Mayerling (1936), directed by Anatole Litvak. This film may be based on the story of the doomed love affair between Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, and 17-year-old Baroness Maria Vetsera, but it is romantic hokum, a sort of Austrian court Romeo and Juliet with a slightly different, but no less melancholy, end. The production is lavish with extended scenes of ballroom dancing, and an evening at the ballet. The ballet being performed is, what else, Swan Lake, another story of lovers facing insurmountable difficulties. The lovers in the story are Rudolf (Charles Boyer) and Maria (Danielle Darrieux). Litvak does not overlook Rudolf’s dissolute activities, his drinking and womanizing. Nor does he overlook Maria’s young innocence. Sets, costumes, performances, the fluid camera, are all spot on, making this an impressive filmic turn. Having acknowledged this, I also admit to finding the proceedings just a bit wan. Charles Boyer kept reminding me of Prince Harry in his hang-dog barking about the constricted life of a royal. His early connection to the newspaper man, Szeps (Rene Bergeron), and student unrest deserved, I think, more fulsome treatment. However, the student protests and M Szeps appear only briefly early in the film. What we have is a sumptuous costume romance telling the story of two ill-fated lovers in snowy Austria in the late nineteenth century.

It Happened Tomorrow (1944), directed by Rene Clair. The penultimate of Clair’s Hollywood films, and in the vein of The Ghost Goes West (1935) and I Married a Witch (1942), It Happened Tomorrow is a silly romp that has ebullient performances by Dick Powell, Jack Oakie, and Linda Darnell. Powell plays Larry Stevens, an obituary writer for the Evening Standard who aspires to greater things as a journalist. His co-worker, Pop Benson (John Philliber), gives him tomorrow’s newspaper, allowing Larry to know what will happen tomorrow so he can write about it today.  Of course, the knowledge comes with a price when Larry reads in tomorrow’s newspaper that he will die at 6:25 p.m. Meanwhile, he meets Cigolini (Jack Oakie) and his niece, Sylvia Smith (Linda Darnell) who perform an act of clairvoyance. The plot moves along briskly, even cheerfully despite impending doom for Larry. We have mayhem and madness, all done in good fun. A prologue lets us know that events will not turn out disastrously. And how could they, this is a comedy! We have newspaper people, police, robbers, restaurant patrons, and others. As I say at the beginning, the film is a romp.

Act of Defiance (2017), directed by Jean van de Velde. This is a film about the South African lawyer and activist, Bram Fischer (Peter Paul Muller), who defended a group of resistance fighters, including Nelson Mandela (Sello Motloung), in what is known as the Rivonia Trial, 1963-64. I was reminded of an earlier film, A Dry White Season (1989), although here, the white lawyer is a leader of the resistance and a communist who tries to hide his affiliation with the defendants, whereas in the earlier film the protagonist is a middleclass suburbanite who has no interest in politics. In An Act of Defiance, the tension arises from the connection between lawyer and those he is defending. Will the prosecuting lawyer discover the truth about his courtroom adversary? If he does, what will he do? We know how the trial ends simply because it is a piece of history. Knowing this does not diminish the scathing account of injustice and brutality perpetrated by the government on people who just want to be free to live, work, and move where they wish to live, work, and move. As a courtroom drama, this film will not disappoint.

Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), directed by Dorothy Arzner. “Go ahead and stare. I’m not ashamed. I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your fifty cents worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you.” So says Judy O’Brien (Maureen O’Hara) when the male audience jeers her ballet dancing; they want Bubbles (Lucille Ball) who plays to their desire for titillation. This is a film about dance, high art and low art, women, and both the male and the female gaze. I confess I had never seen a Dorothy Arzner film before, although I have known about her for years. This first exposure to an Arzner film did not disappoint. Arzner was the first and only female director from the beginning of sound (1929) until the late forties when Ida Lupino began directing. Dance, Girl, Dance could have been a standard Hollywood musical romance, but in Arzner’s hands it is something else, something more interesting. Take, for example, the morning after Judy has spent the early hours with wealthy playboy Jimmy Harris (Louis Haywood). She returns home, looks longingly out her window at what we assume is Jimmy returning to his car, but is actually the morning star. She makes a wish on this star, not that she and Jimmy will find happiness, but that she will be a dancer: “Please make me a dancer.” Her mentor in her dance career is Madame Lydia Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya) who dresses in mannish clothes. The one time she dons a fancy woman’s hat, she is struck down by a car! This is delicious. The plot follows these two women, Judy and Bubbles, and it takes turns we do not expect. Much of the action takes place in a burlesque hall. Arzner’s willingness to forego the familiar Hollywood fare is refreshing and important. Now to see more of her films.

