Signal Watch Reads: Brubaker and Phillip's "Last of the Innocent" - pure noir on the rocks

Holy smokes.  This week saw the release of another issue of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phllips' creator-owned but published by Marvel title Criminal.  Criminal is an ongoing series, but Brubaker tells different stories every few issues with new characters, etc...  in short, its not an ongoing series following a single character.

I picked up the first issue or two and about that time i was changing comic shops, etc... and lost track of the title.  With issue 1 of the recent story, Last of the Innocent, I decided to pick up the comic again.  And I'm absolutely pleased I did so.

As someone who enjoys his crime fiction as much as his heroic fiction, Last of the Innocent hits all of the noir criteria, following stand-ins for the Riverdale High gang of Archie comics in familiar faces such as Archie, Jughead, Veronica, Betty, Moose, Reggie and others.  But to see Jughead's gluttony explained as part of an addictive personality, Veronica's rich-girl self-centeredness taken to the logical extreme, etc... by the character's 30's sets up the perfect noir scenario.

I'm making this sound like something it isn't, which is an unoriginal, cutesy exploitation of the original Archie material.  Instead, the story reads much more like straight noir with flashbacks and reflections of Riley Richard's past remembered through rose colored glasses.

The series has a few more issues to go (this week saw issue 3 hit the stands), but each chapter does what a good noir does with each twist, and ratchets up the tension around Riley and the supporting characters.

The artwork, flipping between Phillips' now trademark rough-and-tumble style and a cartoony, kids'-book feel for flashbacks, is a huge pleasure.

Highly recommended.

Noir Watch: Angel Face (1952)

Angel Face was released in 1952, directed and produced by Otto Preminger (Anatomy of a Murder, Laura) and stars Jean Simmons (Spartacus, Guys and Dolls) and Robert "I guess I'll be in it" Mitchum (oh, geez. What hasn't he been in?).

Its a tidy little movie, interesting mostly in that it makes a few choices that bust the mold for the movies of the era and for those of us who with expectations from reading Chandler or Hammett.

Noir Watch: The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

For years I thought this movie was a screwball comedy based solely on the title. Eventually I figured out I was in no way correct on that score, and when I came across it in Eddie Muller's Dark City I knew I had to give it a try.  And, I kind of fell in love with the name.  Its got a real ring to it.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

dig it.

This 1946 movie stars some pretty darn big guns including Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Kirk Douglas and Lizabeth Scott, so its got its noir bona fides.  Its written by The Hustler writer/director Robert Rossen and directed by Lewis Milestone, who handled movies as diverse as 1939's Of Mice and Men to the great war picture, Pork Chop Hill. 

Noir Watch: The Postman Always Rings Twice

Let us just get this out of the way:  Lana Turner

yup

Okay. I now feel prepared to move on.

About 12 years ago, I actually read the original James M. Cain novel of The Postman Always Rings Twice and liked it so much at the time I saw no real reason to watch the movie immediately afterward. Fortunately, I've pushed a lot of memories out of my brain in order to make room for stuff like Superman, name of my dogs' vet and Jamie's birthday, and I could no longer remember how the novel ended anymore.

I recorded the movie off TCM this week, and finally gave it a whirl.

Noir Watch: The First issue of Brubaker's "Criminal: Last of the Innocent" is great comics

Confession time:  As weird as it might seem, somehow I didn't get past the second issue of Brubaker's creator-owned series, Criminal.  I don't even remember what happened, because I don't recall having ill-feelings toward the series.  I suspect that I always planned to pick it up in TPB, and then just... didn't.  Likely because its being published by Marvel, and I don't really scour the Marvel solicits too hard these days (oddly, my Marvel purchases are limited to only a few things, including Brubaker's Captain America, so its not like I've had an embargo on his work).

Brubaker's series, as I understand it, tells a new story with new characters for each storyline.  Gien the nature of crime movies and stories, it seems really how it should be.  Different tales from the mind of a guy who knows his territory. 

Yes, if you're going to evoke pulp-noir nostalgia, start with the cover

Noir Watch: "Touch of Evil" at Paramount w/ @PlacesLost was a good/ horrible time

Man, Touch of Evil is a complicated movie.  Charlton Heston is supposedly a Mexican narco agent, Orson Welles acts and directs and looks like he's about to keel over in every shot, Marlene Dietrich shows up as a tired fortune teller/ good-time girl and looks pretty damn good, Janet Leigh gets menaced, and for some reason Zsa Zsa Gabor is in the movie for about twenty seconds.

In this film Heston plays what he does best:  Charlton Heston.  But with a mustache.

I watched Touch of Evil for the first time around 1998 or 1999, likely on VHS from "I Love Video" on Airport, and what I really recall is that I found the scene in which Janet Leigh is menaced alone in her motel room so upsetting, I turned the movie off and went and did other things for a bit and came back to finish the movie later.  I suppose as I'd seen the movie before, I knew what was coming and it was a bit easier to manage as a viewer, but its still some fairly powerful stuff.

Noir Watch: Detour (1945)

I'd read a bit about Detour in Eddie Muller's history of noir, Dark City,a great handbook for growing an appreciation or understanding of noir.  Detour was extremely low-budget, shot in about a week, and shows its rough edges pretty much everywhere in the film.  But after one viewing I can see why folks come back to this movie again and again.  Its not always about the professionalism of the product when you've got story and actors that make it work. 

Noir Watch: Pushover

Pushover isn't a top-flight flick, but its a nice study in building drama and tension and a chance to see Kim Novak in not just one of her first credited performances, but as a leading lady. And, of course, the always weird sight of Fred MacMurray in a noir role.

