jazz score that later becomes the killer’s motif, as the two men drive into a small American town, anywhere USA,  we see them from behind in the darkest black silhouette in the car. Then a long view of them walking onto the scene still surrounded in shadow, we know they are trouble. The opening scene of The Killers is perhaps one of the most powerfully ferocious I’ve seen from a 1940s film.

The two men enter Henry’s Diner William Conrad’s Max and McGraw’s Al, are The Killers, who begin to psychologically torture George who works the counter, and Nick Adams the boy at the end of the counter. They exude an obnoxious egotism. A cruel anti-social spirit as they barrage the men in the diner with verbal assaults, having a somewhat perverse quality that begins with the menu.

George: What’ll it be, gentlemen?
Max: I don’t know. Whatta you want to eat, Al?
Al: I don’t know what I want to eat.
Max: I’ll have the roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes.
George: That’s not ready yet.
Max: Then what’s it on the card for?
George: Well, that’s on the dinner. You can have that at six o’clock. That clock is ten minutes fast. The dinner isn’t ready yet.
Max: Never mind the clock. What have you got to eat?
George: Well, I can give you any kind of sandwiches: bacon and eggs, liver and bacon, ham and eggs, steak…
Al: I’ll have the chicken croquettes with the cream sauce and the green peas and the mashed potatoes.
Max: Everything we want is on the dinner.

They continue to harass George, asking for alcohol, “Al: You got anything to drink? George tells them “I can give you beer, soda, or ginger ale. Al: I said you got anything to drink?” George submits a quiet “no.” Max says “This is a hot town, whatta you call it?“George“Brentwood” Al turns to Max “You ever hear of Brentwood?” Max shakes his head no and then Al asks George “What do you do for nights?”Max takes in a deep breath and groans out “They eat for dinner, they all come here and eat The Big Dinner” George looks downward and murmurs  “That’s right” and Al says

“You’re a pretty bright boy aren’t you”, meanwhile George is a grown middle-aged man. The term “boy” is designed  to demean him. George mutters “sure” and Al snaps back “Well you’re not!”

Al now shouts to the young man at the end of the counter “Hey you what’s your name?” he looks earnestly at Al and says “Adams, Nick Adams.” Al says, “Another bright boy.” There is an emerging sadism at work here, almost subconsciously homophobic/homoerotic, in the way they are using the terminology of “boy” working to subvert these bystanders’ manhood. Max says, “Town’s full of bright boys”

The cook comes out from the kitchen bringing the plates of ” one ham and one bacon” George starts to serve the men the food and asks “Which one is yours?“Al says “Don’t you remember bright boy?” the continued use of this phrase truly begins to flay the layers of our nerve endings. George starts laughing and Max says “What are you laughing at?” “nothing” “You see something funny?” “no” “Then don’t laugh” “Alright” Again Max says, ” He thinks it’s alright,” Al says “Oh, he’s a thinker” Here we see the anti-social backlash to an intellectual society that would perceive them as outcasts. The term “thinker” is used pejoratively as is “boy.” This is where the film begins to break the molds of the Hollywood window dressing of a civilized society when two intruders trespass on an ordinarily quiet community and shatter its sense of security. It is the death of humanism in film language.

Max and Al proceed to tie up Nick Adams and the cook in the kitchen. They further taunt George who asks “What’s this all about?” Max “I’ll tell ya what’s gonna happen, we’re gonna kill a Swede, you know big Swede, works over at the filling station” he lights a cigarette. George says, “You mean Pete Lund?” As Max takes the cigarette out of his mouth the smoke enervates in George’s face, “If that’s what he calls himself’, comes in every night at 6 o’clock don’t he?” Georges asks “What are you gonna kill him for? what did Pete Lund ever do to you?” Max replies,” he never had a chance to do anything to us he never even seen us.” The conversation is so matter-of-fact that it’s almost chillingly absurd. Again George asks, “What are you gonna kill him for?” and Max smirks “We’re killing him for a friend.” Al pokes his head in from the sliding panel window to the kitchen “Shut up you talk too much” but Max says ” I gotta keep bright boy amused don’t I?”

Once the killers believe what George tells them, that Swede isn’t coming into the diner for his supper because it’s passed 6 pm, they go to Swede’s boarding house. George unties the two men in the kitchen who have been bound up with dish rags, and Nick jumps over fences trying to head off the killers and warn Swede that they’re coming for him. Nick bursts into Swede’s room.

At first, we only see the obscured figure of a man lying on his bed, only from the neck down to his feet. We do not yet see the figure clearly. Swede is framed in shadow. Nick tells him about the men at Henry’s Diner, they were going to shoot him when he came in for supper.”George thought I oughta come over and tell ya” Out of breath Nick is panting, and we still only hear Lancaster’s substantial voice in a whispering tone “There’s nothing I can do about it,” Nick says “Don’t you even wanna know what they’re like?” “I don’t wanna know what they’re like, thanks for coming” Don’t you wanna go and see the police?” “No that wouldn’t do any good,” Swede tells Nick he’s sick of running and “I did something wrong (pause) once, thanks for coming” he ends very solemnly. Nick leaves. The last words we hear Swede utter are “Charleston was right, Charleston was right.”

Now we see Swede’s face just staring and waiting. Sitting up, as the killers come bursting into the room, blasts of light from the gun spray, we are left looking at Swede’s hand lying limp against the side of the bed, surrounded in shadow once again, he is dead.

The Killers relies a lot on the noir mechanism of the flashback. At times there are flashbacks within flashbacks.

We’re now at the police station with Nick and Sam the cook giving their statements. We see a silk scarf with harps among his effects. Swede left a death benefit life insurance policy for $2,500 that goes to a woman in Atlantic City. The case is now being investigated by an insurance detective for the Atlantic Casualty and Insurance Company. Edmond O’Brien plays Reardon, who refuses to drop the case even after his boss insists that it’s not financially worth the company’s time. But Reardon wants to know what happened to this man who had “8 slugs in him, nearly tore him in half.”

Reardon goes to the hotel in Atlantic City and talks to the old chambermaid, Queenie, who is the beneficiary of Swede’s death benefit. She tells Reardon that at least he could be buried in consecrated ground and Reardon asked why she thought it was a suicide.

Queenie tells him in flashback how she was working that night and came into Swede’s room to clean, and he was visibly disturbed, smashing and stomping the furniture crying out “She’s gone, she’s gone!” Queenie asks “Who’s gone, mister?” He picks up a chair and breaks the window and tries to jump out, but Queenie grabs him and tells him” For the sake of God, you’ll burn in hell for all time” and stops him from killing himself. The death benefit was his way of saying thanks for her kindness.

Reardon embarks on a journey to get the bell to ring in his head, about why the green silk handkerchief with the golden harps is on the tip of his mind. His boss says that claims are piling up and he’s off running around with a 2 for a nickel shooting, but Reardon wants to know why 2 professionals put the blast on a filling station attendant, a nobody. He also notices his hands, scarring which indicates that Swede had been a boxer at one time.

He meets up with Swede’s old boyhood friend from the 12th ward in Philly. Lt Sam Lubinsky who is now married to Swede’s one-time girlfriend Lily played by the young and ever-present character actress Virginia Christine who was also in The Killer Is Loose. In The Killers, she is absolutely beautiful as the “nice girl” playing opposite Ava Garner’s femme fatale role as Kitty. Sam joined the police force and Ole Swede started fighting professionally. They always kept in touch, but “when you’re a copper, you’re a copper” and eventually after taking a savage beating in the ring, Swede breaks his knuckles beyond repair and has to stop boxing. Sam winds up putting ” the pinch” on his friend Ole later on.

