The Thick-Walled Room (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Filmed in 1953, this movie was not released until 1956 because the studio considered it too provocative and critical of postwar American occupation of Japan and of Japan’s higher military establishment for heaping blame on lower-ranking soldiers for war crimes. On the surface, this is a war prison film with similarities to such films as Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953), and Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937), although The Thick-Walled Room is more raw, even ragged. It contains touches of the surreal in a dream sequence, and it has flashbacks. Mostly it focuses on the broken lives of the inmates of a prison for soldiers, a prison guarded by American MPs. We follow the lives of a small group as they try to overcome the trauma the war has visited on them. The narrative, like the lives of the soldiers, is fragmented, in pieces as it were. One soldier grows a beard and when called upon to shave it, he remarks that he is growing it long, long enough so he can hang himself with it. Another solider actually tries to hang himself. These are lives broken. These men bear the burden of a war they did not start, did not want, and did not control. Although this film has little in common with Kubrik’s Paths of Glory, that film kept coming back to me as I watched The Thick-Walled Room. Both are powerful anti-war films. The Thick-Walled Room works as a prelude to Kobayashi’s masterpiece, the nine hour The Human Condition (1959-1961).

 

I Will Buy You (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. It is World Series time now and so it seems appropriate to view a baseball story, or what is ostensibly a baseball story. This one tells of an array of baseball scouts  who chase a rising baseball star playing in what amount to the college ranks. We focus most closely on one of these scouts, Kishimoto (Keiji Sada), who provides intermittent voice over. What matters is simply money, nothing else. We see that people are commodities, loyalties are self-serving, money corrupts, and greed tops everything. Families are torn apart. Relationships sour. The player who has the attention of so many scouts is Goro Kurita (Minoru Oki), and he has been cared for by a fellow named Kyuki (Yunosuke Ito). Kyuki has trained and looked after Goro for the past four years. He seems to have nothing but Goro’s best interests at heart. He also has a gall stone that causes acute pain at times, often at convenient times to illicit the sympathy of others. Kyuki’s “disease” proves to be a metaphor for the state of the sport. It is a disease. Money is a disease. The film also touches on gambling. All in all, this is a dark vision of sport in which sport itself is a metaphor for the larger society. It is corrupt and fraught with duplicity. The film is, perhaps, a bit longer than it need be, but the acting is fine and for the most part the staging is excellent. For much of the film, our moral centre appears to be Goro’s girlfriend, Fudeko (Keiko Kishi), who sees how the quest for fame and money can change a person and not for the better.

 

Black River (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Taking a page from the noir script, Kobayashi gives us a tour of a slum dwelling near a U.S. Naval Air base. We get to know the inhabitants of this ramshackle dwelling, its landlady, and the nearby louts and gangsters who want to benefit financially from the demolition of this place so a new brothel can be erected! Pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, and dealers live here in the shadow of the U.S. military base. Indeed, the U.S. base influences the lives of these people, and not for the better. The group of people in the run-down building include layabouts, a young couple who ostensibly live off the young wife’s earnings as a hairdresser, although she is actually a prostitute, a communist who tries to organize the people and fight against the exploitation of the Americans who use their electricity but do not pay for it, and Nishida (Fumio Watanabe) a young engineering student who wants to be left alone to study. Nishida meets a young waitress, Shizuko (Ineko Arima) and the two clearly are attracted to each other. Unfortunately, local thug in sunglasses, Joe (Tatsuya Nakadai) also has eyes for Shizuko. Joe arranges for Shizuko to be set upon by a gang of hoodlums so he can “rescue” her. He does and then proceeds to rape her. She is devastated and asks Joe to do the honourable thing and marry her. He simply keeps her dangling, while knocking her about when the mood strikes him. So we have a love triangle of sorts amid all the goings on in this squalid place. Joe, by the way, has another young woman whom he mistreats. As you can see, this film is as noir as noir can be. The on-location shooting is effective. All the actors are excellent. And the climax is devastating. The end may not come as a complete surprise, but it does come with a punch.

