This Gun for Hire

I’m not a Veronica Lake guy.  A human charisma sump who nearly torpedoed Sullivan’s Travels, this hairstyle with a mannequin under it sleepwalks through This Gun for Hire as if she’s on gin, or quaaludes, or both.  Pair her with Alan Ladd as an antihero with absolutely zero redeeming qualities, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Fortunately, This Gun for Hire features Robert Preston as the police lieutenant out to catch the evil Ladd and save Ms. Lake.  Even though the great actor’s forced to recite lines like “I want you to darn my socks for me.  To wash my floors and make my corned beef and cabbage,” and even though he’s forced to act like he’s attracted to Lake, there’s no denying his irrepressible charisma.  For every moment Lake brings the film to a halt, Preston fires it right back up again and keeps us in the game.

The story?  Oh, some noirish nonsense about men in fedoras and doublecrosses and spies and poison gas.  It clicks along ok, enlivened by excellent character work from the aforementioned Preston, Marc Lawrence as a henchman who takes particular pride in his work, Laird Cregar as an amorous nightclub owner, and Tully Marshall as the mastermind of the aforementioned spies and poison gas storyline.

One could imagine this movie with Barbara Stanwyck or Lana Turner – what a joy that would have been.  Unfortunately, with Veronica Lake front and center, it doesn't quite work.  How did this woman get a career, anyway?

Three Noirs

Odds Against Tomorrow is a heist movie, a noir movie, and a racial parable all wrapped up in one.  Ed Begley is the disgraced former NYPD detective.  Robert Ryan is the hard-bitten ex-con who’d prefer to stay clean, but doesn’t mind a little dirt.  Harry Belafonte is the degenerate gambler who owes a lot of money to some very bad people.

Begley works out the score and recruits his accomplices, but there’s a problem: yan is a vocal racist and won’t trust Belafonte.  How will they work together when things inevitably veer off plan?

It’s a great premise, but it suffers in execution.  The film spends all but the last fifteen minutes setting up the characters and heist, but this leaves very little time for nuance when things go wrong.  I’d have appreciated more time in the crime, more reversals and counter-reversals.  As it was, I could see right off how things were going to go, and after that it was just waiting for the gears to turn.  I wanted to love Odds Against Tomorrow, but I found myself spending most of the film wishing it’d hurry up and the last few minutes wishing it would slow down.  Ah, well.

...

In Crime Wave, Gene Nelson is an ex-con trying to stay clean.  Ted de Corsia and a young Charles Bronson (as Charles Buchinsky) are escaped cons looking for a hideout and a big score.  Sterling Hayden is the police lieutenant out to get them all.  This is film noir, so there’s no telling what’s going to happen.

While Crime Wave counts as minor noir (Definition: anything I haven’t heard of before a friend turns me on to it), it’s successful.  Filmed almost entirely on location in ‘50s Los Angeles, it takes us to a place we can never (re)visit and makes us feel at home.  It gives us menacing villains, conflicted, heroes, and hard-boiled cops, and it puts them in a story with enough tension and surprise to keep us on edge and delight us to the end.

Crime Wave is a B-side to films like The Maltese Falcon and Out of the Past, but it’s a solid B-side.  If you have a hankering for a new noir, Crime Wave will scratch the itch nicely.

...

Decoy comes as part of a double bill on the same DVD as Crime Wave.  Unlike Crime Wave, which is tense and rewarding, Decoy is dull.

Here’s the deal: some guy in a suit shoots a dame.  Why?  Hey, why not?  It’s ‘50s: everybody wears a suit.  The film goes on to tell us why he shot the dame, but we don’t really care.  Why not?  Because we don’t care about the dame.  Sure, she’s good-looking enough, but she lacks that star quality, that indefinable something that makes us wonder what she’s thinking and what she’s going to think about next, that the part requires.

Sure, there’s another hard-boiled cop (Sheldon Leonard, hamming it up), an innocent, a devilish plot, and perhaps the most fatale femme in the history of the genre.  But the cop’s a jerk, the innocent is a terrible actor, the plot is simplistic, and the femme makes you wonder if she got the part by sleeping with somebody (right up ‘til you learn that she was married to the director).

Ultimately, Decoy just isn’t very good, and that’s too bad.  I was all set to like it.

The Aura

THE AURA is about a guy, a simple guy, kind of a sap, who gets in way over his head. There’s a girl, of course, and guns, and money. Lots of money.

In other words, it’s a noir picture. It’s also Argentine, which is pretty cool since that makes it the first Argentine noir picture I’ve ever seen. The sap is sufficiently sappish, the girl is sufficiently girlish, and so forth, and the whole thing really catches fire in the last 45 minutes. Problem is, it’s a two hour long picture. Act One takes forever and Act Two takes nearly as long. Act Three, that last 45 minutes, is solid, but even it could have been a bit shorter. Here’s a movie that has all the elements it needs but that could have benefitted from one more, supertight, edit.

It’s that edit that keeps this film from excellence and renders it, instead, to the vault of pretty-goodness. Still, if you like noir, and you’re interested in seeing an Argentine take on the genre, THE AURA ain’t bad.

Just Another Love Story

JUST ANOTHER LOVE STORY is one helluva thriller.

