The Lineup (1958), Don Siegel / 5 Against the House (1955), Phil Karlson.

Reno, Reno, Reno, baby, Reno, Reno, Reno!

Finishing up the first volume of my Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics set, I'm licking my chops ready to start the second.  I found 5 Against the House the weakest film of the whole collection.  The title alone screams heist, but none of this gets going until Kim Novak and boyfriend Guy Madison have canoodled for a half-hour or MORE.  Zzzzzzzzz.  Actual heist concept these middle aged "college kids" (Korean war vets) dream up is totally corny and doomed to fail.  You know, you just never hear about Reno anymore.  Does anyone still go? 

The Lineup by contrast, while not a perfect film, is pretty darn slick.  Based on a popular TV show, there's an obligatory but completely pointless line up scene which must have been there just to satisfy studio execs who wanted people to make the connection between the film and the show.  Filled with gorgeous location views of San Francisco, the story turns on a completely hokey concept:  that an Asian based heroin trade would plant teeny quantities of drugs on unsuspecting tourists and then employ psychos to retrieve it once they are back home in America!  OK, but listen-- Eli Wallach as said psycho, his elderly mentor and their "wheelman" make this too thrilling!   Bonus:  crazed banter between noir buff Eddie Muller and author James Ellroy on the commentary track make this an incredible package.  I'm your kind of people, guys! 

 That's some collision!  From The Lineup

Slaves in Bondage (1937), Elmer Clifton.

I wish I could walk right into nightclub scenes of 30s and 40s movies, past the characters and the plot, pick up an imaginary cocktail and hang out & listen to the performance onstage.  I can't think of better accompaniment to a dinner than professional dancers and musicians.  Unlike the diner, these deco clubs seem not to exist anywhere anymore.  The shot above is from a beautiful scene in Slaves in Bondage:  a sensual tango accompanied by soft xylophones.   I always wait for characters to comment on these amazing acts - they rarely do.   In this scene, our villain says, "I'm bored.  Let's get out of here."  What!  

Slaves in Bondage is supposedly an exploitation flick about prostitution rings.  It's actually a decent mystery with likable leads.  Condemned in '37 as "wholly objectionable" by the National Legion of Decency, this film would likely earn a PG-13 these days.  All the risque material fits with the narrative - hardly exploitative.  (OK, there's that one spanking scene - big whoop).  Lona Andre has cartoonish cute looks and her character is no dummy.  A manicurist in a barber shop, she twigs onto the fact that one of her best paying (and overly attentive) customers has sidelined her journalist boyfriend by saddling him with a pocket of marked bills.  While this client (Wheeler Oakman, playing Jim Murray) is the nominal bad guy, house madame Belle Harris (played by Florence Dudley) is the more disturbing character who does all the hands-on work finding naive young ladies desperate to make a few dollars.  There's a sizable cast of fascinating nobodies but I especially liked the hopeless acrobats, even though we never discovered if they ever paid the rent!

  

A Successful Failure (1934), Arthur Lubin.

Lovely Ruth thinks twice about Mr Pencil Mustache's latest offer, one which does not involve marriage.

Dreaming of having his own humour column, henpecked Ellery Cushing cranks out one-liners by day in his study.  By night he is a copy editor at the local newspaper until he's canned by a cranky, penny-pinching boss.  Cushing is rescued from poverty by an old newspaper buddy who helps him parlay his mountain of jokes about the follies of domestic life into a new job in radio.

Crumpled old Cushing is the timid voice of traditional values that keep his family together.  William Collier Sr does a good job depicting the exhausted head of the family, a man struggling against the challenges of modernity.  His pretty daughter Ruth is steps away from a ruined life at the hands of a millionaire creepster, and his son Robert is an enthusiastic but naive supporter of "proletariat" politics; both hound him for money and are apparently too lazy to actually look for work.  More typical of earlier Monogram productions (i.e., Beggars in Ermine), this film recognizes the contemporary politics and events of mid-30s America.  In fact, A Successful Failure is explicitly anti-Communist.  By the film's end Cushing has denounced rabble rousing, decried the fall of Wall Street and praised the New Deal.   Despite the reactionary tone that makes an everyday father a "successful failure," the film likely struck its contemporary viewers as realistic and relevant. 

You can tell they are Communists, because they meet in the dark with torches!

Isle of the Dead (1945), Mark Robson.

Sadly, one of the weakest Lewton films.  One-dimensional story basically laid bare from the opening title card, so every subsequent plot point can be easily guessed.  Lewton recycles from his earlier works and Karloff is no great asset, sporting a curly mop of grey hair that makes him look like a depressed clown.  Apparently Karloff suffered from spinal pain that necessitated surgery around the time of filming, but still, this film is a mess!

The Seventh Victim (1943), Mark Robson.

