The Best American Poetry

"Even bad books have their charm. . ." [by David Lehman]

Even bad books have their charms.
Last night I read such a book
the title of which I shall not mention
nor will I name the book's author
who thinks that at the end of Dark Passage
Bogart wears a white dinner jacket as inCasablanca
and that Loretta Young's father in The Stranger
is the president of the college where Orson Welles teaches
when in fact the dad is a Supreme Court justice
and Mr. Welles as the Nazi without a German accent
teaches at a prep school
and as for Detour the author doesn't get the point
that it's a study in the unreliable narrator
while Double Indemnity, in the writer's opinion,
is only so-so because both Stanwyck and MacMurray
lack sex appeal, ha, and, too, the author likens Dana Andrews
to a baseball player who got to the majors only because
Ted Williams and co are fighting the second World War
I could go on but why should I
when I enjoyed reading the book even despite the irritating
use of “creep” and “milquetoast” just because
I love noir and so does the author so all sins
are forgiven losses are restored and sorrows end.

from the archive; first posted March 2, 2020
Top: Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity; center left Edward G. Robinson in The Stranger; center Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour; center left Edward G. Robinson in The Stranger; bottom left Elisha Cook Jr and Marie Windsor in The Killing; bottom tight Gloria Grahame

Eddie Muller Interviewed by Mark Yost for "Stay Thirsty"

In the summer 2015 issue of Stay Thirsty there's a great interview with Eddie Muller (shown here with Kathleen Maria Milne). Eddie is host of TCM's Noir Alley and head of the foundation that has rescued from oblivion such film noir classics as Cry Danger (1951), Try and Get Me! (1951), Repeat Performance (1948), Too Late for Tears (1949), and Woman on the Run (1950). Watch his showings -- midnight Saturdays and 120 AM Sundays -- and you'll marvel not only at his erudition and charm but also at his period-authentic ties and stylish decor. Click here to read the interview. It was a particular thrill for me when Eddie genrously provided a blurb for my new book, coming in May 2022, The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. -- DL

https://www.staythirstymedia.com/201507-089/html/201507-yost-muller.html
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501763625/the-mysterious-romance-of-murder/#bookTabs=1

Double Indemnity: The Highest Achievement in Film Noir [by David Lehman]

from David Lehman's latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar:

<<<
Director Billy Wilder’s 1944 film, Double Indemnity, is the ne plus ultra of American film noir. If we were to give out noir awards on the model of the Oscars, I believe it would win for best picture, best screenplay (written by Raymond Chandler in collaboration with Wilder), best femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck), and best supporting actor (Edward G. Robinson). Excellent as a villain and a dupe, Fred MacMurray would get a nomination for best actor in a lead role but would lose to Out of the Past’s Robert Mitchum.

The plot is that old reliable, homicidal adultery. Man falls for woman whose husband stands in the way. To consummate the illicit affair requires the couple to collaborate on eliminating the obstacle. As in The Postman Always Rings Twice, also based on a book by James M. Cain, murder presents itself as a feasible solution, albeit one that involves an intricate scheme. In both movies, the woman’s husband is almost incidental to the plot—though Cecil Kellaway’s Greek diner owner who likes getting drunk and sings “She’s Funny That Way” in Postman is a live wire next to Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers), the stiff to whom Stanwyck is married in Double Indemnity. There are various love triangles involving Stanwyck’s stepdaughter Lola (Jean Heather) and her boyfriend (Byron Barr), but in all of them, the husband figure is almost an afterthought, like the corpse in chapter one of a detective novel. It is Stanwyck who dominates the picture, and the triangle in which she and Robinson stand at opposite poles in MacMurray’s consciousness is the most vital one of all.

Our narrator is the wounded Walter Neff (MacMurray), a bachelor in his 30s with a healthy libidinal appetite, dictating his confession into a recording device: “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” Neff is the chump who works for an insurance company and knows that, because of the so-called “double indemnity” clause, the firm pays double for accidental deaths incurred while a policyholder is traveling. He and Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) conspire to amend Mr. Dietrichson’s policy before bumping him off. Then Walter will impersonate the victim and fall off a moving train, though one that is going very slowly. He and Phyllis will plant the corpse on the tracks. Plausible on paper, but it smells bad to an experienced insurance investigator—and then, to paraphrase Dana Andrews in Laura, the dame pulls a switch on you. It turns out that Phyllis has manipulated Walter to do her bidding all along. She’s in it not for love, but for her husband’s dough. She loves somebody else—to the extent that she loves anyone other than herself. By the time Neff gets cold feet, it’s too late. “The machinery had started to move, and nothing could stop it.”

Some favorite moments:

1. Stanwyck as traffic cop and MacMurray as speeding motorist when he first calls on her, hoping to get her husband to renew his life insurance. Mr. Dietrichson is not at home, but Mrs. Dietrichson is scantily clad at the top of a staircase. She descends. Sparks begin to fly. Walter has come on a bit strong, and the dialogue is a wonderful fencing match:

Phyllis: There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

Walter: How fast was I going, officer?

Phyllis I’d say about 90.

Walter: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.

Walter: Suppose it doesn’t take.

Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.

Walter: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.

Walter: That tears it.

>>>>

Continue reading here

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-highest-achievement-of-american-film-noir/

"Fedora, Trench-Coat, Cigarette, and Gun" [by David Lehman]

From The American Scholar July 17, 2021. Click here for the rest of this "Talking Pictures" post. Here's an excerpt:

<<<
Humphrey Bogart was far from your conventional heartthrob. Not blessed with the looks of a Cary Grant or Gregory Peck, he was reliably good as a hoodlum or bootlegger, a Cagney sidekick in flicks of the ’30s, or an unlucky truck driver playing second fiddle to George Raft in Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night (1940).