The story is a small-scale pot boiler about temptation, moral gray areas and what a great idea we can all find Kim Novak.  Novak plays the kept-girl of an on-the-lam bank robber (Lona McLane), and MacMurray a cop (Paul Sheridan) who picks her up awhen he's supposed to charm some information out of her, and see if she can tell the cops where her boyfriend is hiding out.  The two fall hard for each other, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. The two scheme a bit, and figure there's a way to hang onto the dough the boyfriend picked up in his latest robbery.  The cops are particularly hot to find him as, during the last robbery, someone got shot.

Noir Watch: Human Desire

Ah, Ms. Gloria Grahame.

Human Desire is listed as 1954, directed by the great Fritz Lang, and is sort of a Double Indemnity meets Narrow Margin meets The Postman Always Rings Twice meets...   Still, I don't think its fair to say that Human Desire is a throwaway movie just because you can see the movie wearing its influences on its sleeve.

they say the same things about Jamie

The plot is a bit convoluted (aren't they all).  Grahame plays Vicki Buckley, the wife of a railyard junior manager who has lost his job.  He asks her to look up an old family employer of money and influence, and only after Vicki returns from securing the job does her husband, Carl, realize that Vicki and Owens may have had a past.  Things get murdery on the return train, and with incriminating evidence in his pocket Carl holds Vicki's fate in his hands.  However, Jeff Warren (played by Glenn Ford) works for the train company, has a run in with Vicki on the train, and slowly begins to piece things together even as he falls for Vicki.

Lang puts his stamp on the movie, incorporating trademark play with shadows and swashes of light, and in the tradition of the movies I'd mentioned above, it fits the bill for noir with any number of checkmarks including the disintegration of the everyman at the hands of sexual desire.  And, really, that's the hook of the entire story.

strangers on a train?

If I were to pick one thing that made the movie a bit of a standout, its that somewhat like Hayworth in Gilda, Grahame's Vicki is both victim and conniver, innocent and seductress.  Even when she's using less than scrupulous means to get something, its hard not to believe that she's at least partially honest.  And its that vacillation between right and wrong surrounding Vicki, Carl and Jeff, even with a murder in between them, that makes the story a bit different from, say, Double Indemnity.  Rather than simple corruption, its a sort of moral purgatory that seems to consume the characters.

Grahame gets an unusual amount of screentime in this one, and its a welcome difference.  On a simple read, I suppose its easy enough to see Vicki as the femme fatale, but her motivations from even before the film starts are mostly standard issue desires, and its circumstance and situations beyond her control that lead to the climax of the film.  The character simply isn't as likable as her role in her other co-starring film with Glenn Ford, The Big Heat, but she makes the most of a complex character.

Ford may have never committed fully to the pit he's supposed to be sinking into, and seems content to play the hero in a role that doesn't really demand it.  Curiously, in key scenes he does seem in tune with the material, so its an interesting noir schizm to see the lead merrily getting suckered into a bad corner without the "damn the torpedoes" look that comes with chasing a woman you know is going to wind up getting somebody killed.

Did I like the film?  Absolutely.  the story was tightly told, the characters believable, the setting and types of characters a bit fresh, and as I had Gloria Grahame on the brain, the timing was excellent.  I'd like to give it another whirl to see what I missed, and I'm sure some enterprising RTF scholar could write a whole paper on trains as symbolism of some sort as Lang frames them and uses them throughout the film.

I watched the film as part of a set Jamie got me for my birthday, Columbia Film Noir Classics 2.  The movie also comes with a short documentary.

Dames to Watch Out For: Gloria Grahame

Its my birthday as I begin this post, so I'm going to indulge myself and return to that old standby of "Dames In the Media the League Once Dug", which at this URL, we call "Dames to Watch Out For".

In this edition: Ms. Gloria Grahame

You may think you don't know Gloria Grahame, but if you owned a TV in the 1980's and 90's in the month of December, it means you saw It's a Wonderful Life.  Grahame played Violet Bick, the woman who seems a lot more interesting than Donna Reed who George gives some money to so that she can leave town and start a new life (its also shown she had eyes for George Bailey, and he had no idea.  We think George may have missed the boat on that one.)

see, you know this person

She also appeared in Oklahoma! as Ado Annie, a sort of naive, man-crazy problem-child.  Grahame was in her 30's by the time the movie was released, but was playing someone around 17 or 18, I'd guess.  Go figure.

If you've seen Oklahoma!, she's the crazy one who is often seen in a terrible hat.

the hat alone should warn the farmers and the cow mans that she's 10 kinds of crazy

But that's not the Grahame we're here to talk about.  Today, we want to discuss the Noir-centric Gloria Grahame.

Grahame gives Ford a couple of things to think about

In doing my research I stumbled across a great post about Grahame at Bright Lights Film Journal, and I'd recommend it as a good read.

I haven't seen all that many films with Grahame, but its hard to ignore her in either Crossfire or The Big Heat.

It seems Grahame actually received accolades for her work in Crossfire, and its not hard to see why.  Its a heartbreaking role as a taxi dancer, caught up in the murder of a Jewish US Soldier.  Ginny's role isn't the focus, although pivotal, and Grahame breathes a lot of life into the character, worn out and tired, and rightfully certain she's barely counted as a person any more.

I'll discuss Crossfire at another point.  I've seen it twice, and while somewhat dated in its approach, its still a great, tight film and uses the genre to share messages that were on the mind of America in the wake of World War II.

Also like a loaded gun?  A loaded gun.

Grahame would receive an Academy Award nomination, but it wouldn't lead to her becoming part of the Hollywood Pantheon of stars best remembered from the eras she crossed, from Hayworth to Monroe, or their later peers.