The Seventh Victim alternates between silly and labyrinthine, seemingly portentous but ultimately devoid of meaning.  It may be rich for Lewton analysts, but in terms of a viewing experience for anyone seeking a concrete tale it will be unsatisfying.  Private school student Mary searches for her older sister Jacqueline, who has gone missing.  None of the facts that are offered to the audience makes much sense and are often contradictory.  Events that are depicted as mysteries worth solving become non-events that are casually revealed later.  Edward G Bansack claims that the film was heavily edited and key scenes were removed, which may explain the apparent fast pace of the film and some of the gaps in the logic of the story.  However, if the film is largely close to Lewton's original vision, it is a fascinatingly early example of someone deliberately playing with film narrative; fascinating especially because of the presumably straightforward expectations of both the studio that funded the film and the audiences that went to see it.  Some scenes are simply jarring and creepily surreal:  why was a policeman instructing Mary to call the police about her sister's disappearance?  How did Redi get into Mary's apartment?

As Bansack writes about the film's conclusion, "strangely, by this point in the film we have little concern for any of the remaining characters...even The Seventh Victim's main character, Mary, becomes less important, her callow romance with Ward bordering on the trivial. These artificial wrap-up scenes... are merely perfunctory and add nothing positive to the film." The biggest letdown was for me the infantile scene in which the devil worshipers are chastised by a recitation of the Lord's Prayer!  I tend to write off incomprehensible films with fatalistic characters as metaphors for life's journey (surely the fact that Jacqueline stays with a family that runs a restaurant called Dante's must count for something?) but who will ever truly know the meaning of this film - we do know that it was RKO's custom to simply provide Lewton with a title, asking him to fill in the rest!

I Take This Oath / Police Rookie (1940), Sam Newfield.

Mike Hanagan is a veteran policeman who uncovers some juicy tidbits on the numbers racket, but right after a cozy dinner of "Irish turkey" (corned beef and cabbage) he gets bombed to pieces in his garage.  Son Steve decides to go through police training and track down the mugs that got his dear old da.  The story is toothless and predictable and despite a few actions scenes (car accidents and shootouts), unimaginative staging sees them fall flat.  Steve repeatedly bounces between clues to his father's death and being chewed out by the police captain for missing classes.  Baddies don't materialize until the end, which doesn't provide much tension, either!  A triangular love story is supposed to add a little sizzle but it's pretty clear that Steve's girlfriend just wants to get married as soon as he graduates.

The scene in which Steve is attempting to track down a shady character illustrates how poverty row B's err on the safe side with their perennially bland protagonists:  clearly ill at ease in a night club, Steve balks at the high price of a drink.  Feeling uncomfortable when a house girl asks him for a drink, he shuffles out and naively asks too many questions of the doorman.  I can't help but think that if this were an A picture (or at least a 50s B), the audience would escape with the character into the forbidden world of a seedy nightclub and at least enjoy the ambiance as he maneuvered the scene smoothly.  Instead in B-land we are stuck with a middle class schmuck as our tour guide.  Bah!

As actress Joyce Compton demonstrates, by 1940 women's hairdos got a little complicated.  Is it just me or is the guy on the left a dead ringer for Norm MacDonald?

Marooned (1969), John Sturges.

This seems like a movie that got way too much hype initially (it won an Oscar for special effects) and then fell quickly into disrepute as payback.  It gets a lot of slagging nowadays as a piece of crap but frankly, it's not bad!  Looking like it's leaping from a Sears Roebuck catalogue, what with all the primary colours and (by today's standards) cheap looking effects, it's a straightforward story of three astronauts whose rocket malfunctions on the way back from a space station stint.  They have 42 hours of oxygen and no booster rockets - WHAT WILL NASA DO?  Gregory Peck plays an emotionless physicist who doesn't see the logic in a rescue attempt and Gene Hackman is, as per usual, awesome.  A kind of rigid stoicism (parading as seriousness) that flows through this film makes it a little ridiculous.  The completely gorgeous Mariette Hartley is an automaton astronaut wife who tells the other automaton astronaut wives that the best remedy to the impending death of their husbands by slow suffocation is: c'mon gals, turn off your emotions!  There's a also little too many lingering shots of rinkydink model ships.  Oh, but taking a drink whenever one of the NASA eggheads says, "the numbers" would be a great way to further enjoy this one.

"Do not erase"! 

Keep the ladies alive taskforce!

Back in the zine-loving 90s this was one of my favourites, crammed with tiny print reviews of movie after movie and stitched together with love by some dude not too far away in Oregon who refused to publish his picture but described himself as a cross between Billy Dee Williams and Ron Jeremey.  I never did get this Jim Kelly premiere issue, but according to the Dear HNIC... letters, either #1 or #2  asked readers: "Why's the Brotha Always Gotta Die?"  As reader Arthur C wrote in his letter to the editor in one of the subsequent issues, "Something must be done.  I recently saw Alien Resurrection, Phantoms and Deep Rising.  And wouldn't' you know it...they killed the brothas.  With all that in mind, I'm starting the Keep the Brothas Alive Taskforce.  We're gonna harass the shit outta Hollywood until they let us live."  And true enough, Badazz Mofo was always asking WHY the brotha had to take a dirt nap, when the honky gets to save the day, get the girl, LIVE, etc.