Beau Travail (1999), directed by Claire Denis. Loosely based on Melville’s Billy Budd, Beau Travail is a film of bodies, mostly men’s bodies, faces, fences, lattices, and other signs of confinement, open vistas of desert and ocean, and seething emotion that, like a volcano, lies silent and hidden just waiting to bubble and boil over. The men are members of France’s Foreign Legion stationed in a former colony, Djibouti. We watch the men undergoing training exercises of various kinds, all looking arduous, but carried out by the men in dance-like fluidity. Dance plays a significant role in the film. Take, for example, the remarkable final scene in which the suicidal Galoup breaks into feverish, but intricately beautiful, dance. The sequences of men training are not only dance-like, but also machine-like. We also watch the men doing domestic work: ironing, washing clothes, preparing meals, sweeping, and so on. All of this takes place without much dialogue. What moves the narrative along is the voice over by Galoup (Denis Lavant), something that lessens as the film goes on. Galoup is a wolf on the prowl. He is also the pivotal character in this tale of envy, jealousy, and twisted loyalty. Galoup sets his sights on Gilles Sentain (Gregoire Colin), the Billy Budd character here. Much of what we understand is communicated by facial expression and camera angle, not dialogue. The cinematography is crisp and hard-edged and sensitive to colour, vibrant as well as muted colour. This is a remarkable film, so unlike the kinetic sort of films we are most familiar with. Anything kinetic in this film has to do with the motion of men’s bodies, not with the editing or furious action. There are nods to both Godard and Truffaut evident throughout.

 

 Some more Ishiro Honda films

Battle in Outer Space (1959), directed by Ishiro Honda. Special effects here are courtesy of Eiji Tsuburaya and they are pretty cool. The scenes in outer space and on the moon are effective in a 50s sort of way, clean lines and rocky moon surface with nicely done transportation vehicles that can act like hovercrafts. The miniatures used for trains and rockets and land rovers and so on are catchy, although the cardboard buildings used as stand-ins for New York and Tokyo are less impressive when we see them toppled and torn by the alien rays. The story here is thin and familiar: aliens have set up a moon base from which they attach earth, managing such nifty tricks as lifting up a huge train bridge and smashing lots of buildings, and earth fights back. The aliens, by the way, are something akin to minions. As for earth marshaling its defenses, we have a gathering of nations – including Canada with its red ensign – setting aside differences to coordinate the response to the alien threat. I like the cooperation here, something we see with less forthrightness in Hollywood films with a similar plot. All in all, this is a serviceable contribution to 1950s sci fi.

 

Matango (Attack of the Mushroom People – 1963), directed by Ishiro Honda. Thanks to John and Cole Boivin, we got to see this gem last evening. As soon as I read the blurb on the DVD case, I recognised “A Voice in the Night,” a terrific short story by the inimitable William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson’s story tells of a lonely man floating on the ocean seeking food. Two sailors see him, send him provisions, and listen to his story. The story he tells involves a ship coming across another vessel abandoned and covered with a strange fungus. Soon this fungus has taken hold of everyone on board, and the man telling the story is the only one left. He is in the process of turning into a living fungus. Honda’s version is much the same, only updated to the mid-century, and we follow a group of survivors as they try to stay alive on a strange island. Think Gilligan’s Island with giant mushrooms tempting and threatening our merry band of stranded people; some of these mushrooms lumber about colourfully. The colours are appropriately toned to reflect both the exotic nature of these fungi and the sense of decay and rot in the atmosphere. Both the interior sets on the abandoned ship and the exterior sets on the island are cleverly and impressively designed. The story here is less engaging than the look of things. We see just enough of the mushroom people to want to see more.

