The trouble I have with some B movies is not with the cinematography, the acting, the sets or the scenery. It’s the story. Not that many of these films don’t have great premises, but some of their stories lack the connective tissue that helps the viewer make sense of why characters act the way they do. I don’t need a shovelful of back story, but I sure would like a little more character continuity, so that the story hangs together logically.
 
Take Born To Kill, Robert Wise’s first noir. It stars the bad girl deluxe, Claire Trevor, as Helen and Lawrence Tierney as the brutal Sam. These two are supported with a dandy cast of character actors, including Elisha Cook Jr., Esther Howard and Walter Slezak.
 
The movie begins in Reno. Helen has just finalized her divorce and heads back to her rooming house to settle her bill with the landlady. The landlady is drinking and yucking it up with Laury, her slutty next door neighbor. Laury talks about going out that night with an old boyfriend to make the new boyfriend jealous.
 
And does she. Sam is the new boyfriend, and a couple of minutes into the film he’s killed both Laury and her old beau. “There’s no man big enough to cut me out,” he growls.
 
The next morning Sam takes a train to SanFrancisco and meets Helen in the club car. There’s immediate chemistry between them. Helen majorly flirts with him, taunts him, then tells him that they can’t see each other, she’s engaged to a rich man.
 
What a great set-up. We’ve already seen what Sam does to any woman acting fast and loose with him. But that’s not the way it plays. And that’s my problem. Lawrence Tierney plays a great thug, but a lady’s man? C’mon. Do women fall for him even though he’s uneducated and crude? We’re supposing here that the woman doesn’t know he’s a psycho-killer. If it’s true he’s a lover, not just a killer, let’s see some of his moves. Big and strong doesn’t cut it. Five minutes, that’s all it would take to demonstrate a different side of his character or a shift in feeling with any of the women that would explain what happens next.
 
There are great characters in this movie: the googly-eyed Esther Howard as the landlady, the always-sultry Claire Trevor and Walter Slezak as the corrupt detective. And there are ridiculous characters: Audrey Long as the stupidly innocent Georgia Staples and Phillip Terry, Helen’s rich but dim fiancée. Come to think of it, everyone who is wealthy in this movie is an idiot.
 
And from the minute the story hits San Francisco, I don’t believe any of it.
 

1946
Directed by Charles Vidor
Starring:
Rita Hayworth as Gilda
Glenn Ford as Johnny Farrell
George Macready as Ballin Mundson

They say there’s a thin line between love and hate. You need to go along with this questionable adage as you watch Gilda. The story takes place in Argentina and centers around a love triangle: a casino owner, his floor manager and Gilda. Everything is ducky between Ballin Mundson, the Nazi casino owner, and his floor manager, Johnny Farrell, so long as it’s just the two of them. “Women and gambling don’t mix,” Johnny says.

Then Ballin returns from a business trip with his new bride, Gilda. Johnny has this apprehensive look on his face as he follows Ballin into the bedroom where Gilda sits before her dressing table looking drop dead. Never did Rita Hayworth look more beautiful, more luminous. Hands down. Johnny in the voice-over says, “You’d think a bell would have rung, or you’d think I’d have had some instinct of warning. But I didn’t. I just walked right into it.” We notice the look that passes between Gilda and Johnny. They were lovers in the past. And no matter what Johnny and Ballin’s no-girls-allowed relationship has been up until this moment, Gilda changes it irretrievably.

Gilda says something dismissive to Johnny, and he gives her a look that would peel paint. At the end of the scene Johnny says in voice-over, “It was all I could do to walk away. I wanted to go back up in that room and hit her. What scared me was I wanted to hit him too. I wanted to go back and see them together with me not watching. I wanted to know.” Johnny’s torment over Gilda drives the story forward.

Power shifts around from Ballin to Gilda to Johnny throughout the story. Johnny hates Gilda and Gilda taunts Johnny by picking up men and spending the night with them. You’d think it was Johnny being cuckolded rather than Ballin. And where is Ballin when Gilda shows up after being gone all night? It’s one of the many confusions in this story. Like why is Johnny so slavishly loyal to Ballin?

Confusing unless you interpret the subtext, and conclude that Ballin and Johnny are lovers. That’s one take. My husband has a different take. He thinks Gilda is a devastating femme fatale. What red-blooded heterosexual could resist her? Johnny is down on his luck at the beginning of the story because of Gilda (again, we’re talking subtext.)  Ballin rescues Johnny from the streets and gives him a good job for which Johnny is grateful. He doesn’t want Ballin to suffer as Johnny has at the hands of Gilda.