Well, here it is almost fifteen years later (crap, look busy Jesus is coming!) and I have two questions to ask:  1)  did Hollywood ever wise up to Arthur C, and 2) why the LADIES always gotta die?  Are ladies the new brotha?  There's a hell of a lot of big Hollywood action movies these days where the violent death of a woman (wife, mother) provides that special kind of psychological depth a leading man might need.  I'd like to keep a tally because these flicks personally irritate the hell out of me!  Let's see: the first three that come to mind are Star Trek (2009), Shutter Island (2010), Inception (2010)...  I'll keep listing them as they come to me.  Sure, some of these have the wife death worked into the plot pretty well, but how many movies do we need on this freaking topic!?  Somehow a widower is the perfect male character to the contemporary screenwriter.  I guess if you are a lazy ass whose thinking can't rise above cliche, it's easier to make your male lead more noble and sensitive (and, yes, available) yet at the same time not coming across as a pussy by killing off his woman.  I choose to see this as a message to the audience that female characters are less interesting and disposable.  The experience of white ladies like mysself don't mean I can claim to know anything about what brothas are thinking when they get theirs onscreen, but c'mon!  Moratorium on the bereaved male lead!

If anyone wants to send me more flicks that fit this bill (major action film with male lead as widower) let me know and I'll compile them!  The Fugitive (1993), The Crow (1994), Minority Report (2002)...

Contemporary voices: what use is a B?

 The story stank, but he tried.

Were B's were a taboo subject in contemporary industry journals?  Luckily, no!  Cinematographer Phil Tannura advocated for creativity even in the most mundane assignments in a brief article submitted to American Cinematographer (September, 1941).  Behind the camera for Columbia's Bulldog Drummond series and other B products, Tannura went on to work in television towards the end of his career.  Tannura claims working in a B should be no source of shame to anyone and suggested that they instead should be viewed as opportunities to experiment with the latest technologies.  While a risk-averse mentality may rule A pictures and offer certain obstacles against innovation (such as "a director who is not particularly inclined to cooperate with the photographer, or a star who requires a certain specialized and conservative type of camera-treatment") the B's, according to Tannura, could be a place where a risk could be taken because who cares and who's watching!  "If you try out a lenses on a sequence or two," he reasons, "you're not jeopardizing either a big investment or the appearance of an important star...if you succeed, you've found something valuable; if the experiment isn't so successful you're still likely to be ahead, for you've been concentrating on your camera-technique rather than 'walking through' the assignment."

Unfortunately, Tannura does not name any B's that may have been putting his philosophy into practice.  However he received lukewarm recognition himself for putting his words into action when Harold V Cohen reviewed wartime dud Lucky Legs for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  "Tannura has done full justice to her titular props, but the tale... is just a little too indigestible."

So Dark the Night (1946) and My Name is Julia Ross (1945), Joseph H Lewis.

As an AV Club commenter wrote about Robert Osborne, "no matter where he is, as soon as you spot him he takes a few steps toward you and bends his arm at the elbow."  (Sure, it's not beneath me to quote "Juanito" from a comments board).  It was B-movie kismet for me last night, thanks to Osborne and the brilliant programmers at TCM.  I had literally been adding So Dark the Night and other Joseph H Lewis films to my list of missing B-movie classics and the next evening I stumble on a Lewis film fest!  

Lewis toiled in the murky depths, cranking out genre B's like Bowery Boys and Lugosi vehicles for Monogram and PRC before hitting his stride with movies such as My Name is Julia Ross and So Dark the Night.  Although these two were also made on tight schedules and limited budgets, they reveal what surprisingly good movies could come of this stringent process in the right hands.  Lewis appears to have had Val Lewton's gift of creating a world out of a few carefully placed props and, like Lewton's best works, these offer exotic settings for their more mature psychological mysteries.  Myron Meisel's essay "Joseph H Lewis, Tourist in the Asylum," (From Kings of the Bs, 1975) emphasizes Lewis' emerging skills in storytelling through camera placement in So Dark the Night.  Characters are separated from another through use of space and dolly work.  Their phobias and anxieties are expressed visually.  "From the opening," writes Meisel, "the film shows complete visual control."  My Name is Julia Ross had me tense for all 65 minutes.  I believe the film's sense of reality is rooted in its lack of showy effects - we as viewers are simply stuck as prisoners in the wood-paneled bedroom alongside Nina Foch's character, plotting desperate escape.  The limited number of shooting locations deepen the sense of being trapped in an inescapable place.  Each physical prop (a letter, a stone) becomes tangible tools in our own arsenal as we strategize how to break free.  Interestingly, the film shares certain (minimal) plot elements with Shutter Island which for all its play with effects, flashbacks and colour did nothing but alienate viewers to its character's mental state.