 

King Kong Escapes (1967), directed by Ishiro Honda. This is the one with the bad teeth! The villain, Dr. Who, and our hero, King Kong, both are in the need of a darn good dentist. The film also sports a Kong replica, the Mecha-Kong robot who dukes it out with our hero atop a Tokyo tower. The special effects here are rudimentary, at best. The plot has the nefarious Dr. Who (Hideyo Amamoto) attempting to extract Element X from the frozen Arctic so he can sell it to the slinky Madame Piranha, also known as Madame X (Mie Hama). All of this has the distinct flavour of a James Bond film. Indeed, Mie Hama was a Bond girl in the same year’s You Only Live Twice. So we have a Bond villain kidnapping King Kong because Kong will prove to be better at digging Element X than the robot Kong is. Meanwhile Commander Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason) and his intrepid sidekicks Lt. Commander Jiro Nomura (Akira Takarada), and Lt. Susan Watson (Linda Miller), float about in their submarine, get cornered by Kong, do battle with Dr. Who’s minions, and generally try to save the day. As things turn out, it is Madame Piranha who saves the day; she has a change of heart and forgoes her evil ways. Ishiro Honda has made slicker films, but this one is lots of fun precisely because it is so cheesy.

A few recent films.

 The Limehouse Golem (2016), directed by Juan Carlos Medina. Here is another Jack-the-Ripperesque murder mystery, a film reminiscent of a number of earlier films such as the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell (2011). In this one, the detective is John Kildare (Bill Nighy) who is unliked by his colleagues and superiors because he is not “the marrying kind.” He strikes up a relationship with the Music Hall star Lizzie Cree (Olivia Cooke) who is on trial for poisoning her husband. Meanwhile a series of grisly murders has taken place in the Limehouse district of London. Kildare thinks Lizzie’s husband, John (Sam Reid), is the Limehouse Golem, as the murderer styles himself, and he sets out to prove this and find an extenuating circumstance for Lizzie’s poisoning her sinister husband thereby getting her off from the gallows and proving himself capable of solving an unsolvable mystery, unsolvable because there appears to be no motive or pattern to the random murders. The plot is convoluted, just like the last sentence. I found the film a bit tedious, but it does have its moments. It also has a subtext of sexual tension, abuse, and repression that is important. Oh, and it has Karl Marx and George Gissing as two suspects in the unpleasant murders. 

Bombardment (2021 – The Shadow in My Eye), directed by Ole Bornedal. This Danish film is timely in that it recounts the story of an air raid gone wrong late in World War Two. Instead of bombing Gestapo Headquarters, some RAF planes drop their bombs on a school killing many children, teachers, and civilians. The planes saw smoke from a plane that had clipped a tower, lost a tailpiece, and crashed into the school. Anyway, the film presents this incident carefully. We get to know a few of the people involved from a trio of children, to a nun questioning her faith, a young Danish policeman who has collaborated with the Germans, the children’s parents, and a couple of British pilots.  The scenes after the bombing are excruciating. The devastating effect of war on the innocent is in full view here, reminding us, perhaps, of what is happening every day in present-day Ukraine. The children here are very good. I especially like their visits to the bakery where a Brothers Grimm-like shopkeeper terrifies the children because of the way she looks. The opening of the film is also powerful and distressing. This scene, in which a plane mistakenly shoots a car filled with women going to a wedding, sets up what is to come.

 

The Good Nurse (2022), directed by Tobias Lindholm. This film reminded me of Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999). Both films are thrillers without flash, without dramatic turns of violence, and both are about corporate malfeasance. The difference lies in focus. The focus in The Good Nurse is on the two main characters, Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) and Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), and the acting is subtle and effective. The low-key performances work well until Charlie’s burst of maniacal shouts of “I can’t, I can’t,” etc, etc. and so on and on. The examination of for-profit medical care is muted, but insistent. Much of the action takes place during the night shifts in a hospital, the characters stalking (well, at least one is stalking) dimly lit hallways. Perhaps the most precise word for the film is “procedural.” The insistence of the two detectives to carry out an investigation against obstacles stemming from the stonewalling hospital officials to the detectives’ bosses on the force is a welcome relief from the crooked cops we have in so many films. The two detectives are Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) and Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich). The story is, as they say, based on a true story. Conclusion: stay out of hospitals.