Not until he was 41 did Bogart become a leading man. In Walsh’s High Sierra, (1941), Bogart plays Roy Earle, nicknamed “Mad Dog,” an ex-con on the lam after a heist goes wrong. Roy dies on a mountaintop, but not before winning the love of Marie (Ida Lupino). Even Bosley Crowther, the film critic for The New York Times, with his astonishingly low batting average, had  good words for Lupino and Bogart: she was “impressive as the adoring moll,” and he displays “a perfection of hard-boiled vitality.” Then to confirm that, these concessions aside, Crowther was his usual self, he added, “As gangster pictures go—if they do—it’s a perfect epilogue.” The right word would have been prologue, as what followed was a whole new genre of crime and noir movies.

The role of Sam Spade, the hard-boiled private eye in The Maltese Falcon (1941)—Dashiell Hammett’s novel adapted by John Huston in his directorial debut—made Bogart’s reputation and accounts for the image many of us have of him today. The tough guy who won’t let Mary Astor play him for a sap and outwits the wonderful Warner Brothers trio of Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr., is, as he points out, not “as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” even as he joins in the hunt for the legendary priceless black bird, which turns out to be a fake.

A wide-brimmed fedora and belted trench coat are as vital to Bogart as top hat, white tie, and tails are to Fred Astaire. A lighted cigarette dangles from Bogey’s lips. He is quick with a quip, and when this is pointed out to him as if it were a fault, he replies, “What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?” His voice conveys an aggressive world-weariness. It is difficult to impress him. He incorporates skepticism in the sound of his words. As he says in The Maltese Falcon, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”
>>>

To read further, with commentary on Casablanca and The Big Sleep, link here. Photos are stils from The Big Sleep.  

Talking Pictures: On "The Asphalt Jungle'"

Ed note: Since December 2019 I have written a regular column on classic movies for The American Scholar. Here are the opening paragraphs of my latest, which was posted yesterday (April 17) under the heading "Blind Accidents: How John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle brilliantly epitomizes the caper film." -- DL

<<< “If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town,” Louis the “box man” Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) tells Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe),the mastermind of a million-dollar jewel heist, in John Huston’s 1950 noir, The Asphalt Jungle. Surprise: the robbery doesn’t go off as brilliantly planned. Doc, also known as “the professor” and “Herr Doktor,” will end up in prison along with Gus (James Whitmore), the hunchbacked counterman who is a top-notch getaway driver; Cobby (Marc Lawrence), a bookie; and Lieutenant Ditrich (Barry Kelley), a crooked cop . Louis will leave a widow and a small, sickly child after a watchman is punched and falls to the ground,  misfiring his gun, and a slug finds its home in Louis’s belly. Oh, yes—“box man” means safecracker.

Based on the novel by W. R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle is the ur-example for the whole caper subgenre. The booty could be the gems in a shop on Paris’s ritzy rue de Rivoli (Rififi), the proceeds at the track on the day of a big race (The Killing) or, in a comic register, the take of five Las Vegas casinos at midnight on New Year’s Eve (Ocean’s Eleven). Whatever the setting, the result is failure, not because of the ratiocinative powers of the police but because of the inevitability of betrayal, miscalculation, and violent death. Nearly all of noir is founded on this assumption made somehow romantic and even glamorous.
>>>

For the rest of this piece, please link to The American Scholar website here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/blind-accidents/
For other "Talking Pictures" posts, click here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/dept/sections/departments/talking-pictures/

Photo: Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen, and Sam Jaffe in The Asphalt Jungle, 1950

"Witness to a Murder" [by David Lehman]

Witness to a Murder

                                                                   -- Barbara Stanwyck (1954)

She saw a murder.
She bought all the papers.
She pocketed the murdered woman's earrings.
She called the police.
She smoked a cigarette.
She told her story and was not believed.
She deduced that the door had been tampered with.
She answered the doctor's unreasonable questions reasonably.
She heard the woman say one thing: “Show Mr. Peabody into the library, please.”
She didn't back down.
She insisted she saw the ex-Nazi, author of Age of Violence, kill the girl, “Joyce Stewart.”
She didn't write the threatening letters that were typed on her machine.
She didn't get ticketed, just scolded, for speeding on a scary mountainous road.
She took the elevator down.
She ran in the street.
She hurried up the black and white steps pursued by shadows. 

Rogues' Gallery [by David Lehman]

<<<
There’s a special onus on the villains in crime dramas. They have to be wicked, but they also have to make that wickedness interesting. Whether by being singular in some way, or by virtue of fine acting, or because what they do is so despicable, they offend even those of us who might ordinarily root for the scoundrel. Then again, some of them simply impress us with their roguish charm or sharp-toothed wit.

Who are the greatest rogues, then? Many can be found in Hitchcock’s thrillers, in which the culprit can be two people, himself and his murderous mother (Anthony Perkins in Psycho). Or there is madness in the man’s method, and he steals every scene he’s in (Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train). Or the villains are forces of nature wreaking havoc on humanity, which has mistreated them along with the rest of the planet (the birds in The Birds). But let’s omit Hitchcock’s bad guys, as well as the homicidal freaks in movies starring Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, who might otherwise dominate the list.
>>>

From “Rogues Gallery” by David Lehman in The American Scholar: Click here for the article, which includes a list of some of my favorite miscreants, with links to the films’ trailers. Did I leave out your favorite culprits? Charles Laughton in The Big Clock maybe, or Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil? As with all of my Talking Pictures columns, comments and suggestions are welcome.