In a flashback, we see Lily and Swede at a party thrown at a swanky hotel by Jake, one of Big Jim Colfax’s men. Lily doesn’t like Jake, he’s got mean eyes. Swede sees Kitty for the first time sitting at a piano. Swede is mesmerized by Kitty. The women share competitive glances. Kitty says, “Jake tells me you’re a fighter,” he says “Do you like the fights?” Kitty says “I hate brutality Mr. Anderson the idea of 2 men beating each other to a pulp makes me ill.” Lily tells Kitty that she’s seen all of Swede’s fights, but Kitty comes back with “Oh really, I couldn’t bare to see the man I care about hurt” At that point Lily is finished once Swede remarks how beautiful Kitty is Lily leaves the party.

Lt. Lubinsky tells Reardon that “It seems like I was always in there when he was losing, ever see him fight? He took a lot of punishment.”

Ole’s manager leaves Swede after he isn’t any good as a money-making fighter anymore since the bones in his hand are crushed. It’s why he didn’t use his right hand to fight the night he lost the bout to Tiger Lewis. That night his manager says “No use hanging around here, never did like wakes”

In a flashback within a flashback, Ole starts dating Kitty Collins, Big Jim’s girl. Evidently, she shoplifts a diamond pin, Reardon recognizes it as she’s wearing it at a table sitting with a group of thugs who work for Big Jim Colfax. She drops it into a plate of soup, but Reardon stops the waiter, fishes it out, and rinses it off in a cup of coffee then tries to take Kitty in, but then “Ole” Swede walks in and winds up taking the rap for her spending 3 years in jail for Kitty’s robbery then he gets released for good behavior.

Kitty’s given him this green silk scarf with golden harps of hers, which he strokes in jail. Swede has a cellmate and friend in a man named Charleston, a petty larceny crook and old-time hoodlum who bonds with Swede while in prison. Charleston brings up Jupiter one night. He liked to look at the stars after lights out, he knew their names because he got a book from the prison library.

“You can’t learn any better about stars than by staring” Swede and Charleston stares out the window at the stars, while Swede is stroking the silk scarf Kitty gave him. He asks Charleston if he knows what “harp” means. He says “Yeah, angels play ’em” “They mean Irish, Kitty gave me this scarf.” But Kitty hasn’t come to see Swede once while he’s in prison for the robbery she pulled. Swede asks Charleston to look up Kitty when he gets out because he’s worried about her. But Charleston knows she’s not sick or in trouble. Swede is too much in love to see it.

Later on, Charleston relates to Reardon at a pool hall where he was told to bring Swede on the day after his release from jail because Big Jim is planning a “big set-up.” Also in the room is a thug named Dumb Dumb and Blinky Franklin. Charleston opts out, he only wants easy pickings at his age he’s spent half his life in stir, but Swede seeing Kitty in the room, still Big Jim’s girl, says he’s in. Kitty becomes Swede’s mistress again. We see the glances between the two, and Swede knocks Jim down when he tries to hit Kitty. The two men swear that after the heist, they will even up the score with each other.

The last thing Charleston says to Swede before he leaves the room is “Want a word of advice? stop listening to golden harps, they’ll land you in a lot of trouble.” We now know what Swede meant by his last words. Charleston leaves the room. Closing the door, hoping Swede will follow, but ” he never showed up, and I never seen the Swede again” We see the character Charleston in flashback standing outside the door. Framed by the shot making the door a principal moment in the film. Charleston stared at the door waiting, looking trapped and small. The door symbolizes the unknown and what lies behind or ahead.

Back at Atlantic Casualty and Insurance Co. Reardon tells his boss the “bell rang” he remembered hearing about it in relationship to a big caper that was pulled on July 20th, 1940 at The Prentiss Hat Company. Armed gunmen got away with a quarter of a million of Atlantic’s money. One of the robbers was seen wearing a green scarf with golden harps wrapped around his face like a bandit. Swede was one of the people involved in the heist. Now hiding out under an assumed name, and working at a filling station supposedly hiding all the loot from the Hat Company heist, taken away from the other members of the gang. Who sent the killers to assassinate Swede and did Kitty Collins sign his death warrant?

The Killers, details double crosses of all double-crosses, as ‘the killers’ go to the sleepy town of Brentwood to even a score with Swede, who didn’t take Charleston’s advice and stops listening to golden harps. In noir films, there is often a fetishistic quality to an item or action. I think the scarf is a sexual symbol of Kitty for Swede. It bares her scent, it was a token of her sexuality being made of “real silk” as if her skin. the idea of touching something golden. The scarf acts as a surrogate for Kitty’s body, as he strokes it in place of the real thing.

The Killer Is Loose: Gutsy Crime Noir: Get Lila (1956)

Part of my Women in Peril series.

The Killer is Loose (1956) directed by Budd Boetticher revolves around a bank robbery in downtown L.A. While the police have set up a wiretapping operation it is revealed that the meek bank teller Leon Poole is the inside man. Leon had faked going after the robbers and getting struck by one of them in the process. This impresses his old army Sargent who was in the bank at the time. We learn that the nickname Foggy was given to Leon by his superior officer and the entire company apparently to poke fun at Leon” Foggy” Poole for being a simple-minded coward. Starring Joseph Cotten as Detective Sam Wagner, Rhonda Fleming as his wife Lila, and Wendell Corey as Leon “Foggy” Poole.

During the apprehension of Leon, Detective Sam Wagner accidentally kills Poole’s young wife who wasn’t supposed to be home, and at Leon’s trial, he swears to get back at Detective Wagner while staring at Detective Wagner’s wife who is present in the courtroom.

This is the inception of the woman in peril theme once Leon sets his gaze on Sam’s wife Lila the object of his hatred fixed on her from here on in.

In a very chilling manner, Leon asks why Sam’s wife Lila should still be alive. Leon’s lack of affect shows us a more deranged man than someone who might be prone to violent outbursts, and it is this subtlety of his underlying psychosis that is so frightening.

About three years later, Poole (until then a model prisoner) abruptly takes his chance to kill a guard and escape. It’s clear during the ensuing manhunt that Poole is obsessed in pursuit of a single end; but not quite the end everyone supposes.

After serving 3 years in prison, Leon gets assigned to an “honor” work farm, where because of his mild manner and seemingly model behavior is trusted to go on a ride with one of the prison guards to unload a truck. Leon seizes the opportunity to escape by brutally killing the driver and then proceeds on his odyssey of revenge. Like a shark that never stops moving, Leon is driven only by his desire to exact the same outcome for Detective Wagner, to target Lila as retribution for the killing of his beloved wife. Leon becomes a killing machine. Going from one opportunistic murder to the next until he can reach Sam’s wife. So begins the full-scale manhunt for the killer on the loose.

Budd Boetticher gives us a very bleak yet dramatic landscape of America’s man vs society, cop vs criminal, and good vs evil. Like some of the wild west pictures that Boetticher is known for, except here it’s played out in an urban city setting. Leon is a man set on revenge with no other driving desire and void of a consciousness that we can see.

The Killer is Loose is uncompromisingly realistic and often brutal in its portrayal of the ordinary machinations of a psychotic murderer, especially for its time. I’m not a huge Rhonda Fleming fan, but I do love Joseph Cotten in anything even his later cult and horror period like Baron Blood, Airport ’77, and Soylent Green.