I have discussed The Big Heat, which I'll reiterate here is just a terrific movie.

this fills so many check boxes for me on a great noir scene, my brain is kind of exploding

For me, the standout role for Grahame is likely in The Big Heat, which is the source of the image above.  This is a movie about tough/ righteous police, corrupt cops and their spouses, sociopathic henchmen, ruthless mobsters, etc...  and Grahame manages to go toe-to-toe with all of them.  Including Lee Marvin.  Lee.  Marvin.

Grahame's character (a bit like descriptions I've read of Grahame herself) is a particularly bright woman who also likes to have a pretty darn good time.  She may intellectually know she's hanging out with hoodlums, but it seems to be working out pretty well for her.  The character takes a drastic turn, and Grahame handles the metamorphosis terribly well for what could have been an awkwardly melodramatic performance in lesser hands.  It may not be a femme fatale role, but its also an interesting female role from the era (as many are once you head into the world of noir).

publicity still from "The Big Heat"

Unfortunately, as with her peers such as Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, Grahame's personal life seemed fit for its own big screen treatment if it hadn't featured a lot of material that likely wouldn't have met production codes back in the day.

Grahame had her fair share of romantic entanglements and married four times (including to Nicholas Ray and, later, Ray's son, so....  yeah, there's a story there), and died at the age of only 57.

For my birthday I received a film noir box set from Jamie featuring Human Desire from 1954.  Its one of the movies up next in my queue, so expect to see more Grahame in the near future.

Noir Watch - Force of Evil

Before Force of Evil, I'd not had the pleasure of seeing John Garfield in a movie before. Garfield passed back around 1952, and didn't join the field of actors for whom a premature passing ends up placing them in a romantic pantheon of stars who were taken too soon (Bogart, Monroe, etc...).  I have to say, I thought Garfield was very good.  One wonders what else he might have done.

This is my first viewing, but Force of Evil is an interesting movie in several respects, in that its a very well shot movie, using (I believe) New York as a backdrop, and a mix of sets and on-location shots in the streets.  The plot is a bit complicated, relying on what I assume was semi-common knowledge regarding numbers rackets back in the day, gangsters seeking semi-legitimacy through "combinations", and a refusal to let any particular character appear as the white knight of the film. 

When they do my biopic, I hope the actor playing me gets portrayed as a disembodied head staring out from the poster

Its rare you see a movie from this era in which everyone involved is playing fast and loose with law and order, even the attractive young love interest of our male lead (the lovely Beatrice Pearson, who only made a very few films before returning to the stage). 

The movie contains a few scenes that were frankly a bit revelatory, including a scene in a diner which just worked liked gangbusters (including the score).  While the characters motivations don't all exactly click, and it seems the script could have been tightened a bit, I have to give credit to George Barnes, the movie's cinematographer and David Raksin, who scored the film.

Aside from John Garfield, the cast seemed like they were actually quite good, but I also think that this film must have been well above a "B Picture" in budget.  The aforementioned Ms. Pearson turns in a good job, but several actors in smaller roles took their parts to heart, especially Thomas Gomez as Leo Morse. 

And, even Jamie looked up from her computer and exclaimed "Oh, man!  What isn't she in?" when Marie Windsor vamped her way onto the screen.*


The movie is black and white, but Windsor spells trouble in any color scheme

Likely your mileage will vary on this one, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.  While it took me a bit to get how the numbers rackets worked in the movie (actually very important to the plot), I did catch on, and I liked how all of the characters became slowly and almost unwittingly embroiled in deeper plots than anything they'd set out to do.  Very clever stuff.



*I actually had no idea Windsor was in this one until the credits rolled at the opening

Signal Watch Watches: Gun Crazy

I first watched Gun Crazy years ago as part of a DVD Film Noir set. Honestly, aside from a few themes and Peggy Cummins in her cowgirl outfit, I really didn't remember a whole lot about the movie thanks to a 102 fever and a tough case of the flu.

best.  flirting scene.  ever.

Basically, the movie is about mixing guns, desperation and sex into one big ball of wax, and its hard to argue with the results.  John Dall plays a hard-luck case (Bart Tare) who's been obsessed with guns since childhood, and who realizes early on that the only thing he's good at is shooting.  Out of Juvie and out of the army after a stint as a weapons specialist, Tare comes home, unemployed but optimistic.  At the fair, he meets Laurie Ann Starr, the carnival sharp shooter, and what commences is a peculiar if oft-imitated flirtation as Laurie and Bart one up one another with gun tricks.

Soon enough, Bart and Laurie are jungled up and out of money, and Laurie's peculiarly devious side emerges.  Insisting on a flashy, fast lifestyle, Laurie puts the screws to Bart to either join her in a hold-up spree or forego their quicky marriage (and we're to understand quite a bit in the way of bedroom antics).

Stick-up artists don't necessarily make good protagonists, but the writers insist that Bart has a thing about killing, and so the spree has a sort of romantic vibe, until he realizes its not his own worst impulses he has to worry about. 

You have to admire them for knowing exactly what they're selling

The movie predates the far more famous Bonnie and Clyde, but its hard to believe that the producers of that movie hadn't seen Gun Crazy, right down to Faye Dunaway's sassy little beanie emulating the one worn by Cummins in the first reel. 

Its like when they're slow bringing out Jamie's french toast

There's just a whole lot at play in the movie that, while unspoken, isn't exactly glossed over when it comes to the odd-ball romance of the pair.  The movie doesn't suggest that they aren't in love, but its a strange co-dependency of two people who never, ever should have found each other in this crazy, mixed up world.  Its romance that burns hottest when bullets ar flying, and that tends not end well for anybody.