"Odd Man Out": the Belfast Noir [by David Lehman]

<<<
British director Carol Reed turned out three masterpieces in the late 1940s. With an exemplary performance from Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol (1948) does justice to Graham Greene’s brilliant story “The Basement Room.” The Third Man (1949), the most celebrated of the three, has its unforgettable zither theme, its evocation of postwar Vienna, and its extraordinary script, including the speech Orson Welles improvised at the Prater amusement park. Fierce competition, but my vote for Reed’s best goes to Odd Man Out (1947), a modern passion play about a doomed man in the shadows and alleys of his last hours alive.

Odd Man Out foregrounds political and religious themes and differs thereby from most film noirs. Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to claim it for the category. The setting is Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the people take their Catholicism seriously, and the robbery that triggers the plot is committed not by your typical thieves but by an unnamed underground movement, presumably the IRA. Thanks to the inspired cinematography—the hero’s haunted profile, the desolate cityscape, the long narrow alleys—the Belfast we see is a dark and bleak war zone.

You may argue that the revolutionary cause is undermined in Odd Man Out, which establishes that the men who rob a mill for a cause are no nobler than those who rob banks for money. Nevertheless, the viewer’s sympathy is with rebel leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), whom the children in the street emulate in their pretend games of cops and robbers. “It’s probably the best thing that Mason has ever done, and certainly the best film he’s ever been in,” Richard Burton observed.

Johnny, who escaped from prison six months ago, has spent the time hiding at the house where Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan) and her grandmother reside. Kathleen would be Johnny’s natural mate if he were not wedded to “the organization.” Far from a femme fatale, she is closer to a martyr or saint, embodying the Christian virtue of caritas. Love is the moral absolute that sustains her. There is no evidence that she and Johnny have so much as kissed. Yet she is willing to die for him or with him.

The narrative takes place all in one day. When McQueen and chums go over last-minute details of the heist, Kathleen implores him not to go: “You’re not fit for it.” Another man offers to go in his place: “Your heart’s not in this job, Johnny.” Johnny is rusty; his six months in hiding followed eight months behind bars. But though he is not as steady on his feet as he should be, Johnny is “the chief” and feels he must lead the four-man team.

Naturally something goes wrong. Alarms sound. Johnny has renounced violence, but now he finds himself in a struggle with an armed cashier, and when the guns go off, the cashier lies dead and Johnny has taken a bullet in his left shoulder. No one was supposed to get killed. And Johnny wasn’t supposed to fall out of the getaway car—and be abandoned by his none-too-bright chums fleeing for their lives.

Dazed and bleeding badly, McQueen manages to get to his feet and stumble into a deserted air raid shelter. There is a precious moment of relief when, upon waking, he imagines that he is still in prison—and that the little girl who has entered to recover her lost ball is reassuringly a prison guard to whom he can describe the strange dream from which he has woken. Only when his hand reaches inside his jacket and feels his blood-soaked shirt does the wounded man realize that what he dreamed did happen. He is no longer safely, almost contentedly, in a prison cell. Susceptible to hallucination, hunted by the authorities, he staggers out of the shelter and into the mercy of chance encounters.

Johnny’s progress is like that of a pilgrim on his way through hell to get to purgatory. As gray skies give way to heavy rain, he is seldom fully conscious but constantly on the move. Some citizens take brief pity on him—tending to his wounds, giving him liquor, sheltering him in a pub—before returning him to the streets. Sometimes luck lends a hand, as when Johnny is deposited in the back of a hansom cab, which the police do not inspect on the assumption that the passenger, out cold, is an ordinary drunkard.

The secondary characters are extraordinary. As Penn State media professor Kevin Hagopian puts it in his film notes for the New York State Writers Institute, Odd Man Out is “festooned with gargoyles.” The crazed painter Lukey (Robert Newton) sees in Johnny’s suffering face the perfect model for a masterpiece of portraiture. With the bearing of a genteel bordello mistress, treacherous Theresa O’Brien (Maureen Delany) lets two of the bandits drink her whiskey in one room, while in another she informs the police of their whereabouts. Dim-witted Shell (F. J. McCormick), who collects birds and speaks in avian metaphors, discovers Johnny in a rubbish heap and relishes the reward he will get for turning in this bird with the wounded left wing. But Father Tom (W. G. Fay) persuades Shell that there is a greater reward than money and it is called Faith. When Shell wonders what Faith is, his roommate, a medical student, says, “It’s life.”

Odd Man Out is rife with dualities. Father Tom stands for mercy. A police inspector, who represents justice, distinguishes between the sphere of guilt and innocence, which is his concern, and that of good and evil, which isn’t. The med student ministers to Johnny’s body; the painter labors to capture his soul. As for the politics, most of the people are like the cabman who tells Johnny that he’s neither for him nor against him but can’t afford to get mixed up in his troubles.

Movies that make intelligent use of poetry or scripture hold a charm for me, and when he is being painted, Johnny breaks from his delirium into lucid speech, quoting from I Corinthians (13-11 and 13-2): “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” With a visionary gleam in his eyes, Johnny stands up and raises his right arm: “Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

The heavy rain has turned to snow by the time Kathleen locates her man. Johnny: “Is it far?” Kathleen: “It’s a long way, Johnny, but I’m coming with you.” Shots ring out. And then the clock strikes midnight.
>>>
From "An Exchange of Bullets in Belfast," The American Scholar (July 9, 2020)

SF and NY Duke it Out [by David Lehman]

          In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum says he used to live in New York and Rhonda Fleming says she’s never been there and Mitchum says that if she goes there, she’ll know one reason why he’s in San Francisco.