The really memorable star of this gutsy Mise en scene police vs criminal noir is the killer himself Leon “Foggy” Poole played brilliantly by Wendell Corey who defined his sober character with simplicity, and an almost naivete childlike quality. This is what makes the film so compelling. Leon doesn’t understand why he shouldn’t kill the people who are getting in the way of his fixing Detective Sam Wagner for having inadvertently killed Leon’s wife during a raid on his apartment.

Wendell Corey’s Leon never comes across as unhinged in an overt way, it’s the way he holds back his emotions that makes his killer enigmatic and makes your skin crawl.

There are moments of exasperation in The Killer Is Loose for me. The police often miss the mark when trying to effectively do their job, and I find Rhonda Fleming’s character as Sam’s wife Lila annoying most of the time. I  was more sympathetic to Mary, the wife of Sam’s partner Michael Pate (Curse Of The Undead)Detective Chris Gillespie played by great character actress Virginia Christine.

Still, The Killer Is Loose is a compelling watch, because of its existential informality in some of the more brutal moments which are powerful. The tone of Killer overrode the failings of this film for me and so  I was able to separate myself from the few things that irked me like Lila’s stubborn harping and the police’s ineffectual fumblings.

There are some other great veteran actors in this film like the always jovial Alan Hale Jr and John Larch who plays Otto Flanders, Foggy’s superior officer in the army who gave him the nickname Foggy as an insult.

Phantom Lady: Forgotten Cerebral Noir: It’s not how a man looks, it’s how his mind works that makes him a killer.

Phantom Lady (1944)

Directed by the master of suspenseful thrillers and fabulous noirs- Robert Siodmak; (Son of Dracula 1943, The Suspect 1944, Christmas Holiday 1944 The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry 1945, The Killers 1946, The Dark Mirror, The Spiral Staircase 1946, Cry of the City 1948, Criss Cross 1949, The File of Thelma Jordon 1948) is as nightmarish and psychologically aromatic as it is a penetrating crime noir. The distinguishing cinematography by Woody Bredell.

Phantom Lady is a sadly neglected film noir based on a story by Cornell Woolrich and scripted for the screen by Bernard C. Schoenfeld. Stars the quietly enigmatic Ella Raines (Cry ‘Havoc’ 1943, The Suspect 1944, Impact 1949), as Carol “Kansas” Richman, Franchot Tone as Jack Marlow, and Alan Curtis as the leading man Scott Henderson. The film also co-stars Thomas Gomez (Key Largo) as perceptive Detective Burgess, the intelligent and compassionate detective who eventually comes around to believe in Scott Henderson’s innocence. This film noir is directed by Robert Siodmak who derived attention after the release of Phantom Lady which carved out a niche for him in film noir. Adding to the wonderful direction, the film benefits from Woody Bredell’s cinematography (Black Friday 1940, Christmas Holiday 1944, The Ghost of Frankenstein 1942, The Mystery of Marie Roget 1942) He added the elements of Woolrich’s world, from the fraught innocence roaming New York City, a dark blistering urban landscape, threatening shadows, seedy bars, jazz and Kansas’ high heels escaping the pavement.

Phantom Lady utilizes noir’s innocent man theme beautifully. Siodmak’s directing creates an often nightmarish realm, the characters float in and out of. The intersectionality frames the story between crime melodrama and psychological thriller. Siodmak is a master storyteller who earned an Oscar nomination for The Killers in 1946.

Although on the surface you would assume Phantom Lady to be a man-in-peril film, it actually functions as a woman in danger as well because Carol “Kansas” puts herself in harm’s way in order to help her boss, whom she’s in love with. Fay Helm’s mysterious woman has a tragic trajectory herself as a woman who is spiraling into oblivion by a mental decline after losing her beloved fiance.

Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), a successful young businessman, spends the night with a mysterious woman whose identity is unknown to him. Only later do we learn that her name is Ann Terry (Fay Helm) The two first meet in a bar after Scott has been shunned by his wife for the last time. The phantom lady is obviously disturbed by something causing her emotional pain, she finally agrees to take in a show with Scott who has tickets. The conditions are that they do not exchange names as it’s just a way for both of them to keep themselves occupied at a moment when both are feeling dejected.

The “Phantom Lady” is wearing a sensationally quirky hat which the film revolves around in a sense because Scott returns home to find his apartment crawling with police after his wife has been brutally strangled, with one of Scott’s expensive ties. The anonymous lady who wore this stand-out hat is the only key to providing Scott with an alibi.

Scott proceeds to tell Inspector Burgess (the wonderful Thomas Gomez), that he spent the night with this no-name woman, after fighting with his wife and that there are several people who would have seen them together. The bartender, the cabbie with a very memorable name, and the temperamental lead singer/dancer in the musical review could identify him accompanied by the phantom lady, because of her supposedly original hat– the performer Estela Monteiro (Aurora Miranda) was also wearing the same hat on stage, which is later used as a lead. Aurora shoots daggers at the phantom lady for having worn the same design. You could see the fury on her face as she sings her musical number. Estela Monteiro has a fit, walks off stage and decrees that no one would have the nerve to wear one of her original hats, and throws hers away. Wonderful character actor Doris Lloyd plays the designer Kettisha who is sought after for her one-of-a-kind hat designs.

Inspector Burgess takes Scott around to each of these witnesses but no one recalls having seen him with the woman at all. They all very curiously deny seeing the lady, and it becomes obvious that something is very wrong with the testimony from all these people who were obviously covering something up. Neither the cab driver, the bartender, nor the singer will confirm his story. The outcome looks bleak for Scott.

Inspector Burgess: [Questioning] You’re a pretty neat dresser, Mr. Henderson.

Detective Tom: [Taunting] Yeah. Everything goes together. It’s an art.

Inspector Burgess: Nice tie you’re wearing.

Scott Henderson: [Upset] Tie?

Detective Tom: Pretty taste. Expensive. I wish I could afford it.

Scott Henderson: Hey, what are you trying to do to me? Marcella’s dead, gimme a break! What’s the difference if my tie is OK or not?

Inspector Burgess: It makes a great deal of difference, Mr. Henderson.

Scott Henderson: Why?

Inspector Burgess: Your wife was strangled with one of your ties.

Detective Chewing Gum: Yeah. Knotted so tight it had to be cut loose with a knife.

Because it appears that Scott is guilty of the crime he is sentenced to death and faces the electric chair in 18 days. With no witnesses to back him up.

Even his best friend sculptor Jack Marlow played by gravel-toned sophisticate Franchot Tone who doesn’t come onto the scene until midway through the film, is away on business in Brazil, so there is no one but sweet and devoted secretary Kansas who is left to stand by Scott. Scott resigns himself to his fate and doesn’t even blame the jury for their decision.

Scott Henderson is a civil engineer who was in a loveless marriage with a beautiful associate, his faithful secretary who works for him, which he affectionately calls Kansas. She never doubts his innocence for a moment and devoutly sets out on a mission to try and find this mysterious lady to prove she really does exist, before it’s too late. Inspector Burgess and Kansas both believe Scott’s innocence and help each other to try and prove it. Kansas tracks down those whom she knows have lied about seeing this woman. She haunts the bar where Scott first met this mysterious woman.