No, it's not one of those movies where cats jump out of closets or knives make a sshhhhkkktt sound when they're pulled from a block. It's a movie with a supertight screenplay, spot on performances, and a score that makes notice its beauty without pulling you out of the film.

I hesitate to write much about the screenplay, other than to say that though it was written in Denmark and produced in 2007, it would have felt right at home in the Hollywood of the '40s and '50s. It's good noir, as good as you're likely to find, with dangerous women, crafty villains, and men who should now better.

Rebecka Hemse plays Julia, a good girl gone bad, with just the right combination of vulnerability and danger. Nikolaj Lie Kaas is Sebastian, nothing but trouble and charm. And Anders W. Berthelsen is the crucial element so many noirs, the sap. It helps that I hadn't seen these actors before, but not for a moment did I not believe them or believe in their challenges.

"Ok," you're thinking. "I've never heard of this movie and you've given me nothing to help me decide whether or not to queue it up." Problem is, I really don't want to tell you anything about it other than to say that if you liked OUT OF THE PAST, if you liked DOUBLE INDEMNITY, if you liked STRANGERS ON A TRAIN; then you're gonna like JUST ANOTHER LOVE STORY. Take a chance, give it a spin, tell me what you think.

I can't wait to hear.

Alphaville

I fired up ALPHAVILLE feeling neutral. I'm not a Godard fetishist, but neither do I repudiate the man. I was ready to take what this movie had to give and give it, in return, a fair shot. ALPHAVILLE began by puzzling me. Who was this supposed reporter from "LeMonde / Pravda"? Who were these people he was interested in? Why did some guy burst into his hotel room and try to kill him, and why did our supposed hero proceed to unwind by playing a little William Tell with his handgun and a hotel prostitute?

After a while, ALPHAVILLE went from puzzler to fascinator, as it rolled into a water ballet from Busby Berkeley's most depraved fantasies. In the process, it evoked the constant, all-pervasive fear that comes of living under a totalitarian regime and drew me into its world and its hero, one Ivan Johnson (or, as we would later come to call him, Lemmy Caution). As Lemmy came to understand Alphaville, its government, and its people, so I came to understand what was going on, who was targeting whom, and what the heck Anna Karina had to do with anything. As Lemmy took action, the scenario grew simpler still, 'til I was cheering him on and hoping he'd find both what he'd been sent for and what he needed.

I may have come into ALPHAVILLE feeling neutral, but I came out of it feeling energized and excited. Here's a movie that's willing to take risks with the conventions of filmed narrative, and here' s a movie that wraps its thoughtfulness in pulp and never takes its eye off the ball of any sound film's first priority: entertaining its audience.

ALPHAVILLE is a winner.

Shadow of a Doubt

Uncle Charlie's coming for a visit. He's been away for a while, engaged in "business," and now here he is, flush with cash. Charlie's happy to see her namesake uncle, whom she adores in ways both appropriate and inappropriate. Things are about to go very wrong.

And there's the setup for a thriller that's disturbing, engaging, and, yes, thrilling. Joseph Cotton plays Uncle Charlie as a classic sociopath: charismatic, evil, and utterly remorseless. Teresa Wright, as the younger Charlie, does a wonderful job of showing the scales falling from her character's eyes. The film itself winds us tighter and tighter, and the last fifteen minutes had me thoroughly on edge.

Simply put, I enjoyed every frame of SHADOW OF A DOUBT. What a delight.

PS There's a scene in the movie in which Cotton takes Wright to a seedy bar to tell her what's what. As I watched this movie on the Metro last night, someone sat behind me at that very moment. My fellow passenger smelled just like that bar: before I knew it, I was enveloped in the smells of cigarette smoke and alcohol. Talk about an immersive viewing experience!

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity has been on my Netflix queue forever. Actually, it's been sitting in the "pending release" portion, as no one had been willing to pony up for a DVD release. Finally, Turner Classic Movies stepped up and released a beautiful print of the film. It was worth the wait.

Not only does Double Indemnity look great, it sounds great. Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler put together a cracking good script with quotable lines, and Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck deliver them with gusto. This is a fun movie in a couple of ways.

Here's the setup: Fred MacMurray is morally flexible insurance man Walter Neff. While making a routine sales call, he meets Barbara Stanwyck, who plays Phyllis Dietrichson. It's a classic Stanwyck performance: she's sexy, she's hard-edged, and, oh, she's bad news as only Chandler can imagine bad news. Before long, Walter's masterminding a complex insurance scam / murder plot, but it won't be long before everything goes awry. I'm not giving anything away, incidentally - the movie begins with a shot and bleeding Walter confessing to a dictaphone.

Since, like Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity begins by giving away the fate of its protagonist, the question isn't whether the movie will surprise and astonish us. The question is whether it'll make us enjoy the journey. Will it? Well, it depends. Do you like noir? Do you like, MacMurray, Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson? More simply, do you like movies? If you can answer "yes" to any of the above, I bet you'll like Double Indemnity.

EDIT: A friend who works for TCM assures me that this DVD was a Universal, not TCM project from the get-go. I was thrown off by the film's introduction, which features Robert Osbourn on the TCM set. I must still have been thinking about that anklet.