 

Belfast (2021), directed by Kenneth Branagh. Sentimental and nostalgic, yes; effective and even compelling, yes. This is a film about the early days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland told from the point of view of nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill). Buddy is a bright innocent wide-eyed kid who loves the movies – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, One Million Years B.C., High Noon, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance all appear in snippets here. He also has an eye for schoolmate Catherine (Olive Tennant). Buddy’s family are Protestant and live in a neighbourhood where most families are Protestant. There are, however, a few Catholic families. Trouble begins when some young thugs attempt to burn out the Catholic families, and then barricade the street to keep the unwanted other away. Buddy finds all this somewhat bewildering, and he begins to be drawn in to the growing melee when the thugs loot a local grocery story. Buddy comes away with a box of soap and confusion. Meanwhile his parents begin to debate whether they should leave their country for somewhere else safer and calmer. The film begins in colour with shots of contemporary Belfast, but soon the colour drops away leaving us with a vivid monochrome courtesy of cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos. The monochrome is a stroke of genius. The hint of black and white underlines the ”either you are on our side or you are the enemy” mentality of the two sides of the conflict, but the muted quality (almost surreal) of the monochrome gives us the sense of mixture, of something soft amid the hardness of things happening in this Belfast neighbourhood. As a film about childhood in a place of troubles, this is absorbing.

 

Miss Meadows (2014), directed by Karen Leigh Hopkins. This is a distaff version of Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974) and its clones. It is also cloying. Katie Holmes plays the eponymous Miss Meadows who clips through her suburban neighbourhood on tap shoes, talks to a blue bird, skips over a young girl’s hopscotch design, does a twirl or two, and shoots a bad guy in a pick-up (literally) truck. This is, mostly, the first scene. The film begins with a quirky sense of the surreal, but it cannot maintain this sense despite trying its best. Ultimately, what we have here is another valorization of gun culture and championing of the vigilante. Pass on by this one.

 

 Some Ishiro Honda to start the year!

Rodan (1956), directed by Ishiro Honda. This is the first of Toho Studio’s “Dai Kaiju” series shot in colour and it looks fine. The film is short on character development and it re-uses footage several times, but the special effects are attractive. The insect-like Meganurons are suitably hokey, and the pterodactyl-like Rodan (actually there are two of them) that eat the Meganurons are just great. They fly and swoop and whip up wind storms with relish. This is all good fun, except that this is all the result of humans creating nuclear weapons and using them. The early scenes in the coal mine before Rodan turns up are handled well and give us a sense of the life of these workers. I like the notion that human ingenuity and science produces such a primitive, visceral, and shocking reaction. The final scene is actually poignant. You will have to see the film to take in what I mean.

 

Varan the Unbelievable (1958), directed by Ishiro Honda. Of the several kaiju films we have seen, Varan the Unbelievable is the least interesting. Yes, we have a guy in a monster suit, a monster that has a passing resemblance to Godzilla, a gathering of ships, tanks, planes, cannon, rockets, and soldiers, and a futile attempt to stop the rampage of the monster as it stomps huts, houses, and sundry other things. It never does get to Tokyo or any other large urban centre. We have no back story for the monster. Where did it come from? Why is it so angry? Why does it not knock down any famous buildings? We have no back story for the few characters we follow as they attempt to deal with the emergency brought on by Varan. The thrashings and crashings are okay, as far as such things go, but the whole affair is rather tepid. Reviews, however, do compliment the film's score by Akira Ifukube.

 

The H-Man (1958), directed by Ishiro Honda. Think “The Blob,” the American film that came out the same year, except that his one is far more colourful, pulpy, and neon-soaked. Perhaps “adult” is a pertinent description. The nightclub sequences and the gangster angle made me think of Seijun Suzuki’s films of the 1960s. The plot has the Tokyo police looking for some nasty drug dealers, but finding themselves following the trail of a strange series of melting persons. It seems fallout from H-Bomb testing mixed with rainfall is melting a few people and turning them into a green gelatinous substance that seeks out other humans to melt them. The film is curious, but effective. The final sequence in the Tokyo sewers has to be seen to be believed. The garish nightclub sequences with their erotic dances are also noteworthy. The not so savoury influence of America seems evident here. In short, we have a hybrid, a mix of monster movie with film noir. The mixture, although odd, is deftly handled by the director Honda. The special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya (Godzilla and many in that franchise) are masterful, with melting people and oozing slime. 