Kansas assumes the role of serious cookie as she taunts Mac the bartender who denies having ever seen the woman with the funny hat in his bar with Scott at the time his wife was murdered. The bartender winds up getting killed in a car accident. She also goes undercover as a “hep kitten” to trap the lecherous and super frenetic drummer Cliff played to the sweaty frenzied orgasmic nines by Elisha Cook Jr. The jazz fanatic admits that he has been paid off to “forget” the woman. But when Kansas drops her purse and Cliff sees the police sheet on him that she’s carrying on him, he goes even wackier and pursues her. She evades him and calls Burgess.

Along the way, Inspector Burgess confronts Kansas in her apartment and tells her that although he did his job at the time, he also believes in Scott’s story because a child could make up a better alibi than the story he has stuck to so religiously. So now Kansas and Burgess set about to prove that someone has been tampering with these witnesses.

At this point, Jack Marlow, Scott’s secretly crazed artist friend comes back from Brazil to lend his help in getting to the bottom of the case. Jack was having an affair with Scott’s wife and killed her when she refused to run away with him. The always-present Jack begins to play an important role in helping solve the murder. He meets Kansas at the prison while both are visiting Scott.  He wants to help her find the real murderer. They eventually trace the hat to Ann Terry after they find the milliner who designed the unusual hat. Ann gives them the hat.  Kansas goes back to Jack’s studio to wait for Burgess and winds up discovering her stolen purse, realizing that Jack is in fact the murderer. Jack begins to untie his scarf, another strangulation on his mind, but Burgess arrives just in time and Jack commits suicide by defenestration. Interesting to note that Jack’s obsession with his hands reminds me of Maurice Renard’s novel The Hands of Orlac adapted in 1924 starring Conrad Veidt, again in Mad Love in 1935 starring Peter Lorre, and then again in 1960 starring Mel Ferrer.

What lies ahead is a very gripping story with several taut and fiery moments amidst the looming shadows and dead ends.

Elisha Cook Jr. is too believable yet fantastic as the tweaked sleazy drummer who’s got an appetite for women in the audience, even the phantom lady whom he flirted with.

And Fay Helm plays a very palpable victim of her own sadness as the Phantom Lady who alludes to the police after that one night at the musical revue with Scott.

What adds to the noirish obfuscation of the story is the witnesses who are despicable in their evasiveness, which creates an atmosphere of obstruction that is stirring and at times, maddening. But they will all meet a certain cosmic justice by the film’s end.

Woolrich was a prolific writer whose work came close to being as popular as Raymond Chandler, and he was responsible for many of the screenplays of the 1940s as well as the radio drama Suspense. Ella Raines is absolutely breathtaking to look at. And sadly Alan Curtis having died in the 50s of complications from surgery was not only great at being sympathetic, but he was also strikingly handsome as well.

Carol ‘Kansas’ Richman: [Visiting Scott in prison] Is there anything I can do for you?

Scott Henderson: Yes. You can thank the foreman. I forgot to.

Carol ‘Kansas’ Richman: I don’t know what to say.

Scott Henderson: Skip it, Kansas. I’ll be all right now that I know where I stand. Yes, I’ll be fine. Last night for the first time I didn’t have to count sheep. I slept like a guilty man.

Phantom Lady is a cerebral excursion, which uncovers a lot of psychological layers for us, as it progresses.

Without giving away any key parts of the plot, I’ll say that the film shows us the dark side of humanity.

Without going into the background of the characters, the narrative of Phantom Lady is drawn out in little scenic bursts of disclosure. While the film doesn’t describe to us why these characters are doing what they do with the use of flashback another noir technique, we see who these people are by their actions. The film explores human nature in a slightly gritty naturalistic style.

The cinematography by Elwood Bredell (The Ghost of Frankenstein 1942, The Mystery of Marie Roget 1942, Christmas Holiday 1944, Lady on a Train 1945, The Killers 1946, The Unsuspected 1947, Female Jungle 1956)  is remarkable as Bredell paints a landscape of looming shadows, dark sinister corners and breaks of light that cut through the clouds of mystery and excursions into bad spaces.

A nightmarish journey of the wrongly accused, the tragedy of loss, greed, true madness, and sometimes darkness of the soul. And ultimately the love that bears its fruits by unrelenting devotion and the pursuit of the truth at any cost.

Kansas will need to wash her mouth out with bleach after the predatory Cliff plants a raptorial kiss on her!

Inspector Burgess: The fact remains that none of you could have committed these murders.

Jack Marlow: Why not?

Inspector Burgess: You’re all too normal.

Jack Marlow: Oh, the murderer must be normal enough. Just clever, that’s all.

Inspector Burgess: Yes, all of them are. Diabolically clever.

Jack Marlow: Who?

Inspector Burgess: Paranoiacs.

Jack Marlow: That’s simply your opinion. Psychiatrists might disagree.

Inspector Burgess: Oh, I’ve seen paranoiacs before. They all have incredible egos. Abnormal cunning. A contempt for life.

Jack Marlow: You make it sound unbeatable.


 

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The Dark Corner: Private Detective Noir: Mark Stevens-Lucille Ball-Clifton Webb-William Bendix “for 6 bits you’d hang your mother on a meathook”

The Dark Corner (1946) Director Henry Hathaway’s (Niagra 1953, Kiss of Death 1947 )rhythmical detective Noir, with more than just one great line here or there to fill out the plot. Based on a story by Leo Rosten and adapted to the screen by Bernard C Schoenfeld (Phantom Lady 1944, Caged 1950, Down Three Dark Streets 1954, There’s Always Tomorrow 1955) and Jay Dratler.(Laura 1944, Call  Northside 777 (1948), Pitfall 1948, Impact 1949, The Las Vegas Story 1952)  Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald(Panic in the Streets 1950, The Young Lions 1958, Walk on the Wild Side 1962, The List of Adrian Messenger 1963, The Carpetbaggers 1964, The Sand Pebbles 1966). Music composed by Cyril J. Mockridge.

“Hard-boiled, well-paced narrative, — tough-fibered”– Bosley Crowther-The New York Times May, 9 1946.

The Dark Corner is a particularly violent example of film noir the idea of a private detective being pursued by a gunman, whom he captures and proceeds to smash his hand and smears his white suit in order to make him confess to the reason he is tailing him. Later when William Bendix (white suit) breaks into the detective’s apartment he knocks him out viciously and before he leaves, he pays him in kind by stomping on Mark Steven’s hand while he’s unconscious. Dark Corner pushes the limits in drawing out anxiety in the audience. Still, as yet Bradford Galt the private eye (Mark Stevens) cannot imagine why he is being persecuted and hunted down. He doesn’t even know the identity of his enemy. There is a Machiavellian villainous mastermind who is pulling the strings, and Galt is merely a puppet but not the true object of his ire. The great thrust of this narrative is the sense of meaningless suffering mixed with motiveless persecution.

In most Noir films there are the elements of existential anguish– the angst that runs through the central characters’ narrative. Bradford Galt is a prime example of the detective with this sense of being at the mercy of his past burden, the one that haunts his present life. He got a fast shuffle out west, accused of a crime he did not commit, serving time in prison for vehicular manslaughter, set up by his partner-the double-crossing dandy Tony Jardine (Kurt Kreuger) Now he just wants the chance to start up a legitimate business as a Private Detective in New York City.

Kathleen “But remember, I can get brand new tough guys for a dime a dozen.”

Bradford “Here, get yourself two dozen.”

[Bradford tosses two dimes at Kathleen across the table]

Kathleen Kathleen pushes them back towards Bradford] “I’d rather pick you up at a rummage sale. I’m a sucker for bargains. Speaking of bargains, if you can’t get nines in those nylons, I’ll take eight-and-a-half or even ten. Doesn’t matter.”