Unlike the movie's grandchildren and great-grandchildren, even the protagonists of the movie acknowledge the cowardice of pulling a gun, and that's its own theme in the movie.  Certainly not something we'd see out of Mickey and Mallory by the time Natural Born Killers hit the screen.

The movie is obviously made on the cheap (neither Cummins nor Dall were superstars) but there's a lot of spirit, right down to some interesting camera work (a backseat single camera shot during a heist) and even the final shots of the movie are imaginative.  In a lot of ways, the movie manages to successfully pull off what I can never quite figure out how studios screw-up:  if you have a limited budget, shouldn't story and characters become a major focus?  And figuring out how to do a lot with what you've got?

Anyhow, I liked this the first time I watched it while sweating through the flu, and I liked it a whole lot more when I wasn't  hallucinating my way through the plot.

So, I think I am going to see "The Big Bang"

A lot of what folks try to pass off as modern noir seems to either really translate into "plodding detective movie" or "we've mistaken showing the sex scenes/ making an 'erotic' thriller with what they were doing in noir, but we basically ended up making something they'll show on Cinemax after 12:01 AM".

Really, aside from "The Big Lebowski", its hard to think of much in the last few years that actually pulled it off.

I don't want to vouch for the flick until I've seen it, but I'm going to give the new Antonio Banderas movie a shot.  The trailer looks...  not terribly promising, but they cast Bill "Predator" Duke and put him in the trailer, so I'm in.

Language in the trailer is NSFW

Weekend Movies: Laura, Gojira and Predator

So the last three movies I watched were

• the 1944 noirish classic Laura featuring Dana Andrews and the lovely Gene Tierney
• Gojira, the original Japanese version of Godzilla (1954) from before someone decided to cut in Raymond Burr to Americanize the flick
• Predator, the 1987 action/ alien monster flick starring two actual Governors of actual States of the US and the now-under-utilized Carl Weathers

Of late, I've felt like there's so much perfectly good stuff out there that I haven't seen yet, or that I have seen but felt it needed another watching more than, say, Gnomeo + Juliet, that I haven't been out to see very many new movies the past year.  Not to say I don't go out to the movies.  Of course, Austin likes to cater to dorks my age with $10 burning a hole in their pocket, and so if you want to see a super-rare 35mm print of Predator, this is the town to do it in.  And just as TPR runs a terrific summer cinema series of classic and unusual film, so, too, will Austin's Paramount theater.

Sure, I feel bad I didn't see The King's Speech (not really, but I know it will make you feel better if I say so),  but in my experience, if a movie is worth watching, it will be worth watching at some indeterminate point in the future, perhaps more so than had I watched it as part of a media blitz and award season rampage.

That said, I wish the only true arthouse theater left in Austin were not a hike from my house.  And that they also served delicious red pepper hummus like The Alamo.  As it is far from my home and the best I can do is popcorn or Whoppers (which: gross), I don't even really look to see what's playing at the Arbor anymore.

Laura

This was my second viewing of Laura, and I realized I actually had forgotten "whodunnit" when it came to the murder, so it was actually quite a bit of fun to watch again and see a young Vincent Price playing The Handsome but Weak Young Man.  And, of course, the mid-movie twist is more or less now a cinema classic (it was fun to watch Jamie during that part).

Add a mustache, smoking jacket, and a razor sharp pendulum of death, and there's Mr. Price!

Its almost more of a drawing room mystery than a true noir, but the obsession with the murdered Laura and the various motives of our suspects certainly makes it a candidate for the ill-defined genre.  I like to think its a precursor to Vertigo, which is a much more complicated film and takes the obsession just that little bit crazier (thanks, Jimmy Stewart!),  but its hard to argue with success or Dana Andrews' as the no-BS-cop who falls hard for a dame who is pushing up daisies.

Gojira

If you've only seen the American cut of the original Godzilla (which is a perfectly good movie, by the way), I really recommend checking out the original Japanese version, Gojira.  This is the first Godzilla flick, and its where the groundwork for Godzilla as big, physical manifestation of the psychic sins of humanity gets outlined, and in this version its pretty powerful stuff.  Especially when one considers this was about 9 years after Hiroshima, etc...

Gojira just cannot figure out where he dropped his keys

There's just so much to love in a Godzilla movie, whether you're watching it as an earnest albeit metaphorical cautionary tale, as high camp of Man in Suit or just to bask in the weirdness of the sequels.  Being the first, Gojira doesn't hint at the wink-and-a-nod-ness of the more self-aware Godzilla movies, and before technology had moved beyond Man in Suit (but it has become a point of pride to keep the Godzilla movies pure with puppetry and miniatures). 

In about a week, a new Godzilla comic hits, and that was really part of why I was reviewing the movie. Also, man, Godzilla is awesome, but...

Its an odd thing to be watching a Godzilla movie and be thinking "too soon?".  So, give to the Red Cross, won't you?

Predator

And, last but not least, SimonUK and I made it out to the Alamo to see Predator.  Its funny how you learn new things all the time, such as:  Director/ Writer Shane Black is actually IN this movie as Hawkins.

These guys really know how to wipe out defenseless trees

Predator is definitely a nostalgia trip for me as its representative of the movies I was watching once we had a VCR, a membership at the local video store and evenings to kill during the summer.  The unapologetically explosive flicks of the 1980's made up my movie viewing in those years between kid's shows and figuring out movies could be a nuanced form of storytelling, which i think started when my Uncle showed me Das Boot and Godfather in the same weekend when I was 15.  But I still like these movies.