 

The Inheritance (1962), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. This morality play begins with a well-dressed woman walking city streets, shopping. This is Yasuko (Keiko Kishi), former secretary of wealthy businessman Senzo Kawara (So Yamamura). As she walks the streets, she meets the late Kawara’s lawyer, and despite not liking the man, she goes for coffee with hum. Yasuko’s voice over leads us into the flashback that will tell us how Yasuko became the wealthy woman she is. The story turns on businessman Kawara who learns that he is dying of cancer. Once he dies, one third of his wealth is guaranteed by law to go to his widow, Satoe (Misako Watanabe). But what of the other two thirds? It turns out that Kawara has three children, none of them with Satoe, and none of them acknowledged, until now, by Kawara. He wants these children found to see if any or all of them are worthy of an inheritance. Those assigned the task of finding two of these children begin machinations to see the children do not inherit or if they do, then what they inherit will be shared with the one who has found them. In short, everyone around Kawara begins to try and get money for themselves, including Satoe who wants more than just one third of the estate. Meanwhile, Kawara turns his attention to his secretary, Yasuko. He tasks her with finding his third chid, a son. The son is a lout. His Dad, Kawara, is also a lout and he rapes Yasuko. You can, I suspect, see where this is going. Anyway, the film has a noir sensibility: voice over, a character trapped by circumstances, greed, city streets. Perhaps unlike noir with its claustrophobic placing of people in dark spaces, here we have lots of wide-angle shots that position people at a distance from each other. These shots nicely belie the false intimacy of the characters. This is a world rife with duplicity and self interest.

 

Samurai Rebellion (1967), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Director of the 9-hour masterpiece, The Human Condition (1959-61), Kobayashi here gives us a samurai film that focuses on the human condition under authoritarian rule. The protagonist is Isaburo Sasahara (Toshiro Mifune), is a dutiful samurai working for a feudal lord in 18^th-century Japan. He has a wife and two sons and he lives a quiet, peaceful life carrying out his duties. Then a change comes when the lord dismisses the mother of his child and heir because she dared to lash out when she found the lord dallying with another woman. The lord orders Isaburo to arrange for the marriage of this woman to his eldest son. This order causes a ripple in the Sasahara household, but the marriage takes place according to the lord’s wishes. Lo and behold, the bride Ichi (Yoko Tsukasa) proves to be gentle and efficient, and her groom Yogoro (Go Kato) finds himself in love. Things seem to have worked out well. Then, at the lord’s place, the new mother of the heir dies, and the lord cannot have the mother of his heir be the bride of a vassal. Consequently, he demands that Ichi return to the lord’s place to live. In short, Yogoro and his father refuse to send Ichi back. The lord then demands that both father and son commit suicide (seppuku). They refuse thus setting up a final confrontation. What strikes me about this film is its sensitivity to human emotions and its examination of power and its misuses. The desire on the part of the Sasahara family just to live peacefully comes up against the corrupt use of power and the forced adherence to a set of conventions that ignore human desire. The film gives us the architecture (literally) of restraint and control and confinement by rules. The acting is superb and the pace of the action measured. This is a graceful and powerful film.

 A few noir inflected films for November.

“Lights in the Dusk suggests what it might be like to stare at Bill Murray in a coma for 75 minutes” (Ed Gonzalez in SLANT).

Lights in the Dusk (2006), directed by Aki Kaurismaki. This is the story of hangdog night watchman Koistinen (Janne Hyytiainen), who has grand plans to leave his job and start a rival security company. Sadly, he has about as much gumption as a sloth. He finds himself courting, if this is the right word, a blond woman who comes across as mysterious and vacant. She is actually a femme fatale (think Gloria Grahame without the charm) who is working for a gangster. This woman, Aila (Maria Heiskanen), dupes poor Koistinen by drugging him, stealing his keys and the codes to the mall he watches at night, and passing these to robbers who steal a bunch of jewellery. To top things off, this woman plants a bit of evidence that indicates Koistinen is the thief, and he ends up spending time in jail. Once out of jail, he finds a job as a dishwasher. Oh, but this is only temporary, he says. He continues to have dreams that will never come to fruition. Suffice to say there is not much light in this film, but there is much dusk clearly turning dark. The riff on cinema noir has its deadpan moments, but for the most part this is not a film that works for me the way other Kaurismaki films do. As others have noted, the look of this film has something in common with Edward Hopper’s work.