Bradford “I’ll make a note of it.”

Mark Stevens (The Snake Pit, The Street With No Name) is Bradford Galt, the hemmed-in beleaguered protagonist of the film. A private dick who just can’t escape his past, and is targeted as the fall guy in a malicious plot of revenge. As Foster Hirsch says in Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen “His life is subjected to wild reversals and inversions… Cornered, framed, set up as the patsy and the fall guy, these victims are the playthings of a malevolent noir fate…”

The Dark Corner (1946) Directed by Henry Hathaway Shown from left: Lucille Ball (as Kathleen), Mark Stevens (as Bradford Galt).

Lucille Ball is Kathleen Stewart his always faithful and trustworthy secretary who is with Galt for keeps. And then there’s the inimitable Clifton Webb as Hardy Cathcart who reprises his role as the effete love-struck snob Waldo Lydecker in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944).

In The Dark Corner, he plays the overrefined art dealer whose sanctimonious utterances drive much of the film’s best lines. William Bendix is the quintessential homicidal thug, Cathcart’s paid muscle, Stauffer alias Fred Foss who’s been hired to shadow Galt and unnerve him just enough to manipulate Galt into having a confrontation with ex-partner Tony Jardine in hopes of framing him for his murder by creating a motive for Jardin’s murder. Jardine is a man who blackmails women with incriminating love letters, in addition to having set Bradford Galt up for the previous manslaughter sentence, he is having an affair with Cathcart’s wife Mari (Cathy Downs) giving him money and jewels so they can take their stash and run away together and therein lies the tale of revenge. Galt is just the patsy, the fall guy, and the sacrificial goat.

Hardy Cathcart has a psycho-sexually grotesque obsession with his wife Mari played by Cathy Downs In fact, his icy preoccupation with owning fine things in particular his wife, who bares a striking resemblance to a rare painting, presents Webb’s character as a collector indeed, by entrapping his wife in a marriage as the ultimate ill fated ‘object’.

Hardy Cathcart: “The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither immoral nor illegal.”

In the realm of the Noir as detective yarn, The Dark Corner goes smoothly through each scene, darker than some contributions to Noir, it is sustained by some memorable dialogue and a psycho-sexual current that flows underneath the narrative. In particular, Cathcart is a coded-gay character, which I will cover in my upcoming feature Queers & Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters.

Chapter 3 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:

The Dark Corner utilizes some of the characteristic visual motifs of the Noir film The frame within a frame, creates the environment of imprisonment. Bradford Galt is an iconic figure whose existential anxieties create the trope of no way out.

Bradford Galt murmurs “There goes my last lead. I feel all dead inside. I’m backed up in a dark corner, and I don’t know who’s hitting me”. This reflects the uncertainty of the character’s situation. Mired in the existential despair of going down blind alleys and not being able to see who his enemies truly are.

Even the shot of Kathleen waiting in the cab, looking out the window, Kathleen’s (Lucille Ball looking gorgeous) face is framed by the glass and the darkened night. She is fixed on her love for Bradford Galt. As she tells him

Kathleen-“I haven’t worked for you very long, Mr. Galt, but I know when you’re pitching a curve at me, and I always carry a catcher’s mitt.”

Bradford-“No offense, A guy’s got to score, doesn’t he?”

Kathleen-“I don’t play for score. I play for keeps.”

There is a very memorable scene in The Dark Corner which has a very vivid moment of someone being flung out a window. I guess defenestration is a popular method of character disposal in Noir/Thrillers. Being hurled out a window is quite a drastic way to die, let us say rather than being shot in the heart once with a small pistol. Defenestration is an utterly violent way to die.

The Dark Corner has other inherently typical themes of Noir in addition to the detective yarn, it also shares the “wrong man archetype”. Galt has been framed for a crime he did not commit. For the first part of The Dark Corner, it is also not made very clear who and/or why someone, possibly this Jardine character is persecuting Galt.

The chiaroscuro is used powerfully when obscuring the embrace of Jardin and Cathart’s wife downstairs in the lower level of the art gallery, while Hardy Cathcart stands off stage. This ambiguous shadow-play that Hardy Cathcart witnesses reveal that he might have known for quite some time about his wife’s unfaithfulness.

More disturbing is the idea, that as his prized possession, wife Mari is an object d ‘art, a thing, that will remain with him even if she doesn’t love him, even if she’s been with other men. This is the main underpinning for the film. Without Cathcart’s sinister obsession, there would be no story.

Hardy Cathcart “Love is not the exclusive province of adolescence, my dear; it’s a heart ailment that strikes all age groups-like my love for you. My love for you is the only malady I’ve contracted since the usual childhood diseases. And it’s incurable.”

Hardy “I found the portrait long before I met Mari, and I worshiped it. When I did meet her it was as if I’d always known her. And wanted her.”

Party Guest “Oh how romantic”

Hardy “If you prefer to be maudlin about it. Perhaps.”

Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) is superb as the private investigator who after serving 2 years for vehicular manslaughter, in which he was set up by his ex-partner a shyster lawyer the suave Tony Jardine (Kurt Kreuger), Galt comes to New York from San Fransisco to start over. He’s got a kind of Alan Ladd, nice guy looks about him.

He opens up his new detective’s agency. Bradford Galt sits in his huge mostly empty office with one large desk and a map of the city on the wall, and a phone.

Lt Frank Reeves ( Reed Hadley) is the ever-present detective on Bradford Galt’s back, watching over him to make sure that he isn’t going to slide into any criminal behavior again and let Bradford Galt know that he’ll be watched from here on out. The detective promised his friends in California that Bradford Galt wouldn’t get into any mischief, saying “He’s an impulsive youth” and he’d be smart to keep it clean.

One of the driving narratives of The Dark Corner is Bradford Galt’s self-persecution and Kathleen’s need to prop him up and keep him from feeling sorry for himself. The more he tells her to forget him, the tighter she holds on and sticks by him.

Kathleen-“What’s done to you is done to me.”

The banter between Stevens and Ball is highly palpable and it’s quite sweet the way they develop their relationship. Even when she mentions him being a detective and uncovering a pair of nylons size nine for her and he keeps saying he’ll make a note of that. It’s their chemistry, their adoring partnership that’s yet the other real focus of the story.

 (Frank Foss also known as ‘White Suit’ throughout the film) hired muscle and tail, dressed in an ‘out of season’ linen white suit is tailing Galt and his secretary very conspicuously, while Galt and his new secretary and lady friend are on their first unofficial date, wandering through the Tudor Penny Arcade, they confer that white suit’s been tagging along. Both Bradford Galt and Kathleen notice him and conspire to get him up to Galt’s office. Kathleen is supposed to wait in a taxi and then follow Foss to where ever he goes. After Galt finds out what his game is. Once Bradford Galt gets hold of Foss (Bendix) he hits back hard, smashes his thumb with a rolled-up wad of quarters used like brass knuckles, and finds out that Jardine the ex-partner who had framed Galt back in San Fransisco and is now after him once again. Or is this just a ruse, set up by yet another nefarious mastermind behind a scheme to frame Galt for murder once again?

This sets off a chain reaction for Bradford Galt to uncover why Jardine is so interested in him again. Bradford Galt roughs up Bendix, humiliates him, takes his wallet so he can remember his name and where he lives, and when Foss spills ink on his desk, he wipes his inky fingers all over the nice white linen suit. Bradford Galt also breaks Frank Foss’ (Bendix’s) thumb. Which becomes significant later on in the film.