Predator also represents one of the high points of a specific sort of genre that became relegated to direct-to-video when studios just quit trying.  In many ways, Predator is sort of a high point for a genre that came out of 50's B-movies and has since become a staple of SyFy original movies.  And in that, much like John Carpenter's The Thing, I was surprised to see that  Predator is actually a pretty darn good movie.

You don't see much of him since he went off to run Howard University's RTF department, but actor/ director Bill Duke makes a serious impression as the "going quickly crazy" Mac.  And I find it surprising you didn't see more of the Elpidia Carillo after this movie.

But the movie is also notable for other names associated with the picture.  Famous creature maker Stan Winston designed the Predator, Die Hard director John McTeirnan did this pic first, Joel Silver was a producer, Alan Silvestri wrote the score...

...and Arnie appeared as the kid who gets bullied

I like the "technology vs. primitive" aspects, especially as the humans realize they don't have any technological advantage (a bit like people versus, say, deer) and the technology the humans depends on becomes useless compared to mud and sticks.  I also think you have to admire how the movie conveys the odd, wordless expression of the Predator honor system that becomes a thread in the movie.  Sure, its got some hokey lines, irresponsible use of explosives and firearms, and seems to believe Native Americans are magical, but its still a fun flick in a sort of Jack London-ish way.  Only with exploding heads, chain guns, and laser missiles.

Signal Watch Watches: Hell's Half Acre

I was a little unconvinced that Hawaii would make a good back drop for a noir film, and while its a little hard to feel terribly gritty around loud floral shirts and hukilaus, I think the particular neighborhood (Hell's Half Acre, natch) frames the action in an understanable way.  Even in paradise, there's always some hive of scum and villainy.  The movie is a bit even tempered for noir, and so its hard to say it has any gut emotional impact or leaves you with any particular impression, but the plot isn't all bad - ie - it's not exactly The Big Heat, but after Crack-Up, I felt like I was getting back in the Noir groove.

I learned about the movie flipping through a book on noir, and was particularly interested in this movie as it stars the lovely Evelyn Keyes and has two of my other favorite women on the silver screen, Marie "Narrow Margin" Windsor and Elsa "Bride of Frankenstein" Lanchester.  The male actors are okay, though lead Wendell Corey doesn't radiate grit so much as a sort of anxiousness, and was just overpowered on screen by Phillip Ahn.

Its an interesting movie not because the plot is all that fascinating, but because there's some stuff in the movie that, frankly, I was surprised slipped by the censors, including a near rape and what appeared to be the start of a conversation regarding Elsa Lanchester's character's homosexuality.

As per things that surprised me for the time:  The movie also makes no bones about both putting Asians into the film and making it clear that there's equal footing here in Hawaii (that said, the character of "Ippy" is incredibly complicated as I have no idea if that was offensive or not.  But it was goofy.).

You guys know I love Marie Windsor when she shows up in a movie, and she gets some pretty darn good lines and scenes, but she's not in the movie all that much (though her role is pivotal).

Its probably not required noir viewing, but its interesting to see the genre moved to a location of such distinct character and the film embrace some small part of the culture of the location in order to tell a story.

Noir: Crack-Up, Comics: Icon, The Stage: Spidey!

Let this cardboard box say what I cannot

I just have nothing to really say in any coherent fashion (this week).  Last week I was ready to go with a new post every 8 hours, and this week...  nothing.  The good news is that I am not feeling the old kick of negativity that would occasionally get me to begin making proclamations about ending a blog.  There's just not much here at the moment.  

That's how it is sometimes.

Noir Report

Last night I watched a movie entitled Crack-Up from 1946.  It was sort of a weirdly dull and unconvincing noir that relied upon the viewer to buy a pretty cockamamie scheme by a bad-guy to frame an otherwise perfectly rationale person as a lunatic, assumed the audience would be hostile to the work of Salvador Dali (this is '46, when Dali would have been already known, but not yet a fixture of dorm room poster art) and tried to sell the very dad-like Pat O'Brien (of Knute Rockne, All American fame) as our hero, when he feels like he's sort of phoning it in through good chunks of the movie.

That's not even a very good likeness of Ms. Trevor.  Even the poster artist isn't trying.

I stuck with it because I kept thinking something interesting was just about to happen, but...  it did not.  It was mostly middle-aged guys hand-wringing and framing each other for things that, honestly, its not clear anybody would really care about if the whole scam were exposed.

Comics

I've also been reading last month's Super-comics (I confess to really liking all this Legion stuff, which 23 year old me would slap me for), Dwayne McDuffie's Icon, and other assorted comics.  I do want to write a brief post on Icon at some point, as I think he'd be useful in the current DCU.

This cover only hints at the 90's-ness that one must adapt to in order to read this volume

I actually quite like what I've read so far, even if its in a sort of 90's-era comic style (bear in mind, I didn't like nor read much in the way of Superheroes from about 1991-1997). Its not really a Superman analog other than a cape and invulnerability of a sort, and its dealing with different issues.

Theatre!

Oh, yes. Also, in case you hadn't heard... Spider-Man, Please Turn off the Dark is closing for a few weeks, that director Julie Taymor has left/ quit/ was fired and when the show reopens, audiences will likely have a different show on their hands. It seems somebody pointed out that Taymor's ideas about Spider-Man were maybe not working.

My suspicion is that Taymor always had a certain level of disdain for the material as a "comic book" and "kid stuff" and missed the part where this is modern American mythology.  Her job was to steward the story, not to "improve" the story, tell her own story over the back-drop of Spider-Man and play to her usual audience.  And in that...  I doubt she was the right person for the job to begin with.  This was just never going to be her bag.  It happens, and it happens in comics, too (see:  Jodi Picoult on Wonder Woman).