 

Mothra vs Godzilla (1964), directed by Ishiro Honda. This is the one about the clash between Godzilla and a giant moth, and also the giant moth’s two larvae. This is an example of the Japanese kaiju film, most famous for Godzilla (1954). The plot has something to do with the environment, big business, and human stupidity (except for a trio of good guys). Most appealing to me are the Shobijin, twin small girls (fairies?) who often travel about in a box. These twins come from an island in the Pacific that is also home to Mothra, and to a people who dance and chant and dress in extravagant ways. As usual with these films, the surface fun contains serious matter beneath, most obviously the threat of nuclear damage to the planet. The monsters have camp charm, and the battles are furious. Godzilla does manage to destroy a few buildings, but not as many as in some of his appearances. This is a pretty good outing for the big guy, and his expression in this one is particularly menacing.

 

Frankenstein vs Baragon (1965), directed by Ishiro Honda. Imagine a Japanese monster flick that sports Nick Adams as a central character and “Frankenstein” as one of two large creatures duking it out, and you have this film. Really. It seems that during the Second World War, the Germans secretly give the Japanese the beating heart of “Frankenstein” (Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, not the zany doctor himself). Years later this heart is the focus of research at a laboratory that specializes in radiation. Somehow, this heart becomes a boy who escapes and runs about as a large feral child, large and growing larger. The authorities capture the boy and place him in a cage; soon he is outgrowing the cage. Meanwhile an earthquake in another part of town unearths a burrowing creature with a radioactive breath and glowing horn. This is Baragon. We all know that Baragon and the wild boy are fated to clash. They do while Nick Adams and his two cohorts look on with worried expressions. We have much rushing about and much thrashing and tossing of trees and boulders. Young Frankenstein is smart enough to make fire and this he uses to his advantage. Behind all this is, of course, the nuclear past that Japan has experienced. The German/American/Japanese connection is a reminder of the war that resulted in unleashing the nuclear nightmare, and that collectively these countries are responsible for the state of things as Baragon and Frankenstein battle. Thanks again Cole and John for passing this gem along. Baragon spitting feathers and the pig-on-a-rail scenes are worth the price of admission.

 A few films for December.

Pinocchio (2022), directed by Guillermo del Toro. This version of Pinocchio takes place in the years between the two Great Wars. Fascists lurk about, as a wicked carnival makes its way through Italy thrilling audiences with its magical puppetry. The basics of Collodi’s story are here, although del Toro may signal any changes when he names Geppetto’s first son Carlo. Carlo dies, the victim of an errant bomb in the first war. What follows is a dark take on the familiar story. Anyway, this is an impressive outing by del Toro. He delivers a film that gives nods to the likes of James Whale, Edmund Goulding, Walt Disney, Lewis Carroll, and Tex Avery. The off-kilter antics of the wooden boy are echoed in the rough workmanship that went into the shaping of him (he only has one ear, for example). The song and dance routines are a parody of Michigan J. Frog.  The animation is stunningly good. I suspect many of you will have watched this film; I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

 

The Duke (2020), directed by Roger Michell. Remember those Ealing Studio romps, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). The Duke is a throwback to those Ealing comedies, and is an enjoyable romp that focuses on an unlikely art thief, Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) and his family. In 1961, Bunton was charged with the theft of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. The film focuses on the eccentric Bunton, his various crusades for social justice and the welfare of humankind, and his hard-working wife (she works as a charwoman), Dorothy (Helen Mirren). The plot involves the theft of the Goya painting, the actions that precede the theft, and the trial that ensues. Perhaps a bit more treacly than those earlier Ealing comedies, The Duke nonetheless works because of the fine performances of the lead actors and the quite fine script. “Feel good” is perhaps often tossed out as a way of dismissing a film, but in this case, the term is spot on. The film manages to deliver a clever story with likeable characters and a championing of the common person who sets out to speak truth to those in power. 