During the film, Bradford Galt is as sullen as a wounded animal having been set up a few years earlier by his ex-partner and now is being targeted once again, but this is secondary to the plot. It’s the vehicle for which Galt can finally put the demons from the past to bed and start over as a stronger more complete man who’s found his strength and love in his “faithful noir lady” Kathleen(Lucille Ball), who dotes on him and is the strong shoulder to lean on, whenever things get confused or dangerous. Kathleen’s in it for keeps.

Kathleen just won’t quit her boss. She knows he’s in trouble and wants to help him in any way she can. She keeps pushing Galt to open up his steel-safe “heart”, of his and let her help. After a wonderful kiss, He just tells her “If you don’t want to lose that stardust look in your eyes, get going while the door’s still open… If you stick around here, you’ll get grafters, shysters two-bit thugs, maybe worse, maybe me.”

The one-liners are great in this film. And there are so very many of them. Webb is perfect as the pretentious predatory art gallery, he’s a snobbish fop who is more concerned about his collectibles namely his wife Mari though he connects them with his sense of pride and dignity without any moral principle. His wife is his possession and keeping her as such is the only thing that matters to Cathcart.

The Dark Corner is filled with quirky, interesting moments that fill out the landscape with memorable plot devices. One such wonderful element is when the little blonde girl who keeps playing her penny whistle irks Bendix’s character and adds a light comical edge to the picture. Galt is being hounded by Bendix using the alias name Foss who doesn’t succeed in running him down with his car, Detective Frank Reeves is trailing Bradford Galts’ every move to make sure he isn’t into any unsavory business.

Tony Jardine looms over Bradford Galt, the memory of having been framed for manslaughter by Jardine who doused him up with booze, puts him in the car, and leaves him to take the rap for killing a truck driver. At times we see Galt as he sits in his big mostly empty office except for his desk. This shot makes him look small and swallowed up. Again, Joseph MacDonald’s cinematography frame the shot within an atmosphere of entrapment.

memorable lines:

Kathleen “I’ve never been followed before.”

Bradford Galt “That’s a terrible reflection on American manhood.”

 

Hardy Cathcart “How I detest the dawn. The grass always looks like it’s been left out all night.”

 

Bradford Galt “{to Anthony Jardine} “For six bits you’d hang your mother on a meat hook.”

 

Bradford Galt: “I’m playing this by the book, and I won’t even trip over a comma!”

 

Bradford Galt “There goes my last lead. I feel all dead inside. I’m backed up in a dark corner, and I don’t know who’s hitting me.”

 

Bradford Galt “I’m clean as a peeled egg. No debts, no angry husbands, no payoffs… nothin’.”

 

Bradford Galt: “I can be framed easier than “Whistler’s Mother”.

 

Mrs.Kingsly: “Isn’t my Turner divine? Look at it! It grows on you.”

Hardy Cathcart: “You make it sound like a species of fungus.”

 

Hardy “I found the portrait long before I met Mari, and I worshiped it. When I did meet her it was as if I’d always known her. And wanted her.”

Party Guest “Oh how romantic”

Hardy “If you prefer to be maudlin about it. Perhaps.”

 

Bradford Galt “You know, I think I’ll fire you and get me a Tahitian secretary.”

Kathleen “You won’t like them; those grass skirts are a fire hazard.”

 

Bradford Galt [replying to Anthony Jardine] “You, on the level. Why, for six bits you’d hang your mother on a meathook.”

 

Hardy Cathcart “Take, uh, Tony for instance. I never imagined him to be interested in… Lucy Wilding.”

Mari Cathcart “But he loathed her! It’s not true.”

Hardy Cathcart “He loathed her intimately.”

Mari Cathcart “He couldn’t!… she’s too old for him!”

Nightmare Alley: Faustian Carnival Noir: The rise and fall: From Divinity to Geek

The Hanged Man XII or Dying God – this figure is Osiris or Christ and shows redemption through suffering. He is drowned in the waters of affliction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The spook racket – I was made for it.”

Nightmare Alley (1947)

Directed by Edmund Goulding is one of the more moody, nightmarish and sophisticated Noir films of it’s time. Goulding’s direction works like an expose of the sleazier aspects of carnival life, threaded with romance, both surreal and unseemly. Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s book and scripted by Jules Furthman (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep). The film is a grim and somber look inside the lives of carnival folk and the demons who ride their backs with drug and alcohol abuse, which breeds inhumanity and the nadir that people are capable of reaching. This beautiful nightmare is both picturesque and polluted with ugly ideologies.

Cinematography by Lee Garmes, (Morocco 1930, Shanghai Express 1932, Scarface 1932, Duel in the Sun 1946, The Paradine Case 1947, The Captive City 1952, Lady in a Cage 1964) Music by Cyril J. Mockridge, and set direction by Thomas Little (Laura 1944, Day the Earth Stood Still 1951). Edited by Barbara McLean.(All About Eve 1950, No Way Out 1950, Niagara 1953).

The film stars Tyrone Power as Stanton Carlisle a ruthless con artist with no morals who stumbles onto a traveling carnival. Not only did Powers want to see Nightmare Alley made, but he also wanted the leading role to show 20th Century Fox that he was more than just a pretty face. It also stars Joan Blondell (one of my favorites and known for her wise-cracking sex appeal) as Zeena Krumbein, Colleen Gray (Kay in The Killing 1956) as Molly, Ian Keith in an intense role as alcoholic mentalist Pete Krumbein and Mike Mazurki as the strongman Bruno.

Nightmare Alley is an enthrallingly morbid fable about the rise and fall of a greedy, socio-pathic charlatan Stanton Carlisle (Power) who uses his good looks and skillful deception to work his way from traveling carnival barker to high society mentalist. First, he seduces Zeena (Joan Blondell) a gentle soothsayer, in order to obtain the key to her and her husband Pete’s (Ian Keith) mind-reading code. Stanton accidentally poisons Pete when he gives him a bottle of wood alcohol. He then moves on to romance Molly (Colleen Gray) the beautiful young girlfriend of the strongman Bruno (Mazurki). Stanton winds up marrying Molly, and the two leave the seedy carnival life for better pickings as successful nightclub mentalists, of course using the code he charmed out of Zeena. But even the nightclub act is not enough to satiate his desire for power. He meets Lilith (Helen Walker) an unscrupulous psychologist (the film’s coded lesbian and cunning femme fatale) who has access to her clients and can feed Stanton confidential details from her patients. The pair begin to blackmail their clients out of money. The ‘spook racket’ is an extremely profitable scheme, but his plans to build a spiritualist empire is at risk when Molly’s integrity overshadows Lilith’s avarice.

Stanton Carlisle is the film’s charismatic Anti-Hero, the central character who thrusts the film’s narrative forward though there are three very strong female leads. Stanton is portrayed by Tyrone Power in perhaps one of the most enigmatic performances of his career; an amoral misanthrope whose inherent skill is to prey on the vulnerability of people’s weakness.

The film’s two powerful and kind women have a crucial interdependence on Stanton. They are the ‘caregiver’ archetype of women, who while not in threat of bodily harm, their danger lies more in the betrayal of their trust. However, Helen Walker’s heinous psychiatrist who preys on the weakness of others is aptly named Lilith, the most ‘notorious demon’ in Hebrew mythology. Stanton exploits the opportunity that each woman offers up.