Comics are still ghetto-ized, and even when I like to think "oh, if you spend time on it, you'll get it", I'd say that 95% of the population just gawks at you, shrugs, and says "oh, its just a comic book, get over it.  It doesn't matter if we completely do our own thing" (and usually that's exactly the moment where things go off the rails, btw).

Alas, most likely the play will now be a rambunctious, teen-audience friendly re-telling of the Spider-Man movie, which will play well to tourists , but it will be ultimately pretty forgettable, and we'll never have a permanent record of what I am certain must have been an amazing spectacle of hubris, disdain for source material and its audience, and risk-taking heretofore unseen on the Broadway stage.

"Star Trek IV" and "Gilda"

Yesterday we spent the day helping Wagner move into her new pad down here in South Austin, so by the evening, I wasn't excactly pressing Jamie to make sure we got a night out on the town.  An order to Domino's later, and we had our evening mapped out.

STIV: TVH

I'm no true Trekker (I'm more of a Trekkie), but I love some original-cast, original-series Star Trek.  For Christmas, Jamie had got me a Blu-Ray set of the first 6 Trek films, some of which I haven't watched in years. 

I think we all knew about Trek growing up, but I wasn't really sold on the premise until 1984, when my folks moved us to Austin and Trek ran every weekday afternoon on the local UHF channel, KBVO.  No need to recount much more here, as, thanks to the power of the internet and 8 years of blogging, I've already done so elsewhere. 

Kirk and Spock try to decide if Pier 39 is too touristy

But what I would recount here is that seeing Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in the theater was an eye-opening geek-tacular experience in my youth.  Yes, its the sit-com episode wherein the crew travels to 1987 to recruit some humpback whales in order to prevent an alien intelligence from accidentally destroying Earth with their megaphone.  But it was also the movie where people were so excited, they were cheering, standing up to applaud, etc...  really, pretty incredible.

The movie holds up remarkably well, and the Blu-Ray edition I have cleans up all the fx and optics that had gotten a little funky over the years.  The plot is, perhaps, a little silly, but its good, clean fun, and does what sci-fi does so well, and that's uses a metaphor to explain the issues of the day (ie: we need to be careful how we deal with our planet and the species we share it with, as we cannot predict the tragedy their loss will bring us). 

Also, it gives us all the line we use (inaccurately) when we see ourselves flying into the Bay Area:



Kids today won't get the scant Cold War references either as Chekov gets picked up as a Russian spy on our naval vessel, the USS Enterprise, nor the stalemate of Federation vs. Klingon that plays out in the bookend scenes. 

Its also unfortunate that we don't get a bit more time to explore the Enterprise crew dealing with the late 20th Century or get more cultural comment (and it is kind of hilarious that the single-use device, the communicator, is the size of a brick).  But I can say that to this day, when my computer at work does not do as I say, I still find myself repeating Scotty's condescending "hellllloooo, computer...".  (Yes, I work on Windows machines.  Don't judge me.)

Anyway, I still love this movie.


Oh my Goodness, Rita Hayworth
After Jamie toodled off to bed, I watched Gilda, a post WWII decidedly noirish flick about everything from tungsten cartels to romantic obsession, to philiosophizing men's room attendants.  Starring Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth, its a reminder of what an "A" noir looks like in comparison to, say, 5 Against the House. 

Not the most subtle advertising for why you should watch this flick

I'd pose the question of whether or not the movie would have been made without Casablanca as a predecessor, as it seems a product of somewhat similar setting, characters, etc... only without anybody having anything honorable to fight for, and sinking into noirish territory rather than the turn to the just-cause that Casablanca provides as the alternative. 

It does, however, feature Rita Hayworth as Gilda, the quickly-obtained wife of a shady night club owner, who has good reason to butt heads with his strong arm, Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford).  There are some comparisons one could make to the Coen's development of the Tom/ Verna/ Leo triangle in Miller's Crossing, although here its all a bit more...  tuxedo-clad. 

The role of Gilda is remarkably well-written, with some seriously snappy dialog, and became the role Hayworth would be associated with for the remainder of her life.  She would also inspire looks and other characters in countless movies afterward.  And I find it hard to believe Jessica Rabbit, and countless other "oh, that woman singing is trouble" scenes would have existed without Put the Blame on Mame. 

Its definitely a film I'll want to watch again, and not just because of Rita Hayworth.  There were a lot of plot threads, some things I'll want to see again as per how whole scenes were thought through (such as the use of disguises during the Carnival sequence), etc...  Its a smart, clever movie and I can see why it turns up in so many lists.

As easy as it is to just want to applaud Rita Hayworth for her Hayworthness, Glenn Ford and George Macready are also both really good as well.  I haven't seen all that much of Glenn Ford's work, but I can see why he was a popular actor.
I hear San Antonio residents will be able to see it on the big screen this summer as part of the TPR Summer Film series!  So, you know, go check that out when NathanC begins promoting the film season.

The Sting and Five Against the House

Last night we watched The Sting (which I'd never seen) and then, after Jamie had drifted off to Sleepytime Junction, I watched a an ostensibly noir flick called Five Against the House. 

There's not a whole lot to be said about The Sting.  It's already a popular movie and I'm late to the game on the discussion.  I always like Paul Newman, and Robert Redford was most definitely, as always, Robert Redford.  I guess I was a little surprised to find the impetus for the characters setting up "the sting" was pretty much the "young handsome male" has his "aging black mentor" killed off by the movie's villain, ie: The Simpson's Mendoza.