Gay—hetero, however you weigh in on that topic, there’s another interesting tension in the story. Johnny Farrell is the point of view character, but shortly after he encounters Gilda, we lose sympathy for him. He becomes the unreliable narrator, and our sympathy turns to Gilda. She’s just so damned beautiful, we forgive her slutty behavior, and believe that she would be true as true with the right man. We want to tell Johnny Farrell to get over it and run off with Gilda himself.

There are many twists and turns in this story that I won’t spoil for you, including the non-noir ending. Gilda is a highly entertaining film and I would recommend it just to see Rita Hayworth at the height of her powers.

Take the perfect heist, add three flawed characters and you have a classic film noir.

The heist: a small town bank, and $200,000 extra cash every Thursday night to cover the town’s Friday payroll. The bank workers stay late to balance the books. And every Thursday night at six o’clock the black waiter from a nearby soda fountain brings a box of sandwiches and coffee to the bank employees by a side door in the alley while the rest of the town is at supper.

“It’s a one-time job, one roll of the dice, and then we’re through forever,” says Dave Burke, an embittered ex-cop and the brains of the operation. Dave, played by Ed Begley, lives in a ratty apartment and dreams of a better retirement. He recruits a brutal ex-con only known to Burke by reputation. The con’s name is Earl Slater, played brilliantly by Robert Ryan. Dave’s final choice is Johnny Ingram, played by Harry Belafonte. Johnny is a jazz man and a hopeless gambler, but he’s black, and a  perfect stand-in for the regular deliveryman. 

Burke assumes that a white man might not notice that a different black man is delivering their sandwiches. Back in 1959, when this film was made, the Jim Crow laws were still enforced. There were still segregation, still lynchings. Harry Belafonte, who helped fund the film, said: “My own personal desire was to put things on the screen that reflected a deeper resonance of black life.”

The success of a heist story depends on how disparate roles cooperate (and how lucky everyone is.) A is chosen because he’s a great safecracker, B is chosen because he can drive through any police trap and has nerves of steel. Dave Burke’s team never has a chance because Burke discounts Earl’s racism. But Earl isn’t the only one with a problem. Johnny bitterly resents being a black man in a white world. No wonder Dave’s “one roll of the dice” ends up snake eyes. Odds Against Tomorrow centers around this racism. And as you would expect in such a tale, the men’s antagonism towards each other blows up in their faces.

The movie is beautifully shot, scored and acted. The film absolutely succeeds in dramatizing the black/ white divide, so I feel like a jerk for wanting one of the leads to be just a little sympathetic.

I also prefer stories with women playing central roles. Three minor roles went to Shelley Winters as Earl’s girlfriend, Mae Barnes as Johnny’s ex-wife and Gloria Grahame as Earl’s sexy neighbor. Through these female characters we see Earl and Johnny’s societal resentments and rebellion. All three actresses did a bang-up job of making the most out of a few lines of script.

Odds Against Tomorrow with its honest look at race relations was among the first of its kind and one of the last films to be shot in the classic period of film noir.

In film noir, you start with characters looking for the easy life. Whether it’s sex or money (and usually it’s both) they’re not willing to woo the girl or work the job. They believe that playing it straight is for suckers.

Tomorrow is Another Day is different. It begins with Bill Clark, a truly decent guy. Bill killed his no-good, abusive father at the tender age of thirteen, and spent the next eighteen years in prison paying for his crime. Now that he’s out, he’ll never catch a break, no matter how clear his heart, no matter how hard he works. This story is straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel.

Clark, played convincingly by Steve Cochran, is set free into the adult world at thirty-one years old with no more knowledge of the world than he had at thirteen. He ogles a new convertible, but has no idea how to drive it. He ogles a young woman, but has no idea how to approach her. If ever there was a chicken ready to be plucked, it’s Bill Clark.

His first encounter with an over-friendly stranger ends up in a front page story in the morning paper with Bill’s picture and  an “exclusive” interview with the convicted murderer just released from prison. That night Bill finds himself in a dance hall with a harem of dime-a-dance girls. Bill is instantly drawn to blonde Catherine Higgins, played by Ruth Roman. Roman was remarkable as Farley Granger’s slutty wife in Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train.