It’s a story of a immoral, ill-fated scoundrel who spirals down even farther, into a remote dark corridor where humanity has no place to radiate its light. It’s a story of devouring power and the leap into the pit of perdition with no sign of redemption. A truly nihilistic vision. Ultimately at the climax of Nightmare Alley, Stanton has fallen into the depths of the self-imposed freak show in purgatory.

Mademoiselle Zeena is portrayed by the earthy, gutsy Joan Blondell who is seduced by Stanton Carlisle, the charming carnival barker, con-man into teaching him the secret of “The Blind Fold Code”. A word code that helps mentalists work a crowd of people who submit questions for the “Mentalist” to answer. This was once a very lucrative stunt that Zeena and her husband Pete (Ian Keith) used, which was worth its weight in gold.

Zeena is the catalyst, the unwitting Prophetess who gives away the word code to Stanton. A Faustian contract that ultimately seals his condemned fate. Stanton will sign his soul away for the secret. For him, it is a one-way ticket to obtaining a dark providence for the sake of a brief dance with power. His appetite is fueled by Protean greed to obtain more and more power and riches. He longs to be a bona fide Mentalist, in high society, not just a two-bit cheater in a fleabag carnival. He wants to tap into the profitable Spook Trade where there is more of a potential for wealth. Stanton sees himself becoming more like an Evangelist, a prophet helping ease people’s crisis of faith as well as their grief while turning a sizable profit.

Zeena is also a Circe or Hecate — a witch, a seer, like a figure seen in her obedience to the art of Tarot. And her visions see very dark forces ahead for Stanton. She is a tragic figure because she has fallen under Stanton’s alluring influence, yet she is a devoted caretaker to her husband Pete whose drinking has cast a shadow over their career and marriage. Zeena is a woman trapped by her superstitions and her reverence for the arcane mysteries of life. She’s also a woman driven by her devotion and desires.

Stanton Carlisle: You’ve got a heart as big…

Zeena Krumbein: Sure, as big as an artichoke, a leaf for everyone.


In the opening scene we behold The Miracle Woman Zeena, standing on the platform by her tent, like a Greek goddess, a soothsayer, weary with visions of things that have played out in her life. Circumstances the Tarot Cards have foretold, that she is driven by the past winds of fate to observe. Zeena is at the mercy of her willing subjugation to her plight and the sacrifices she’s made in life as a caretaker and mystic witness.

Molly (played by Coleen Gray) is the sweet young girl in the carny act, billed as the Electro Girl who sports a galvanic bra that can withstand electrical shocks so she doesn’t get fried in her seat. Letting the arc of electricity flow between her hands is a mesmerizing scene. It gives Molly her almost fairy-like quality. The mirror with which to reflect whatever decency might still be inherently shrouded in Stanton’s dark heart. She can only see his beauty and his passion for working the crowd and his gift for showmanship. She doesn’t understand his ruthless nature, or that he is exploiting her affections. Molly is in danger of being manipulated by Stanton who plunges into marrying Molly for the purpose of using her in his new act. Her face is almost lit like an icon of a painted Roman angel, cannot see the wheels turning in Stanton’s eyes when he talks about them being together.

Stanton is fascinated by The Geek in the sideshow. This is the carnival’s biggest draw, but a subversive illegal attraction that even some performers won’t work there if a show carries such a grotesque feature. But Stanton is fixated on him. “How do you get a guy to be a Geek, is he born that way?” It’s an unsettling foreshadowing of events. “I can’t understand how can get so low” We can hear the live chickens squawking as they are being fed to The Geek. It’s a disturbing effective use of background sound.

Stanton thrives on the energy of the carnival “I like it, it gets me to see those yokels out there gives you a superior feeling, as if YOU were in the know and they were on the outside looking in.” We see Stanton as an egoist with a ruthless narcissism to take over, be in control, to be omnipotent.

Stanton first starts working on Zeena’s affections in order to procure the secret code. She doesn’t want to hurt Pete. But she is taken in by Stanton’s seductions. If the new act works, she could make enough money to get Pete “the cure”. “Oh Stan do you think I could make the big time again?” Her arm stretched out leaning on a pole, he kisses the soft insides where her arm bends. She is torn between enabling Pete and being seduced by their lustful manipulations by Stanton.

Stanton Carlisle: What kind of deck is this?

Zeena Krumbein: This is the tarot. Oldest kind of cards in the world. Pete says the gypsies brought them out of Egypt. They’re a wonder for giving private readings.

Stanton Carlisle: I’d say. They look plenty weird.

Stanton shows up later at Zeena’s hotel room where she has laid out the Tarot cards. He asks what she’s doing. “This is the Tarot, the oldest kind of cards in the world … whenever I have something to decide or don’t know which way to turn.”

She tells him to cut the cards 3 times. “Look Stan that’s the Wheel of Fortune, Pete and I never had it this good!” Everything looks good for them in the reading, but there is no sign of Pete dead or alive. Zeena starts to panic. Stanton picks up a card that had fallen on the floor face down. Zeena is shaken, “It couldn’t be like that it’s too awful, it’s too crazy what have I done!”

She tells Stan to take his bags and get out, it’s all off. Stan asks what he’s done, she says “Nothing! but I can’t go against the cards.”

Nightmare Alley’s characters each have their own level of spiritual awareness, an intimate relationship with their own nature of worship. Zeena dabbles in the esoteric mystical aspects of superstitions of luck and curses. The Marshall who comes to shut the carnival down, has a very quiet reverence as a good Christian man, Molly is the embodiment of moral purity, and Stanton sees himself wielding his own religion as a Nietzcsheqsue Uberman.

Zeena shows Stanton Pete’s card. The Hanged Man is the recurring theme of the film. This again is the foreshadowing of what can happen when humanity is sacrificed for power. She tells Stan when a card falls face down on the floor, whatever is going to happen is going to happen fast and it’s never good. Stans says “That’s for the chumps, to fall for one of your own boob catchers” He’s so superior, so ruthless, he cannot even fathom that the warning might be credible. We don’t really see shades of humanity in him but a curiosity, as Stanton asks “I wonder why I’m like that, never thinking about anybody but myself.” Zeena asks if his folks dropped him on his head. “Yeah, they dropped me.” This gives us a little background, he grew up in an orphanage where he became aware of the Gospel that came with black and blue bruises and its useful passages he can avail himself of later. They kiss, and Zeena is once again under his charismatic control.

Molly: You ought to have heard Stan spout the gospel to that old hypocrite. It was like being in Sunday school.

Zeena Krumbein: You must have been raised pretty religious.

Stanton Carlisle: Yeah, in a county orphanage.

Molly: Didn’t you have any folks?

Stanton Carlisle: If I did, they weren’t much interested.

Zeena Krumbein: Where’d you learn all this gospel?

Stanton Carlisle: In the orphanage. That’s what they used to give us on Sunday after beating us black-and-blue all week. Then when I ran away, they threw me in the reform school. But that’s where I got wise to myself. I let the chaplain save me, and got a parole in no time. Boy, how I went for salvation! Comes in kind of handy when you’re in a jam.

On a foggy night, crickets chanting, Zeena’s husband Pete, staggering in between the caravans of the carnival stumbles upon Stanton one night. Zeena has cut him off from his drinking. Pete has the dropsies. In the background, we hear the Geek wailing, screaming, ungodly screams. “He’s got the heebie-jeebies again.”

Throughout the film’s darker scenes the usage of music by Cyril Mockeridge, with orchestral arrangements by Maurice Packh underscores moments with a diabolical motif, again in keeping with the Faustian theme. Several waves of glossolalia especially where the Geek runs amok on the carny grounds are simply mind-altering.