Guilty Bystander (1950), directed by Joseph Lerner. This low budget noir stars Zachary Scott as alcoholic and former cop Max Thursday. Max’s ex-wife, Georgia (Faye Emerson), finds Max in a sleezy hotel owned by Smitty (Mary Boland). He is the house detective, but he spends most of his time drinking and sleeping. Anyway, Max and Georgia’s young son has disappeared and Georgia wants Max to find him. Thus begins a rather convoluted plot peopled with gangsters, losers, hypochondriacs, and molls. Scott is good at playing the alcoholic and Emerson is convincing as his ex. The film is shot in New York with its suitable dark and wet streets and subways and fire escapes and less than savoury hotels and apartments. In other words, this film is dark as noirs should be, despite the rather cheerful ending. Especially appealing, in a dark way, is gangster Otto Varkas (J. Edgar Bromberg) whose hypochondria is extreme. The plot turns on the identity of a mysterious person named St. Paul. I do not think it is particularly difficult to know who this person is among the various characters. Without divulging St. Paul’s identity, I will just say that the person gives a fine performance. As noirs go, this one is a small gem.

The Long Night (1947), directed by Anatole Litvak. This is a remake of Marcel Carne’s Le jour se Leve (1939), although the Fascist implications are muted here. The acting is fine, Henry Fonda as Joe and Barbara Bel Geddes as Jo Ann are convincing. Then we have Vincent Price as smarmy magician Maximilian and Ann Dvorak as Charlene. Charlene is a character who is under developed, and perhaps this is true to a lesser extent with the other characters. What we have is a noir, and the lighting and camera work make this clear, that focuses on star-crossed lovers. The main character, Joe, is a murderer who elicits our sympathy. As with many remakes, The Long Night offers nothing new. It is efficient and impressively constructed, but so was the original. We have some strange goings-on here with the police spraying Joe’s apartment with bullets, and Joe shooting Maximilian after relatively little provocation. From another perspective, the police action and the lying Maximilian give us something contemporary to chew on. Perhaps this film has Fascist overtones after all.

 

The Raging Tide (1952), directed by George Sherman. This noir may be Sherman’s best work, although much of the credit must go to Russell Metty’s cinematography. The film boasts excellent lighting and compositions, familiar with the genre. We do have dark city streets, but we also have the open sea and a fishing boat. The plot has gangster Bruno Felkin (noir stalwart Richard Conte) murdering someone in the film’s opening frames, then finding himself on the run. We even have a bit of voice over, something the film drops before long. Since all roads and other means of travel, aside from water, are covered by the police, Bruno hides away on a fishing boat owned by crusty Swede Hamil Linder (Charles Bickford, by golly) and his son Carl (Alex Nicol). Rounding out the cast are Shelley Winters as Bruno’s girl, Connie Thatcher, and Stephen McNally as Lt. Kelsey. The script has some fine moments, especially when Connie and Lt. Kelsey are onscreen. Conte’s Bruno is a stone-cold murderer with a soft heart, if you can get you mind around this. His time on the fishing boat makes him appreciate hard work, and he comes to admire Hamil, while seeing just how much of a sap Hamil’s son Carl is. Bruno serves as something of a mentor to Carl, both in a bad way and a good way. The plot has Bruno saving Carl, literally. As noirs go, this one is well worth watching.