          San Francisco, because of its natural beauty, its hills and bridges and bay, may be the most popular location for film noirs and crime dramas. Think of The Lady from Shanghai, Dark Passage, Woman on the Run, Vertigo, Bullitt, Dirty Harry. These movies feature some of the distinctive landmarks of the city – Chinatown’s Mandarin Theater, the Steinhardt Aquarium, and Playland-By-the-Beach in The Lady from Shanghai; the Golden Gate Bridge in Dark Passage; Fisherman’s Wharf and the Embarcadero in Woman on the Run; the Presidio, Coit Tower, and Muir Woods in Vertigo; the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale on the mound at Candlestick Park in Experiment in Terror; Kezar Stadium in Dirty Harry; the many steep streets on which Steve McQueen drives his green Mustang in Bullitt.

          Still, as a New York native, I must put in a plea for the city of my birth. Jules Dassin’s Naked City comes to mind because of the producer’s pioneering effort to shoot the film entirely on the streets and sidewalks of New York (photo right). In Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Clint Eastwood is a deputy sheriff from Arizona who flies into the big city to nab an escaped killer in Fort Tryon Park and leave for the airport from the heliport on top of the old Pan-Am Building, now named for Met Life. In The French Connection, Fernando Rey eludes Gene Hackman on the subway and dine on French cuisine at an elegant midtown restaurant while Hackman shivers in the cold holding a cardboard cup of coffee.  

         Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street gives us the subway and a shack on the waterfront where our hero resides; Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street treats us to art galleries and a desolate Central Park bench at dawn; John Farrow’s The Big Clock situates us in a magazine empire’s midtown skyscraper. In Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Manhattan Bridge in the background is a constant reminder of where we are.

           Among neo-noirs and technicolor crime films, New York is home to The Manchurian Candidate, which features Sinatra’s favorite bar, Jilly’s, and the Central Park lake. In part one of The Godfather, Michael and Kay go to Radio City Music Hall on Christmas Eve. To elude a possible tail, the driver of the car taking Michael and his antagonists to the Italian restaurant with the best veal in the city begins to cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, then makes an illegal u-turn to deliver the group to the Bronx.

          Die Hard with a Vengeance is a virtual tour of the town with stops in Harlem, Wall Street, the FDR Drive, Central Park, and Yankee Stadium. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are laugh lines in this 1995 movie that does its bit to combat racial prejudice by pairing the Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. And you get to hear the odious villain say he loves “this country,” his words belying his scorn for Americans, such suckers, so trusting.  Mind you, this is a movie you’re not supposed to like; you’re allowed to call it a triumph – of “blitzkrieg action,” perhaps – but only after first denouncing it as “bombastic mush.”

Epitaph for a Genre: On Kubrick's "The Killing" [by David Lehman]

Adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson from the pulp novel by Lionel White, The Killing is classic noir. The plot is about an expertly planned racetrack heist that goes spectacularly wrong because the weak link in the chain of confederates is married to a two-timing frail. A cast of noir stalwarts under Kubrick’s direction brings this story to life. Later Kubrick movies such as 2001 and A Clockwork Orange are more ambitious undertakings, but many of us with noir in our bones have a special affection for The Killing, a taut, black-and-white depiction of futility and failure.

Just out of prison, Johnny Clay is tall, tough, taciturn, and as decent a guy as you could want in a thief—a role Sterling Hayden was born to play. He has planned the robbery with a chess player’s precision. An inside job, it requires the contributions of a pay-window cashier named George (Elisha Cook Jr.) and a track bartender. Johnny has also recruited Randy (Ted de Corsia), a crooked cop, who drives solo in his prowl car; Nikki, a sharpshooter (played with great nastiness by Timothy Carey); and Maurice, a muscle man (Kola Kwariani, a Georgian wrestler with whom Kubrick played chess).

Nikki must shoot Black Lightning, the favorite in the high-stakes race of the day, just before the colt reaches the backstretch of the track. At the same time, Maurice will pick a fight at the bar. You need 10 men to hold Maurice down, and so, amid the chaos, no one notices the cashier when he unlocks the door marked “NO ADMITTANCE,” behind which men count and stash the day’s take. The diversions give Johnny time enough to walk in, don a mask, brandish a submachine gun, and collect the dough in a duffel bag, which he then tosses out the window … for Randy to pick up and drive away in his cop car. A perfect crime.

Kubrick starts and restarts the story, shifting points of view, reverting each time to the track announcer’s call of the $100,000-added Lansdowne Stakes. The marksman’s story features a chilling scene between Nikki and a black racetrack employee played by James Edwards. The narrative throughout is advanced by voiceover, a matter-of-fact male voice of authority, accentuating the suspense.

The novel’s original title was Clean Break. Elisha Cook, Jr., so memorable as the humiliated gunsel in The Maltese Falcon and as brave, lovesick Harry Jones in The Big Sleep, is outstanding as George the cashier, a man who, in Lionel White’s novel, is said to be “crazy about his wife” but “not completely blind to her character.” He knows, too, that “he himself had failed as a husband and failed as a man.”