Stanton gives Pete the bottle he’s stashed in the prop trunk and says here you need this more than me. Pete tells him “You’re a good kid Stan, you’re going places, nothing can keep you out of the big time, just like I used to have.” He reminisces about him and Zeena during their big time when they had top billing. The Geek comes stumbling near them singing an incoherent tune, “Poor guy” Stanton says. “If it weren’t for Zeena they’d be saying that about me, Poor Pete, Pete the Geek” He remembered that fellow when he’d first showed up at the carnival. He used to be plenty big-time. “Mental Act?” “what difference does it make, old smoked meat now, just a bottle a day rum dumb and he thinks this job is heaven, as long as there’s a bottle a day and a dry place to sleep it off. There’s only one thing this stuff (bottle) will make you forget how to forget.”

Pete jumps onto the platform, turns the grungy, swinging overhead lamp on, and begins his little soliloquy, his old spiel “Throughout the ages certain men have looked into the polished crystal (holds the bottle of liquor to his breast and gazes) and see, is it something about the quality of the crystal itself, or does the gazer merely use it to turn his own gaze inward” now holding his hands to his temples as if to gleaning visions” in a seriously, sage like tone, as if giving a sermon (again the comparative to religion).

“Who knows, but visions come, slowly shifting their form, visions come, WAIT! the shifting shapes, begin to clear.”

Pete Krumbein: Throughout the ages, man has sought to look behind the veil that hides him from tomorrow. And through the ages, certain men have looked into the polished crystal… and seen. Is it some quality of the crystal itself, or does the gazer merely use it to turn his gaze inward? Who knows? But visions come. Slowly shifting their forms… visions come. Wait. The shifting shapes begin to clear. I see fields of grass… rolling hills… and a boy. A boy is running barefoot through the hills. A dog is with him. A… DOG… is… with… him.

Stanton Carlisle: Yes… go on… his name was Jib. Go on!

Pete Krumbein: [Choked laughter] Humph. See how easy it is to *hook* ’em!

He begins to describe fields of rollings hills to Stanton, a young barefooted boy, and a dog. Stanton caught up in Pete’s oration begins to tell him, “His name is Jim, go on” Pete breaks from his trance and begins to laugh sardonically, “See how easy it is to hook ’em!” he cackles. “Stock reading fits everybody. Every boy has a dog”, as he laughs. But Pete’s demonstration deepens Stanton’s hunger to obtain the ability to entrance people by elocution and persuasion. To divine people’s souls by reading their body language. To Stanton, this is a form of religion. To be a holy man of the mental act. An art form, a business, and again, a spiritual rescuer to those who are in a crisis of faith — only… for a price.

That night, Stanton unknowingly slips Pete a bottle of wood alcohol that Zeena uses to burn the papers of written questions from the audience. Stanton accidentally reaches into the prop trunk and grabs the wrong bottle. The bottle that Pete had been drinking that night. He dies and leaves Zeena to renew the act with Stanton as her partner working for the crowd. But the guilt that starts to build up in Stanton’s psyche haunts him, and eventually becomes the spiraling down, the turn of his destiny and his ruination. While climbing to the top in society being billed at a Chicago nightclub as a Mentalist he is attracting a lot of attention.

Zeena shows up at Stanton and Molly’s hotel for a surprise visit. Again she lays out the Tarot cards “You’re going to the top, like a skyrocket” The one card face down is The Hanged Man, Pete’s card. This rattles Stanton. Molly believes it and Zeena warns Stanton not to take the act in the direction he is thinking. He calls Zeena and Bruno carnival freaks and tells them to get out. But Zeena comes back having forgotten her Tarot deck. Again, Zeena finds The Hanged Man face down on the floor. We hear the music glossolalia again, the disturbing voices resurrected in the backdrop. Later, Stanton goes to get a massage and when the masseuse puts alcohol on Stan’s skin to close his pores, he thinks of Pete about the night he inadvertently switched the bottles of alcohol that killed Pete. The act he benefited from because it created his opportunity to use “the code” and rise to the top.

At the nightclub in Chicago, in the audience one night, there is a woman, Dr Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker) a cunning psychoanalyst, who challenges Stanton. He goes to see her at her office and a new unholy relationship is forged. Not based on sexuality but the mutual bond of greed and opportunistic paranoia. She is the femme fatale of this noir film. She records all her patient’s sessions and Stanton wants to be able to use that information to his advantage, by having inside details of people’s lives that he can use in his Mentalist act. The name Lilith again is an interesting element. Lilith in Hebrew mythology is related to a class of female demons. When Stanton accuses her of secretly recording her patient’s sessions she espouses “Anything my patients reveal is as sacred as if given under the seal of the confessional.” Again references to the religious structure. And the twisted bond they forge from this point on is based on “it takes one, to catch one.”

Ritter gives Stanton secret information about a wealthy patient of hers. Ezra Grindle (Taylor Holmes). Stan sees it as “An absolute blown in the glass clincher” Stan doesn’t see this skeptic as a challenge because his ego is so poised that he is certain he can con this old man into believing that he can manifest the spirit of his long-dead love Dory. Using his command of the Gospel, Ezra a man who obviously struggles with religion, is told to “prepare himself more with prayer and good works” To Stanton this translates into receiving enough money for his own radio station and tabernacle.

Trying to use Molly as an accomplice to dupe the very wealthy man out of a fortune Molly threatens to leave Stan. He manipulates her love for him by telling her “What should I do, should I let the man’s soul be lost forever, or should I stake my own to save it!” It is this brilliant subterfuge that convinces Molly to stand by him for this ruse. She is so bound by her blindness, that she follows Stanton a bit further. She agrees to play the ghost of Dora.

From here on in, Stanton begins his descent down the darkened pit, where he losses his wicked identity and transforms into a damned, lowly geek.

Stanton Carlisle: Listen to me, I’m no good. I never pretended to be. But, I love you. I’m a hustler. I’ve always been one. But, I love you. I may be the thief of the world, but, with you I’ve always been on the level.

McGraw – Final Carnival Owner: Wait. I just happened to think of something. I might have a job you can take a crack at. Course it isn’t much and I’m not begging you to take it, but it’s a job.

Stanton Carlisle: That‘s all I want.

McGraw – Final Carnival Owner: And we’ll keep you in coffee and cake. Bottle every day, place to sleep it off in. What do you say? Anyway, it’s only temporary, just until we can get a real geek.

Stanton Carlisle: Geek?

McGraw – Final Carnival Owner: You know what a geek is, don’t you?

Stanton Carlisle: Yeah. Sure, I… I know what a geek is.

McGraw – Final Carnival Owner: Do you think you can handle it?

Stanton Carlisle: Mister, I was made for it.

McGraw – Final Carnival Owner: Well, he certainly fooled me. I never recognized him. Stanton. Stanton the Great.

Roustabout at Final Carnival: How can a guy get so low?

McGraw – Final Carnival Owner: He reached too high. Good night, boys. Lock up.

Roustabout at Final Carnival: Good night.

William Lindsay Gresham discusses his creative angst researching Nightmare Alley, as a backdrop to his own movement toward faith. Here it’s cited his discovery of Tarot:

“During my analysis I had a brief period of prosperity: I managed to write a novel, savage, violent, and neurotic, which made money. Yet with a temporary release from financial worries, my own inner nightmare grew worse. It was not true, then, that men live by bread alone?” (Source)