For the Defense (1930), directed by John Cromwell.  Suave William Powell plays slick William B. Foster, a hot-shot defense lawyer who thinks he is above the law. He also thinks his girlfriend, Broadway star Irene Manners (Kay Francis), will stay with him despite his wish to remain unmarried. He is wrong on both counts. Something of an early film noir, For the Defense finds lawyer Foster caught in a tangle he cannot extricate himself from. His conceit catches up with him. Irene accidentally kills a man while she is driving one night. The man with her takes the blame, and Irene asks Foster to defend this man. This is where things go awry, as you would expect. Kay Francis and William Powell make a fine couple. The film has something to say about corruption in the judicial system, and it does this efficiently. Cromwell’s use of back projection is excellent, especially for a film made in 1930. All in all, this is a slim film that holds up well.

The Wild Goose Lake (2019), directed by Yi’nan Diao. A yellow-lit bus stop in the rain with two strangers loitering, one a dishevelled man and the other a woman in red who asks for a light. This is the opening of The Wild Goose Lake, and it drips noir. We have the anti-hero and femme fatale. These two are about to find themselves in trouble. Well, they already have found themselves in trouble as the flashbacks tell us. The film might have been called Wild Goose Chase, since these two soon find themselves on the run from a wild gang of motorcycle thieves and a bunch of wild policemen. This is noir and so things won’t turn out well, at least for one of these two. The sleezy grimy back streets of this Chinese city are the backdrop for most of the action, the titular Lake appearing only briefly. What we have is a society in decay, rough tenements, dank eating establishments, and an unsavoury hotel. Corruption and violence are a way of life. The picture of society here is not flattering. Nods to such films as Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), Now, Voyager (1942), The Warriors (1979), and others indicate that this exercise in neo-noir fits in the dark end of the cycle. The characters are less than fully rounded, but the action is sufficiently furious to keep one from nodding off. Filmed largely at night, the action plays out in various shades of yellow street lighting and grey to black corners, a palette that is becoming all too familiar in recent films. Here it is handled with confidence.

Nightmare Alley (1947), directed by Edmund Goulding. Guillermo del Toro has remade this film, and not being able to see the remake, I thought to revisit the 1947 version with Tyrone Power as the hustler Stanton Carlisle. This is a noir with bite. Lee Garmes’s photography brings to mind the photographs of Diane Arbus, as does the film itself. In the world of this film, America is a carnival sideshow filled with hucksters, grifters, con persons, and geeks. Sound familiar? Sliver-tongued Stanton rises from a menial jib to being a mentalist and then something of an evangelist before descending rather quickly into hobo status and finally becoming a geek, a sideshow freak who bites the heads off chickens for a bottle of hooch. If Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) comes to mind, then you are on the right track. As I watched Stanton’s rise, I kept thinking of Joel Osteen. The people in this carnival all suffer some sort of psychological damage, and the sparkling black and white photography outlines this in excellent fashion. This is both an unusual noir and a central example of the noir sensibility, presenting a world of psychological turmoil and tangled relationships coupled with selfish motives. It is not difficult to understand why del Toro chose to remake this film at this time.

 

Nightmare Alley (2021), directed by Guillermo del Toro. Here is film noir softened and sanded by time and trickery. The film looks dark enough and conjures up a time past out of time, but it lacks the sinister, creepy, and even vicious streak of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 version of the story. Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle drifts through the action, a passive recipient of, for a while, good fortune. Tyrone Power, by contrast, plays Carlisle with a sinister lack of interest in anything but himself. Everything seems just a bit too studied, cool to the point of well-this-does-not-really-matter. Cate Blanchett, for example, plays Lilith Ritter with an iciness that aims for the femme fatale in sculpture. Even the riff on the carnival geek seems just a bit too calculated. We have a gallery of assorted players with familiar faces – Ron Perlman, Willem DaFoe, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen, David Strathairn – but they come across quite simply as a gallery of familiar faces. Stanton Carlisle’s rise to spiritual medium is rather tepid, and I found it unconvincing that his patsies would fall for his patently artificial patter. All in all, this film is a disappointment. Oh, del Toro makes films always worth watching, and this one has its visual charms, but for a story so well suited to our times of fakery, lies, gullibility, and grift, it lacks the punch it ought to have, or could have, delivered.