In short, he is the archetypal noir loser, married to Sherry (Marie Windsor), who is discontented, fickle, frustrated, and doomed. When George confides that in the next few days he will have a lot of money, she says, with practiced cruelty, “Did you put the right address on the envelope when you sent it to the North Pole?” Sherry gets George to reveal the gang’s plan.

Everything goes right until the guys gather to split the proceeds. Sherry has spilled the beans to her handsome boyfriend Val (Vince Edwards). Val and a henchman barge in to steal the dough, and in the ensuing shootout all are killed except George, who is badly wounded but has enough vitality left to stumble home and shoot Sherry before he expires. “It isn’t fair,” she says, making the cinematic most of the moment. “I never had anyone but you, not a real husband, not even a man.”

Having transferred the loot to the biggest suitcase he could buy, Johnny Clay arrives at the scene 15 minutes too late. Seeing George stumble down the front stairs, Johnny puts two and two together and drives away with the sound of sirens in his ears. He and girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray) hightail it to the airport.

The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny and Fay are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.

Johnny Clay does not survive in the novel. On the last page, two bullets from George’s gun make a “peculiar, plopping sound” as they enter Johnny’s stomach. Under his elbow is a folded newspaper, headlined “Race Track Bandit / Makes Clean Break / With Two Million.” The novel’s original title was Clean Break.

The movie’s ending is even better. Two million bucks in small bills go up in a whirlwind, and the bandit has not only lost the cash but has also unmasked himself as the culprit. Dazed, helpless, Johnny and Fay retreat and try to hail a taxi. They are standing by the airport’s front doors as two armed plainclothes cops walk menacingly toward them. The look on Sterling Hayden’s face is unforgettable.

Fay: “Johnny, you’ve got to run.”

Johnny: “Ah … what’s the difference?”

This exchange, which ends the movie, could stand as an epitaph for all of noir.

Written for and posted by The American Scholar. Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

Odd Man Out: "the best thing James Mason has ever done, and the best film he’s ever been in”

British director Carol Reed turned out three masterpieces in the late 1940s. With an exemplary performance from Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol (1948) does justice to Graham Greene’s brilliant story “The Basement Room.” The Third Man (1949), the most celebrated of the three, has its unforgettable zither theme, its evocation of postwar Vienna, and its extraordinary script, including the speech Orson Welles improvised at the Prater amusement park. Fierce competition, but my vote for Reed’s best goes to Odd Man Out (1947), a modern passion play about a doomed man in the shadows and alleys of his last hours alive.

Odd Man Out foregrounds political and religious themes and differs thereby from most film noirs. Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to claim it for the category. The setting is Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the people take their Catholicism seriously, and the robbery that triggers the plot is committed not by your typical thieves but by an unnamed underground movement, presumably the IRA. Thanks to the inspired cinematography—the hero’s haunted profile, the desolate cityscape, the long narrow alleys—the Belfast we see is a dark and bleak war zone.

You may argue that the revolutionary cause is undermined in Odd Man Out, which establishes that the men who rob a mill for a cause are no nobler than those who rob banks for money. Nevertheless, the viewer’s sympathy is with rebel leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), whom the children in the street emulate in their pretend games of cops and robbers. “It’s probably the best thing that Mason has ever done, and certainly the best film he’s ever been in,” actor Richard Burton observed.

from The American Scholar (July 9, 2020). For the rest of the article, click here.

Jim Cummins Takes a Noir Detour

We date the “classic” noir period from 1941's The Maltese Falcon (or even Orson Welles' 1940 Citizen Kane, itself a mystery about Fate) to the 1959 Welles tour-de-force Touch of Evil.  But noir wasn't noir until the French got hold of America's backlog of films after 1945.  Hollywood had to flush its war film stockpile through the pipeline before it could release its noirs on the Continent; and when it did the French, the beautiful French, went crazy.  Partly as a result, Detour is often regarded as the Ur-noir though it was made in 1945 on a very un-Hollywoodian shoestring. 

I can think of at least two reasons why this is so.  One is that films like Falcon and Murder My Sweet, the latter from 1943, were still “Hollywood” movies.  Despite the noir fixtures such as the private detective, the hard-boiled language, the femme fatale, and the sleazy subject matter (all elements that poets love!), Falcon still has elements of the filmed play, especially the last third, as well as “comic” moments such as Spade's anger ploy in Gutman's suite, followed by Sam laughing at himself in the hallway, looking at his hand shaking with adrenaline.  And Murder has the unlikely romance between Philip Marlowe and Ann. 

Detour has the requisite noir elements: good girl/bad girl contrast, downward spiral of events, an emotionally vicious femme fatale. It also has a voiceover narrator, a la Murder My Sweet, but in this movie the narrator is hugely unreliable; we don't identify with Al as we do with Phil. We aren't sure he didn't kill the guy, steal his money, clothes and car, and go whistling down the road.  And the “accidental” strangulation behind a locked door strains credulity. We don't even know whether Al is in fact a talented musician, or that Vera might just have wanted to get away from this loser. After Vera emotionally eviscerates him, it turns out she's dying of TB and wants him to have sex with her? The whole story might be a pack of lies, and Al merely a self-pitying narcissist.

The second reason Detour is often thought of as the first noir is its great noir subject: Fate.  Now if you believe, as I do, that “character is fate,” then you have a shortcut into understanding noir.  I wonder if poets secretly appreciate this even if, to be politically correct, they must blame social and cultural processes as the reason for everyone's unhappiness. And if you believe in great cosmic manipulations of a supernatural sort, then good luck to you.  Detour is about “fate” only in the sense that in 1945 the word still held a factor of fear and malevolence shrouded in thousands of years of human superstition.  As a word, it still had, even has, poetic resonance. In Detour Al is merely a sniveling, whiney, wretch-in-denial loser who blames his shortcomings on others.  He's the personification of self-pity. And at least in one case, probably two, a murderer.