Bill follows Catherine back to her apartment where they meet a third character, a thuggish cop who is doubling as Catherine’s pimp. He knocks Bill unconscious. When Bill comes to, the cop is gone and there’s a lot of blood on the floor.

Bill and Catherine embark on a crazy road trip running from the inevitable police inquiry. As they travel west, they fall in love. How Catherine journeys from a cynical blonde taxi dancer to a brunette and virtuous wife is a journey as long as their trip across country. And Ruth Roman really sells it.

They eventually befriend the Dawsons, a family of farm laborers who lead them to the lettuce fields of Salinas, California. The Dawson family are the kind of decent hard-working people that Bill and Catherine are striving to be. Catherine, after a grueling day of trimming lettuces, cooks and hangs curtains. It looks like our couple has found peace at last.

But that would be a happy story, and this is a noir. A notice in a national magazine offers a reward for Bill’s whereabouts. The message is clear: no matter how hard you try to play it straight, life is never going to give you a break.

But wait, there’s another twist…

If you were stranded on a desert island with only one noir movie—I know that’s a hard scenario to fathom—but if you had to pick just one, what would it be? My choice is John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.

It’s a caper flick told from six criminals’ point of view. These characters are so vivid, so real that the story becomes riveting. Huston said in his introduction, “You may not admire these people, but I think they’ll fascinate you.”  I  love these characters because they’re vivid and sympathetic, every last one of them. They’re not the brutal, heartless thugs we’re used to seeing in stories. Each of them is highly functional, each with a passion motivating him to work on the wrong side of the law. As the financier of the caper tells his wife: “Crime is merely a left-handed form of human endeavor.”

Huston introduces us to Dix, the hooligan (1950s speak for the muscle). Dix’s passion is the Kentucky horse farm his family lost in the Depression. He wants to make enough money to buy back the farm and recapture his lost life. In a brilliant performance by Sterling Hayden, Dix is a straight-up guy who won’t welch on a bet or go back on his word, but is a remorseless enforcer on the job. His not-really-girlfriend, Doll, just wants to be with Dix. They have one of the most enigmatic on-screen relationships I’ve run across. Somebody, please tell me what’s going on with these two.

Then there’s the brains behind the caper: “Doc” played by Oscar nominated Sam Jaffe , whose dream is to move to Mexico and chase girls all day. There’s the financier, played by Louis Calhern, desperate to make a lot of cash and run away with his mistress. She’s an unknown Marilyn Monroe who steals every scene she’s in. There’s the driver played by James Whitmore; the safecracker who has a wife and two babies to feed; and an alcoholic bookie who puts the deal together.

The caper is planned meticulously and beautifully executed. Then the noir kicks in. Fate is never, ever kind to the poor strivers in a noir story. This is not a tale of cause and effect, but of chance. As Doc says: “Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?” Now, I know there are a lot of definitions of film noir kicking around in the world, but this particular sensibility is, in my opinion, at the heart of the genre.

I haven’t said a word about how gorgeously this picture was composed and filmed. It was nominated for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best B/W Cinematography.

Okay, that’s my vote. If you had to pick just one noir picture, what would it be?

I’ve converted this page into blog form. I know you’re out there, so comment and let’s start talking.

I just finished re-reading Dashiell Hammett’s classic,The Maltese Falcon. Because I’ve seen the movie dozens of times, I hear Bogart as Sam Spade and Mary Astor as Brigid O’ Shaughnessy as I read the book. I hear the tremor in Mary Astor’s voice, when as Brigid, she says, “I don’t have to tell you how utterly at a disadvantage you’ll have me… if you choose.” In the book,  Brigid is very  young and very beautiful. She’s selling damsel-in distress looking for her knight-errant. Her power comes from finding men who can fight, steal and even kill for her.

Now look at Mary Astor. She was thirty-five when she made this picture. Does she look like a damsel-in-distress? Hell no. 

Imagine a different actress playing Brigid. Say Gene Tierney. At twenty-one Gene could have totally sold her helplessness. And then when Sam Spade says, “You’re very good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get in your voice…,”  think  how we’d  feel. What is wrong with Spade—does he hate all women? In the end, we’d realize that our detective  knows a whole lot more about human nature than we do.

Who would you choose?