The Green Knight (2021), directed by David Lowery. Based on the 14^th century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the film sends a rather immature young Gawain (Dev Patel) on a journey to the Green Chapel where he is to receive a blow from the Green Knight, whose head Gawain removed at the outset of the film in a “Christmas game.” On the journey, Gawain proves less than heroic, chivalrous, or honorable. He encounters a talking fox, giants, brigands, and a lord and lady who take him in, seduce him, and send him on his way. He also has a sash that is supposed to keep him safe. He eventually arrives at his destination where the Green Knight, looking like a large Groot, prepares to swipe off Gawain’s head. All of this happens slowly over 130 minutes of film time. The cinematography is suitably dark and mysterious, and the various locations – moors, rocky landscapes, forests, castles – are both grounded in reality and otherworldly. Mark Kermode in the Guardian calls the film “sumptuously elusive,” and this pretty much sums it up. What we have is a riff on the original story that throws in visual allusions to things as disparate as Blade Runner 2049 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Some of what we see is arresting, and yet the action moves slowly to try the patience. I suspect this 21^st century take on the chivalric romance has something to do with notions of masculinity, although just what the message might be eludes my grasp.

Remember the Night (1940), directed by Mitchell Leisen. This script for this film is by the great Preston Sturges, and he said of the finished film that it "had quite a lot of schmaltz, a good dose of schmerz, and just enough schmutz to make it box office." This is a feel-good Christmas movie with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. Stanwyck plays Lee Leander, a thief/shop lifter who finds herself caught stealing a bracelet just before Christmas. The District Attorney, John Sargent (MacMurray), has the trial delayed in order to assure that he can get a conviction. He learns that Lee has no money and no family and so he takes her with him to Indiana for Christmas. The idea is to drop Lee with her mother, and then for John to proceed to his mother’s for Christmas and New Year’s. Of course, things go awry, Lee ends up staying with Sargent’s family, romance springs up, and everything is so nice. The supporting cast is, as in Sturges’s other films, superb. It includes Beulah Bondi and John’s mother, Sterling Holloway as the farm helper Willie, Elizabeth Patterson as Aunt Emma, and Fred Toones as Rufus. John and his family are just about the most friendly and agreeable people in cinema, making for a delightful and, dare I say, heart-warming filmic experience. There is some silliness here, but it makes for much fun.

Spirited (2022), directed by Sean Anders. Clayton Dillard, in Slant, opines: “To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one.” Dillard’s review might deter readers from watching this latest reiteration of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but I hope not. The film is a buoyant throwback to Hollywood in the heyday of musicals. Sure, as Dillard says neither Will Ferrell nor Ryan Reynolds will win Grammys for their singing, but their singing is part of the fun. The film is chocked full of references literary, musical, filmic, and just plain hokey. For example, things begin with a reference to Vancouver – wink, wink. The dance sequences are high energy. The playful use of the Scrooge story is clever. The acting earnest. The two principal characters, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Ferrell) and the cynical PR guy Clint Briggs (Reynolds), are attractive. The inclusion of a variety of body shapes is noteworthy, and also praiseworthy. Okay, we have Benjamin Lee in The Guardian offering this: the film is” an atonal grab bag of inharmonious notes (an uneasy third act suicide proves to be the flattest). When stretched to a two-hour-plus runtime (with more musical bits during the credits), we leave feeling bloated, a 10-course Christmas meal we wish we’d never started.” May I say that the grammar error here might warn us away from such an opinion? The film is high-spirited and fun. Roll with it.

 A couple of noirish films as November comes to a close.

Exposed (1947), directed by George Blair. This small picture from Republic has a female detective, Belinda Prentice (Adele Mara) in the Marlowe mould. It also has some snappy dialogue: “He’s as stiff as a laundered collar.” “He’s a tough egg.” Send him over and I’ll scramble him.” And so on. It also has one of the most frantic vicious fights I have seen on film from the early days; this one involves the baddie Chicago (Bob Steele aka “Battling Bob”) and Belinda’s helper Iggy Broty (William Haade). Aside from these notable features, the film is a standard mystery. To be honest, the plot left me a wee bit bewildered, but the film was amiable nonetheless. There are plenty of suspects for the murder of businessman William Bentry (Russell Hicks): the butler (of course), the daughter, the son, the lawyer, the family doctor, the ex-business partner, and the gangster. The police detective, Inspector Prentice (Robert Armstrong), just happens to be the private eye’s father. She, of course, proves to be much better at sleuthing than he is.