No one could deny, of course, that social and cultural processes carry great weight and power in influencing one's external “destiny.”  But noir is about the inner life, and this is one of the main reasons any writer loves these movies.  “Fate” informs all noir because human beings are weak, yet they must act against the background of social norms which we the audience provide.  We're the Greek chorus, except that we deliciously slip the bonds of “normal” behavior and partake with gusto of noir's shady deals, viciousness, pathological sex, and black-and-white photography.  What's not to like?

Richard Deming on "A Touch of Evil" as BFI Film Classics Return

BFI Film Classics – books commissioned by the British Film Institute, published by Bloomsbury in the United States -- make a welcome return with Richard Deming’s excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles’s 1958 noir is justly celebrated by film aficionados, though its meandering plot has puzzled many viewers. Deming's book is a fine guide for the perplexed.

Set in a town near the US-Mexican border, the movie fuses sex and violence in a boiling cauldron. It begins with an explosion that interrupts an embrace and ends with two shooting deaths in an oilfield.

As Deming points out, one remarkable thing about the film is the extent to which the plot is subordinate to the technique. Welles uses cinematic means to explore questions of justice, motivation and “a complex, perpetually equivocating moral world,” in the author's phrase. If the causality and chronology of events are enshrouded in a swamp-like fog, it’s because Welles achieves his effects by cinematic rather than literary means. Deming’s analysis of the famous tracking shot that opens the movie is right on the money. 

Deming strikes a personal note in his preface by way of ushering us into the darkness of Welles’s vision. In chapter one he presents a valuable summary of noir, its meaning, its history. He argues that A Touch of Evil “is more than the apotheosis or apex of a genre or a style” – to his mind, it is the ultimate noir, and then some. The movie’s central thesis, he argues, is spoken by Charlton Heston, playing the Mexican policeman Vargas, to Welles, playing the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan, an obese bully, a bigot, and a slob: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

Janet Leigh, the blond Yankee spouse of the Mexican Vargas, is as beautiful and vulnerable as in Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate, and Marlene Dietrich as a fortune teller may have the best line in the movie. When Welles asks her to read his future, she has, “You haven't got any.” “Huh?'” “Your future's all used up.”

A Touch of Evil takes the romance out of noir, and leaves only the criminality, the hostility, the spite, and the evil that men do that lives after them. It is a deliberately ugly movie, refusing to treat sin and crime, the stuff of noir, with the romantic sheen and sensual promise that usually comes with the turf. (Think of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past.) Welles, possessor of a “distinctive smoothly textured baritone with its ability to slide across tonalities with both insolence and nobility,” is willing to sacrifice even this most valuable of assets; he slurs his words, mumbles, steps on other characters’ lines.

“Who’s the boss – the cop or the law?” Vargas asks. That’s the thematic crux of A Touch of Evil. the movie. But the experience of the movie is far more unsettling than any such formulation, and Richard Deming's discussion of the film makes it an object lesson in understanding the meaning of a narrative in cinematic images rather than in literary terms.

The BFI has seized the opportunity to reissue of other books on the backlist. I enjoyed Greil Marcus’s take on The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer), for example. Marcus, who writes with swagger and is never less than interesting, regards the picture as the “most exciting movie” from Citizen Kane to The Godfather, an overstatement but an arresting one.

The Manchurian Candidate is Frankheimer's best movie To make his point about the originality and brilliance of the brainwashing sequence that opens the movie, Marcus argues that by comparison the Hitchcock / Dali dream collaboration in Spellbound is “visually florid and intellectually dead.” I maintain that Spellbound, Hitch’s most Freudian effort, is underrated, but perhaps the larger point is that Gregory Peck's dream in Spellbound has a very different function from the collective hypnosis of the American POWs in The Manchurian Candidate. To exalt the latter it is not necessary to deprecate the former. Criticism is not a zero sum game.

Again, to substantiate his feeling that Sinatra’s performance in The Manchurian Candidate is the best in his Hollywood career, with which I would concur, Marcus says that Sinatra in From Here to Eternity gave "a one-note performance" and that Ernest Borgnine's in the same film was "better." Come on. 

Agree or disagree, Marcus is a compelling writer, and he hits the nail on the head when he talks of “the Iron Maiden of repression,” which sums up Laurence Harvey's acting in The Manchurian Candidate -- and explains why Al Pacino’s work in The Godfather movies was the best of his career.

Other books in the BFI series include Camille Paglia’s characteristically provocative and engrossing study of The Birds. Paglia contends that Tippi Hedren is “the ultimate Hitchcock heroine” (not a consensus view) and analyzes her, what she says, what she wears, with the meticulousness of an exceptionally astute apostle of Freud. It is always stimulating to spend a few hours listening to Camille Paglia, though I do wish she would overcome her aversion to Doris Day, among the best of all the big band singers, and Deborah Reynolds, whose contributions to Singing in the Rain and The Tender Trap are not to be underrated.

-- DL

Richard Deming Takes On "A Touch of Evil"

Ray Kelly, at "Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource," reports on the new book by the poet and Yale professor Richard Deming:

<<
Richard Deming’s Touch of Evil — the latest offering in Bloomsbury Publishing's relaunch of the BFI Film Classics series — looks at Orson Welles' role as screenwriter, as well as director and star of the 1958 film.