The first meeting of The Handsome Men's Club

George Roy Hill was a talented director, and I think all of that's on display here.  But aside from Robert Shaw as the movie's villain, it sometimes - especially in the first act - it feels a bit like "hey, we're modern actors having fun playing as if we're in an old timey movie!" rather than just playing it straight as a period movie. 

I don't want to say I didn't like The Sting, but its not going to find its way to the top of my list.

For Christmas, I received two different collections of film noir from Jason.  Its pretty neat, as I really don't know many of the movies, so every time I put one in, I don't know what to expect.  Last night, because it featured Kim Novak, I pulled Five Against the House from the selections.

It's a heist flick, and more along the lines of a B-Noir than something like Out of the Past.  The set-up is that, basically, four college buddies get bored and decide to see if they can rob a casino they visited once.  Now, two of those buddies are law students who've served in Korea, so they're a bit older.  And Kim Novak is a nightclub chanteuse girlfriend of the one who isn't suffering from PTSD.

While the movie is enjoyable enough, and the actors and plot more or less engaging enough, somebody knew the movie had one big selling point:

well, it got ME to watch the movie

It is a bit unusual in that its not a movie about guys pushed to an extreme, seeking revenge, etc...  quite literally, it starts off as a movie about four fun-living college buddies who decide to rob a casino because they're bored and they'd like to try to do something they think can't be done.

The movie is fun enough, but I'd mention it for two reasons.

1)  There's a shot very, very similar the one used in The Graduate; the famous "Dustin Hoffman framed by Anne Bancroft's leg" shot. Its almost hard to believe someone didn't remember that one.  Kim Novak, ya'll.

I'm not crazy, right?

The movie is oddly frank about sex for a 1955-era flick.  It seems Novak has been with a few dudes prior to meeting our hero (to his credit, he's pretty open minded on that score), and Brian Keith flat out announces "hey, I had sex" in an early scene after meeting a casino patron. 

2)  Soderbergh is a really smart guy, and I have to believe that when he was prepping for a big budget remake of the goofy-fun Ocean's 11, he also checked out a huge number of other casino heist movies to get inspiration.  I can't help but think that part of his inspiration for Yen's part of the plan was inspired not by what actually happens in Five Against the House, but by what they tell other people they're doing, which is smuggling an ex-jockey into the casino in a box (which they've rigged up with a tape recorder and speaker).

While its not what Soderbergh did, its not too hard to make the leap.  Then again, how many ways can you really get an inside man into a casino, I guess.

I am in favor of a good heist movie (see:  The Killing), but this one is set up a bit oddly in that it all seems to lack real motivation, and that the stakes are non-existent for our leads.  The most dramatic tension occurs between the romantic leads, and whether Kim Novak will flake on our baritone-voiced hero.  The heist feels a little gimmicky, and there's not a lot of the usual fun in understanding the set-up, which... after watching The Sting, which is all set up, it just felt wrong.

5 Against the House is not going to go down on anyone's list as better than The Big Sleep, and were it not for the slow roll out of the PTSD storyline and its conclusion, I'd have a hard time labeling the movie as noir at all (not all heist movies are noir movies.  See:  Ocean's 11 and its remake,  Ocean's 11).  But it was okay, I suppose.

Rubbernecking 1947 Crime Scenes: "The Black Dahlia" book and movie

So, I'm not quite ghoulish enough to spend a lot of time watching shows about true life murder (unless I'm unemployed, then all bets are off.  City Confidential is aaaammmaaaaaaazing.).  For reasons I'm not quite sure of, I've been aware of the Black Dahlia murder since at least high school.  "The Black Dahlia"* was the name used in the LA press to describe torture and murder victim Elizabeth Short, found dead and terribly mutilated in an empty lot in January of 1947.  Short's murder has never been solved.

The crime has been endlessly revisited, much like the Jack the Ripper slayings, due to the unthinkable cruelty inflicted upon Short, the seeming calculated ruthlessness, the bizarre manner of public disposal, the odd follow ups from someone seemingly Short's killer, and the fact that the crime went unsolved despite a media frenzy and all-out effort by the LAPD.

I'm going to interrupt you now and say, I am totally not @#$%ing kidding:  DO NOT GOOGLE FOR IMAGES OF ELIZABETH SHORT.  Due to the nature of Google image search, you're likely to turn up autopsy and crime scene photos, and, I repeat:  her manner of her death was absolutely horrific.

She looked like this in life.  There.  You're done.

Back in the 1980's, crime novelist James Ellroy penned a fictional account of the investigation of Short's murder, and I think its safe to say that Ellroy stuck to some basic facts of the case, held close to historical accuracy for the time, but otherwise readers should consider the book a work of complete fiction (including characterization of Elizabeth Short).

I recently completed the book and watched the movie, The Black Dahlia.  Reading the book and watching the flick back-to-back is something I've been doing a lot of late, although I confess I gave up on the film of Slaughterhouse Five, deciding I wanted more time between the book and movie, but in this case...  I hadn't been completely sold on Ellroy's Black Dahlia.  Maybe I should have been, but parts of the book felt like they'd been cut too short or sold short, other parts seemed to linger on a bit longer than I felt necessary.

SPOILERS, AHOY

Some of the characters are fairly obvious, and, frankly, I felt that the minute the entirety of the Sprague clan showed up, and the way in which our narrator meets the family, this would be another tale in which the well-hidden perversions of the wealthy lead to victimhood for others.