 

The Girl in the Black Stockings (1957), directed by Howard W. Koch. If you like whodunnits, then this low budget murder mystery just might keep your attention. A bunch of troubled and troubling people gather at a Utah lodge, and one evening as guests dance, two young lovers discover the body of a murdered woman. Who among all the guests is the killer? And will he or she kill again? Yes, is the answer to the second question. Sheriff Jess Holmes (!), played by John Dehner, arrives to sort things out, but not before three more people turn up dead, including Harriet Ames (Mamie Van Doren). For some reason Mamie Van Doren appears prominently in promotions for this film. Other familiar faces in the cast include Lex Barker, Anne Bancroft, Stuart Whitman, Dan Blocker, and Marie Windsor. Ron Randell plays Edmund Parry, owner of the lodge who is a paraplegic. Mr. Parry’s confinement to a wheelchair is the result of a psychosomatic condition. Some years ago, Parry’s lover left him. His embitterment was so acute that he lost the use of his arms and legs. He is now a misogynist of the first order. Of course, he is a suspect. All of this is quite fun, if somewhat tepid. The camera work is efficient and has a noirish edge. The characters are quirky. And finally, the solving of the mystery proves to be, I think, unexpected. 

 On Dangerous Ground (1951), directed by Nicholas Ray. Another noir for November, On Dangerous Ground begins on the gritty city streets at night. We meet jaded cop Jim Garrison (Robert Ryan) who is lonely, worn out, and psychologically damaged by the “garbage” he has to deal with in his job. He is prone to violence and to cool him off his superior sends him on a trip north to help a country sheriff solve a murder. The film, then, has two parts, one dark and city-bound and the other light and snow-bound in the country. Light and dark permeate the film in ironic ways. The woman (Ida Lupino) whom Jim meets in a lonely farm house lives in the dark; she is blind. The farmer (Ward Bond) whom Jim meets is as prone to violence as Jim is. In other words, the film focuses on Jim and his coming to terms with his demons when he meets these two people in an isolated landscape. The plot is incidental; the characters are central. Ryan’s cop is a typically flawed and paranoid noir hero, but he is also a familiar Ray character, a rebel without a cause, a man in a lonely place, a Johnny without his guitar; he is in an odd place. He has been living by night. His victory is bitter and his blood is hot. He blunders into the blind woman’s house and knocks things asunder. By the end, he has attempted to put things back together, but whether he has been successful is doubtful. This is, after all, a noir. 

They Live by Night (1948), directed by Nicholas Ray. This film was later remade by Robert Altman (Thieves Like Us). Ray’s version of the story is his first feature film, and it stars Farley Granger as Bowie Bowers and Cathy O’Donnell as Keechie Mobley, two young people star-crossed, and on the lam as the film moves along. The opening shot from a helicopter, followed by a few other helicopter shots in the film, give the sense of a large world that these two youngsters will not be able to navigate. Their fate is sealed, as it were. Ray was fascinated by young people caught in a world of betrayal and crime and misunderstanding. His most celebrated look at such a world is, of course, Rebel Without a Cause. Here, in They Live By Night, we have Rebel Without a Cause mixed with Gun Crazy or Bonnie and Clyde. Keechie and Bowie are not like the protagonists in those two films, but they are in a similar world. Ray’s penchant for images that are, for lack of a better word, symbolic is evident in Chickamaw (Howard da Silva), the one-eyed Cyclopean figure, in various shots through grill work or bars, in close-ups intended to reflect innocence or its opposite. Scenes at the garage with Bowie at work on changing a tire are suitably touched with grit and grease. Bowie is both sweetly innocent and yet clearly fallen into an underworld he does not try hard enough to repudiate. For the most part, this noir eschews those dark and damp city streets, choosing the open road, the country cabin, and out of the way places for its action. Still, they live by night because they cannot risk travelling by daylight when someone might recognize young Bowie. As it turns out, someone does recognize young Bowie anyway, and someone else who has ties to the gang of thieves Bowie has become part of proves to be a snitch. As for us, the viewers, we just hang on for the ride.