Deming, a senior lecturer in English and director of creative writing at Yale University, sees the film as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson.

"Badge of Evil is a solid potboiler, but it has no grand ambitions. Welles uses the basic idea of the novel and remakes it as a meditation on cruelty, irony, and the intrinsic complexity of trying to respond justly to an unjust world. There are so many differences between the novel and the novel, it is hard to catalogue them all," Deming told Wellesnet. "Some broad differences, just to name a few, are that Welles transferred the setting of the action from San Diego to the U. S. Mexico border; the novel’s protagonist, Mitch Holt, becomes Miguel “Mike” Vargas in the movie; and Welles wholly invented the opening scene, one of the most famous in cinema, and offered it as a master class in developing suspense that arguably out does Hitchcock in its use of dramatic irony."

He added. "As ever, however, it is Welles’s deep sense of how to use the visual elements of cinema to evoke rather than explain, to gesture and suggest rather than to declaim and illustrate, that so transfigures the novel’s raw material."

Deming called Welles "one of the greatest figures in cinema."

"Whereas many directors get more and more restrained as they mature — especially if their work doesn’t always fare so well at the box office — Welles become more and more daring," Deming said. "Visually, Touch of Evil is as radical and innovative a film as any ever produced by a major studio. It is morally complicated, dark, provocative, and the more one watches it, the more one sees in every frame. I have also been so amazed with what Welles did with his own acting. It seems incredible that he wanted to make his own character so visually repulsive and would slur his lines and mumble. His voice was a precision instrument, so his willingness to take his greatest strength as an actor and do that kind of damage to it so as to make such an unforgettable character seems truly remarkable. Also, the history of the film and its multiple versions is fascinating and raises the issue of what the 'authentic' text of a film really is."

Filmed more than 60 years ago, Touch of Evil remains both relevant and radical, Deming said.
>>>

For more click here.

"Strangers and Mirrors": On Two Noirs from Orson Welles [by David Lehman]

Today The American Scholar posted my essay on The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, two late 1940s noirs from Orson Welles. Here are the opening paragraphs, with a link to the piece at  The American Scholar.

<<<
Orson Welles directed and starred in two late-’40s noirs. He is the hapless hero in one; in the other, the dastardly villain. In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Welles cast himself as itinerant Irish sailor Michael O’Hara, who narrates the film and is the fall guy in an intricate homicidal plot. In The Stranger (1946), Welles plays an unrepentant Nazi. In both, the acting up and down the cast is superb, and the direction a marvel.

The Stranger has the more straightforward plot and is the more righteous of the two. It includes newsreel footage informing an incredulous public of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. It is also the only movie Welles made that showed a profit when it was first released. Variety called it “socko melodrama.”

Franz Kindler (Welles), a bigwig in the Third Reich, who is said to have “conceived the theory of genocide,” has reinvented himself as Charles Rankin, an instructor at the exclusive Harper School for Boys (“established 1827”) in an idyllic Connecticut village. An imprisoned Nazi fanatic, Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), is released in the hope that he will lead the authorities—in the person of pipe-smoking Mr. Wilson, agent of the war crimes commission (Edward G. Robinson)—to Kindler.
>>>

For more of this piece, please link here. And click here for previous essays on classic movies.

Some cinematic suggestions [by David Lehman]

For The American Scholar, I've posted short essays on the movies I've listed here. Here are links to, and brief excerpts from, the articles. To this post, which first  appeared on March 27, 2020, I have since added my piece on The Manchurian Candidate from January 22, 2022.

-- Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear 
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xn5LrNJKiM8 ("The Shadow of Evil")

<<< Horror is what we feel witnessing the aftermath of a fatal car wreck. Terror is what we feel in anticipation of something terrible that has not yet happened.

What Cape Fear (1962) offers is a pure example of a third kind of sensation, one that attracts even as it repels: menace. Menace is Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, newly released from an eight-year prison sentence, a cigar in his mouth and a Panama hat on his head, into the heat of summer in a small, southern town. Cady embodies evil and Mitchum embodies Cady, a character who is as cunning as he is vicious.

Although he plays an unreformed sex offender who beats up women and has no business gaining control of the viewer’s attention, Cape Fear is Mitchum’s picture from the moment he appears on the scene, confronting the attorney who put him behind bars. “Hello, Counselor. Remember me?” Cady is back with a vengeance. >>

-- William Holden, in two POW films, Stalag 17 and The Bridge on the River Kwai 
https://theamericanscholar.org/william-holden-model-prisoner/#.Xn5LANJKiM8 ("Model Prisoner")

<<< In each movie, Holden says something that communicates his capacity for irony and irreverence, as well as his distaste for the boyish conception of war as a “game.” In The Bridge on the River Kwai, Shears says to Warden: “You and Colonel Nicholson, you’re two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being.” In Stalag 17, he offers this wonderful parting shot: “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we’ve never met before.”

The slam-bang conclusion of The Bridge on the River Kwai is magnificent, and I shall say nothing more about it here except to reveal that the movie’s last word is “madness!” At the end of Stalag 17, Sefton takes wire-cutters to cut through the barbed wire, rescue a lieutenant the Germans want to kill, and guide the two of them to freedom. Duke: “The crud did it.” Harry Shapiro: “I’d like to know what made him do it.” Animal: “Maybe he just wanted to steal our wire cutters. Ever think of that?” >>>

-- The Best Years of Our Lives with Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews

 https://theamericanscholar.org/souvenirs-of-war/#.Xn5LL9JKiM8 ("Souvenirs of War")

<<< A great scene: lovesick Peggy confronts her parents, saying they can’t understand her because they “never had any trouble.” To which Milly responds, turning to Al: “We never had any trouble. How many times have I told you I hated you, and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?”