Paramount is in a tizzy. It’s early in 1945 and Alan Ladd, their top earner, is headed back into the US Army in three months time and they’ve got nothing in the can. What is immediately needed is an Alan Ladd vehicle. Paramount settles on my hero, Raymond Chandler, and his half-written manuscript, The Blue Dahlia.

George Marshall starts directing from the beginnings of the script as Chandler continues to write.

The Blue Dahlia begins with a Hollywood-bound bus stopping at a corner and three war buddies getting off, each of them carrying a suitcase, each looking sheepish in their civvies. There’s Buzz who’s brain damaged and flies into rages,  there’s the amiable George who has taken the responsibility as Buzz’s keeper, and there is their squad leader, Johnny, played by Alan Ladd.

The three men decide to stop for a drink before they resume life back home.  Johnny is the only guy there with a wife to come home to, but he isn’t any more eager to leave the bar than his two friends. He raises a shot of whiskey and toasts his buddies,  Here’s to what was.

What does he mean? Is he mourning a past that can’t be recaptured, or is he not looking forward to what’s ahead? When he arrives home, we get it. His wife, Helen, is entertaining all the people in town who didn’t go to war. And what a corrupt, disreputable bunch they are. The most corrupt of all is Helen’s new boyfriend, Eddie Harwood, the owner of a nightclub called The Blue Dahlia. The party ends when Johnny socks Eddie in the jaw,  You got the wrong lipstick on, Mister, and Helen announces,  Ladies and gentlemen, I think you’d better leave. My husband would like to be alone with me. He probably wants to beat me up.

 I want to beat her up. So I’m not surprised when the housekeeper finds Helen dead the following morning. There are a number of people who have motive and opportunity. It’s the classic set-up used in every Perry Mason ever made: who killed the despicable victim?

There’s Johnny who has a boatload of motive. There’s Eddie Harwood, and Eddie’s boss, Leo, and there’s Buzz, Johnny’s brain-damaged buddy. But as far as the cops are concerned Johnny is their chief suspect. Johnny doesn’t trust the cops anymore than he trusts the rest of the civilian population. Enter Veronica Lake as Joyce who is eager to help Johnny. Why she is so eager to help is the unanswered story question. When she picks him up in a rainstorm he tells her, You oughta have more sense than to take chances with strangers like this. To which she replies,  It’s funny, but practically all the people I know were strangers when I met them.

Joyce acts as Girl Friday while Johnny evades the police and searches for Helen’s killer. And then the shoe drops. Joyce is Joyce Harwood, Eddie Harwood’s wife. The look on Alan Ladd’s face when he’s introduced to her is what makes noir Noir. It’s that this-is-what-happens-when-you-begin-to-trust-someone look.

The most complex and interesting character in the film is Eddie Harwood, played by Howard Da Silva. He wins our sympathy (at least mine) when Johnny socks him. He looks like he could clean the floor with Johnny. Instead he reaches for a handkerchief and tells Johnny,   You’re entirely right. The scene when he’s confronted by a blackmailer is worth the price of the movie. Eddie intimidates the blackmailer with a drink and a cigar.  He’s uber polite and he’s dangerous as hell.

It’s a great set-up, but who killed the dame is the big question. Chandler doesn’t know. He’s leaning towards Buzz, the brain-damaged soldier. Nuh-uh says Paramount. They tell Chandler that the public won’t buy a war hero turned murderer. Chandler is in crisis. He tells the studio he’s unable to finish the script sober. The only way but he can finish on schedule is if he can write from home—drunk—since alcohol gives him the energy and confidence that he needs.

He also requires from the studio two Cadillac limousines, parked outside his house with drivers available to run errands for him at any hour of his choosing and six secretaries available at all times for dictation and typing.

Believe it or not, Paramount agrees to his demands. And Chandler delivers the ending on schedule. Does Johnny solve his wife’s murder and learn to trust the blonde? I’ll leave it to you to discover.

There’s a postscript: shortly after the film was released, a young woman, Elizabeth Short, was brutally murdered and dismembered in Los Angeles. Elizabeth was called the Black Dahlia by the kids who hung out at the soda fountain with her. The name was picked up by the press and from then on her real-life story was entwined with the fictional one.