 

Knock on Any Door (1949), directed by Nicholas Ray. This is a noir film with both a difference and a purpose. The difference is that this film lacks much in the way of damp dirty and dark city streets with stark lighting, although it does have plenty of scenes in Skid Row, New York, and it does not have a femme fatale, and it does not have the usual gaggle of gangsters and detectives. What it does have is two main characters, one a successful lawyer (Humphrey Bogart) and the other one of Ray’s troubled youth from his gallery of young men who find themselves in big trouble (John Derek in his first role). The purpose is to direct our attention to the effects of poverty and a failed justice system. This is essentially a court room drama in which the story is filled out in extensive flashbacks. To provide the film’s message concerning delinquency and injustice with punch, Ray delivers a story that is relentlessly downbeat. Perhaps the courtroom confrontation between “pretty boy” Nick Romano (Derek) on trial for murder and scar-faced prosecutor  Kerman (played by George Macready) is too obvious or even devious, and perhaps the depiction of life on the streets is not quite as gritty as it might be, but the film nevertheless delivers its message effectively, especially after the verdict when Bogart delivers his final words to the court and to the viewer. Oh, and young Nick’s credo is: “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.”

 

A Woman’s Secret (1949), directed by Nicholas Ray. This film is often categorized as a film noir, but it has more in common with the cheap mystery films made at the time by small studios such as PRC and Monogram. It has a not-quite murder mystery, a Miss Marple-like woman detective, a likeable detective (not hapless, as in so many of the cheapie mysteries), and a plot that spills things wily-nilly, taking us from New York to Paris to a luxury liner, locations we do not often associate with noir. If this is noir, it is noir light. The narrative has its interest in its use of flashbacks, flashbacks that include more than one telling of the near fatal incident. For me, what makes this film interesting is the pairing of two quite different women – Maureen O’Hara and Gloria Grahame. This plays out, or so it seems to me, as a precursor of the female struggle Ray reprises, with quite a different result, in his later film, Johnny Guitar. In both films, two women strive against each other; they are opposites often shown wearing clothing that is either dark or light. Although these women are adversaries, there is a tension between them that suggests their attraction for each other. In A Women’s Secret, the Maureen O’Hara character goes so far as to say that the Gloria Grahame character is living her (O’Hara’s) life. They meet when Grahame falls on some steps, and O’Hara picks her up and brings her to life, as it were. The backdrop to all this is performance. Both women are singers (shades of Gilda here). In a nice touch, O’Hara loses her voice to a strange kind of laryngitis and Grahame has her voice dubbed (no, the audience is not supposed to know this, but it is a nice touch anyway). The performances are good, and despite the tepid noir touches, the film manages to hold our attention. And it does have Gloria Grahame.

 

Born to be Bad (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray. Here is another Ray film on the edge of noir. It is also a sly presentation of Randolph Hearst (Zacharay Scott’s character is very wealthy, has a pencil-thin moustache, likes to fly, and pursues a young woman played by Joan Fontaine). And again, Ray gives us two women, opposites who compete for the same things. Those same things here are money, position, and men. Joan Fontaine’s Christabel is more accurately a Geraldine, if you get my drift. Her adversary, Donna (Joan Leslie), is the innocent here. Donna is intelligent, an editor for a big publishing house, but of course she does not see the duplicity at work in Cristabel’s manipulations. As for Christabel, she is a drop-out from business school who wants the wealthy man, and she also wants the dashing young novelist, Nick (Robert Ryan). She wants the two of them, and she wants them at the same time. Both the wealthy guy, Curtis (Zachary Scott), and Nick are taken in by the cunningly winsome Christabel. Well, this is not precisely the case; Nick sees through Christabel’s character, but he doesn’t care that she is a manipulator and a cheat. The same might be said of Gobby, the gay painter who is a hanger on in high society. Gobby likes Christabel because she is interesting as a study. Meanwhile we have a rich uncle and an ailing aunt for Christabel to either court or ignore depending on what she might need at the time. All this is, perhaps, more the stuff of melodrama than noir. I am not sure why this film finds itself included on lists of noir films. This may have something to do with the tangled web that always ensnares people in the noir world. Endings in film noir, even when they are ostensibly happy, leave us with a sour taste.