I am always moved by a scene in which Fred climbs aboard a discarded bomber, his “office” during the war, which is now rusting in an aircraft boneyard. The scene has no words, just music, as Fred sits and stares into his turbulent past and blank future. This may be my favorite moment in the film, but there are others very nearly as affecting, including the one in which, at a formal dinner of bank officers and trustees, Al gulps down too many highballs but manages not to hiccup when he makes a speech that begins unsteadily but ends with eloquence. >>>

-- Gentleman's Agreement with Gregory Peck

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-matter-of-pride/#.Xn5LT9JKiM8  ("A Matter of Pride") 

 

<<< Gentleman’s Agreement is one of two late 1940’s pictures that wrestle with the ugliness of anti-Semitism. The other is Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, also from 1947, a noir featuring three Roberts: Robert Young as an investigator, Robert Mitchum as a friend of a suspect, and Robert Ryan as a demobilized soldier who brutally murders the hospitable Jewish man whom he and his army buddies meet in a bar. But while Crossfire centers on a homicide for which the only motive is drunken anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement deals with the sort of suburban, exclusionary anti-Semitism practiced by those who claim that “some of my best friends are Jews.” >>>

 

 

 

 

The Killing (directed by Stanley Kubrick; with Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr., Vince Edwards, etc)

https://theamericanscholar.org/epitaph-for-a-genre/#.XptjCVxKiM8 ("Epitaph for a Genre")

<<<
The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny (Sterling Hayden) and Fay (Coleen Gray) are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.
>>>

The Manchurian Candidate
January 22, 2022
Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

The Manchurian Candidate, which presaged the change, presents a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate by long-range rifle during his party’s nominating convention in Madison Square Garden. The movie’s conceit was so scary that studio executives at United Artists felt the project had to be cleared with the White House. Frank Sinatra dutifully called JFK, who greenlit the film, which Sinatra believed in so strongly that he volunteered the use of his private plane for an early scene in the movie.

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to him until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike..

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump has been depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-prophecy-of-an-assassination/

"Street Scene": The Movies That Use Alfred Newman's Theme of the City

 

Listen to it (with Alfred Newman and orchestra, 1946):  here

https://youtu.be/DqjWf7qgoHg 

Or here

for Nic Raine & the City of Prague Philharmonic (rehearsal)

Maybe best of all, the horns and strings on the soundtrack of How to Marry a Millionaire

Directors: Henry Hathaway (2), Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan. Robert Siodmak, Jean Negulesco, Bruce Humberstone, George Marshall, and King Vidor 

"Fifty-Two Pickup" [by D. N. Redfern]

.

"I make a lot of money," he said, 

to no one in particular,

which was a lie. He'd gambled it away

at blackjack in Vegas, where the dark bar

had as many ugly girls as cute plump chicks,

which was fine with him. He was after their

money, not their virginity. The bar 

had a name. What was it? That's right.

The Ace of Clubs. His lucky card.

He wanted someone whose name he might find 

on a plaque in a manicurist's salon: Destiny, 

Divina, Celeste. He'd know her face

sure as he knew when to hit and when to stay. 

That was the way it was supposed to happen.

He would walk into her dream the way

Steve McQueen walked into a poker game. 

It excited her. His blonde looks, his cute butt.

And then the talk turned to money.

"Charity," he'd say, "What's a million dollar

babe like you doing in a dump like this?" 

It wasn't original but neither was she. 

She'd wriggle and tell him how she wanted 

to be a dolphin trainer or a product tester at Revlon, 

then she'd blot her lips and toss off

the trust fund, the Mercedes, the polo pony's

gold-plated shoes glinting fine as luck. 

What a horny man will do for a fuck.

 

—Ed. note: D.N. Redfern is the nom de plume of an American poet who divides her time between Miami and New York. Under her proper name she has written a novel of intrigue involving gambling and the cocaine trade. She picked the drawing that accompanies this post. D. N. Redfern sometimes identifies herself as Diane Redfern. She pronounces her first name "dee en."

Glamour Defined: Rita Hayworth as "Gilda" (1946)

Even Bad Books Have Their Charms [by David Lehman]

 

Even bad books have their charms.
Last night I read such a book
the title of which I shall not mention
nor will I name the book's author
who thinks that at the end of "Dark Passage"
Bogart wears a white dinner jacket as in "Casablanca"
and that Loretta Young's father in "The Stranger"
is the president of the college where Orson Welles teaches
when in fact the dad is a Supreme Court justice
and Mr. Welles as the Nazi without a German accent
teaches at a prep school
and as for "Detour" the author doesn't get the point
that it's a study in the unreliable narrator
while "Double Indemnity," in the writer's opinion,
is only so-so because both Stanwyck and MacMurray
lack sex appeal, ha, and, too, the author likens Dana Andrews
to a baseball player who got to the majors only because
Ted Williams and co are fighting the second World War
I could go on but why should I
when I enjoyed reading the book even despite the irritating
use of "creep" and "milquetoast" just because
I love noir and so does the author so all sins
are forgiven losses are restored and sorrows end

On "The Bigamist" by Ida Lupino on her birthday [by David Lehman]

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the 
        same time and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas
       are Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

-- David Lehman