In 1954, ten years after Double Indemnity, Fred MacMurray stars once again as an honest guy lured into sin . Pushover is a morality tale: choose the indolent blonde (easy sex, easy money) or the working life with an industrious little brunette. The blonde and brunette live next door to each other, their apartments lit like the windows in an Advent calendar. The two men watching them are cops: Fred MacMurray as Paul Sheridan and Phil Carey as Rick McAllister. They’re watching the blonde Lona McLane played by Kim Novak in her debut role. 

Lona’s gangster boyfriend is on the lam after knocking off a bank and killing a guard. The cops have Lona under twenty-four hour surveillance as they wait for the boyfriend to show. Day after day the cops watch as Lona paces back and forth in her apartment. She doesn’t read, entertain or do housework, knit or paint landscapes. She smokes. She’s boring as hell, but she’s Kim Novak. All she has to do is breathe. 

Contrast Lona with the little brunette next door played by Dorothy Malone. The cops watch her because she’s next-door and she conveniently leaves her lights on and drapes open. She comes home from a hard day at work and makes canapés and hangs curtains. Busy, busy, busy like brunettes everywhere. Phil Carey is intrigued with her in his sexist, patronizing way, but he’s big and handsome and appearances have even more cache in this story than in life. And that’s a high bar.

We know from the first five minutes that Fred MacMurray is going for the lazy blonde and the easy money. And that he most likely won’t succeed. It’s not called Pushover for nothing. The tension in the story comes from trying to figure out the Kim Novak character. She sleeps with MacMurray the night they meet, so I’m thinking the woman has an agenda. And then later she suggests that they kill her boyfriend and take the money. This is classic femme fatale behavior, but as the story progresses, she shows unexpected loyalty towards Fred MacMurray. I find myself asking is she on the level? Are these two the noir version of star-crossed lovers? 

The cinematography in Pushover is beautiful and the score hilarious: pensive jazz for MacMurray and Novak, the march of the righteous for Carey and the other honest cops, music straight from Lassie Come Home for Dorothy Malone. I love watching MacMurray play the fallen man and Kim Novak is stunning. Pushover is not Double Indemnity great, but it’s definitely worth seeing.

I love Raymond Chandler. Trouble is my business, too. And if Philip Marlowe was a real person, I’d do my best to make him my next husband—just kidding. Just not. Naturally, when I got word that a new/old Marlowe movie crawled up from the Out-of-Print, I pressed the correct buttons on my computer and a week later, the movie arrived on my porch.

 The movie is The Brasher Dubloon, and stars George Montgomery as Philip Marlowe. They should have never cast George Montgomery as Marlowe. Montgomery is a tool in this story. I could outwit Montgomery. He immediately falls in-love-or-whatever-you-call-it with the Crazy-Girl. Crazy–Girl is pretty but lacking enough screen presence to lure our detective into believing in her innocence. There’s a painful scene where Marlowe gives Crazy-Girl “love lessons”. Don’t make me explain.

The rest of the cast is an assortment of stock characters: squinty-eyed mobsters, brash coppers, imperious old ladies and furtive fences. At one point in the story, Montgomery opens and closes the outer door of the suspect’s office to trick the suspect into thinking he was alone. Good God, that’s the kind of trick we learned as eight-year-olds. But even with a less than stellar cast, the Dubloon is a pretty decent story based on Chandler’s High Window. And it has great windy sets.

Although Brasher Dubloon is worse than the regrettable Lady in the Lake (another unsuccessful Marlowe) it is not the worst Philip Marlowe ever!!!!! That prize goes to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. Altman has fun with the private eye genre by setting a chain-smoking Elliot Gould with his rumpled suit and narrow tie smack in the middle of  1973 California.  This Marlowe spends what feels like a half-hour on camera shopping for and feeding his cat. You read me correctly—Marlowe has a cat. Gould mumbles to himself, he smirks, he hides in the bushes, and smirks some more.

Take a noir, flood the sets with California light, throw out the story, cast a smirky, ironic Marlowe BUT keep the femme fatale. What does that say about Altman? The femme fatale and her doomed husband (a brilliant Sterling Hayden) are the only serious characters in this farce. Altman has a jolly time making fun of the women in the cast as well . Marlowe’s next-door-neighbors are a group of nude or semi-nude yoga practitioners. Thankfully, no one practices downward-facing-dog; they just prance across their balcony waving chiffon scarves. There’s one other woman in the cast, and you won’t like what Altman does to her.

I hate this picture, but if you like camp, you might be amused by it. No you won’t.