As the book arrived in the 1980's, I can't be certain that it hasn't been imitated endlessly since, or if its carrying on the tradition of stories like Hammett's The Dain Curse or The Big Sleep by Chandler, and there's been enough repetition in crime and noir fiction that its almost inevitability of the genre.  It doesn't really matter, I suppose as I wasn't able to guess, exactly, who was responsible for the Dahlia until it was revealed in the novel, but it seemed as if rather than pursuing red herrings, the book could have tried to come to less of a dead end so early on.  The winding mess does obfuscate the mystery, but somehow the denouement just feels a bit too much like a "hoo-dunnit" by the time the final chapters put things into place.  Moreover, unlike the similar fictional reconstruction by Alan Moore in From Hell, the players selected are all entirely fictional, and it feels a little odd solving a very real, very tragic murder with fictional characters, motivations, etc...

Frankly, I couldn't ever shake the feeling that making Lee Blanchard the killer would have been a more logical and more interesting choice, even after pursuing the Sprague clan, but...  a lot of people who've read the book apparently thought otherwise.

END SPOILERS

I do like most of Ellroy's style, and its made me curious to check out some of his other work (this seems like a very good companion piece to what I remember of the film adaptation of LA Confidential, also by Ellroy). 
I've been looking at American Tabloid as an audio book, and I might have to do that.

The sprawling cast of the book feels right, especially in the multiple environments our narrator passes through, and Ellroy does a good job of knowing all of his characters well enough that you don't get lost.  He seems to fully realize the world of 1940's-era LA and Hollywood, refusing to romanticize any of it. And while he's not as razor quick as a Hammett, Chandler or Westlake, his more "novelistic" approach to traditionally pulp material does give the proceedings a welcome bit of gravitas.

What's terribly odd is how... off I found the recent adaptation to film by Brian DePalma.

these poor jerks thought they were in the next big movie

Released in 2006, the entire tone of the movie seems simply off.  DePalma seems to want to imbue the movie with same sweeping grandeur he captured in The Untouchables, which was a movie far more like a tale of larger than-life heroes and villains playing out morality tales against the marble and granite backdrops of Depression-era Chicago.  Its a strange tack to take with a story that is, flat out, crime-fiction-noir, the kind of story that relies on dingy apartments, bare light-bulbs, cheap-looking actors and a bottle in either foreground or background of every shot.

I knew things had missed the mark fairly early on, but almost groaned aloud when I saw DePalma had transformed the dank, intentionally dark and unobtrusive "lesbian bar", Laverne's, into a swank, deco dinner club complete with a KD Lang (plus dancers) floor show.

Casting for the movie could have been mostly on.  Josh Hartnett was likely okay to cast as narrator Bucky Bleichert, but a producer somewhere decided you can't hire Hartnett and give him prosthetic Buck teeth, no matter what the character is named, and so the teeth disappear before the end of the Act 1.  Scarlet Johansson, always welcome on the screen or in my home, is clearly cast about 10-15 years too young for her role, coming off as a co-ed playing grown up rather than the worldly Kay Lake of the novel.  Hilary Swank never captures the acute weirdness of Madeline Sprague...  the list just kind of goes on.  But, man, do the Sprague-scenes feel like actors chewing up the scenery...  Aaron Eckhardt and the character of Lee feel simply wasted in this adaptation.

you would think Ms. Johansson would make everything better

But even the directing and cutting feel weird.  Scenes are awkwardly shot, seemingly lacking B roll and inserts for close-ups.  Actors seems to know their lines, but haven't quite found the scene, but that's what's on the screen.  And the investigation into the life of Elizabeth Short gets dumbed down into a series of sort-of-goofy screen tests.  Bucky and Lee's absolute unraveling just doesn't make it into the movie, and that's unfortunate (for Ellroy and the viewer).  It was so much the point of the book, and here it just feels like plodding plot points.

All of the pieces are there, from big name actors to up and comers, to beautiful sets, a name director and a best-selling novel as the source...  Anyway, don't take my word for it.  The New York Times also watched the film.

On the whole, its a missed opportunity.  My personal feelings about how Ellroy wraps up the mystery aside, something really weird happened here, and I doubt that's a story Mr. DePalma will ever get to tell.  And because Short's death was very real, and because its not completely outside the window of memory, even while preserved in records and black and white photos, somehow it seems you need to do better when you're given the chance.

In interviews and elsewhere, its no mystery that Ellroy carried (or carries) his own low-level obsession with the Black Dahlia, and wanted some sort of justice for Elizabeth Short. 

As I understand it, Ellroy isn't alone, and a few folks hit the LAPD for the Short files on a routine basis, hoping to find some new clue, somewhere in the endless amount of paperwork created during the investigation.I find it unlikely that with 60 years turning to 70 since Elizabeth Short died, that anyone will ever know what truly happened, but she was real.  And so you hope that those who want to use her memory to tell their stories will do so with the care that I believe Ellroy genuinely employed, but which somehow got lost in the same Hollywood that killed Short the first time around.


*the name was coined after The Blue Dahlia, a popular movie of the era starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

Quick Wonder Woman post

I wound up watching "The Line Up", a film noir with Eli Wallach. It started very slow, but its a pretty good picture once Wallach shows up. By today's standards, perhaps a bit clumsy, but its got its clever bits, too, and uses San Francisco to good effect.

The picture above is an Adam Hughes cover to Wonder Woman.  Frankly, I don't remember the story behind the cover, but ever since Waid and Ross's Kingdom Come, armored Wonder Woman has been sort of one of those "oh, she's really going to kick-some ass now" signifiers, like, I guess when the lions finally come together and form Voltron. 

I can take or leave CosPlay, as so much of its done poorly, but this young woman has been showing up as Armored Wonder Woman, and I tip my hat.