Category: The Players

BUtterfield 8 (1960) Part I “I’d know her with my eyes closed, at the bottom of a coal mine, during the eclipse of the sun”

Spoiler Alert: I do discuss the film through to the end. So if you haven’t seen it yet skip the review!

Butterfield 8 – Directed by Daniel Mann and scripted from the John O’Hara novel. One of his early works which garnered a lot of attention, primarily because O’Hara dealt bluntly with matters of social class, sex, and ambition that other novelists didn’t write about during the 50s and 60s.He acquired a grasp of social stratification that is pervasive in his writing.

The melodramatic score by Bronislau Kaper is as beautifully dramatic as it is as trashy as a Harold Robbins novel.

Butterfield 8 Stars the great lilac-eyed beauty of the golden age of cinema, when the big studio empires ruled over their actors. One of my favorites is Elizabeth Taylor.

Taylor won an academy award for her role as Gloria Wandrous and Laurence Harvey play Weston Liggett(without his groovy sideburns that he sported in the early 70s. Harvey whose speaking voice is like silk to my ears.)Both actors had played husband and wife in the psychological thriller Night Watch (1973) which I plan on reviewing down the road.

First some blurbs about O’Hara’s novel:

“Gloria Wandrous is New York’s ultimate playgirl–a professional escort in the down and out days of the Depression. O’Hara bitingly paints a portrait of despair in Gloria’s life–from the minute she wakes up in a strange bed, to the moment her life ends. Based on a true story, men flock to Gloria–raped by her father figure as a child, her security with love is thin, though she continues to seek support from her friend Eddie, and her seducer Liggett. In the speakeasy culture of New York, sex and booze is all the rage, and yet Gloria’s one real desire, love, only leads her to her death.”
Angela Allan, Resident Scholar

“Gloria Wandrous is a golddigger extraordinaire in New York City during the depths of the Depression, circa 1931. She escaped a molesting uncle in the sticks and has made her own way in the big city ever since. When she tangles with prosperous businessman and Yale grad Weston Liggett, it’s hard to tell who’s leading whom. David Loftus, Resident Scholar

Butterfield 8(1960)

The film unlike the novel is set in the 60s era style and not the Depression era 30s.It is a story not just about Gloria Wandrous a tragic figure, at the mercy of her past and present demons that haunt her, the film is about male ego, male control, and male pride. In order for Taylor’s character to be redeemed in the end as a good person, she must be obliterated by the plot. Similar to the way Kelly had to leave the clean town of Grantville In The Naked Kiss, Gloria must die in order for her existence to be redeemed.

This is what happens to girls who are either hyper-sexual, sexually independent, or perceived as wild and immoral. It’s a tragedy of moralizing. For me Butterfield 8 is a story about society’s fear as well as male fear of the female body, when neither are in control of it.

Gloria is portrayed as an amoral sex addict whose trajectory was formed at age 13 when a man her mother was engaged to marry raped her over the course of a week. Now her only goal in life is to obtain wealth and power through her body. The abuse is alluded to early on, we catch wind of Gloria’s mother Annie saying that Gloria didn’t like her fiance the Major.

The fact that her self-worth and promiscuity might stem from early childhood sexual abuse and that Gloria is a victim condemned to repeat the abuse with each man she flagrantly sleeps with isn’t really part of the narrative until much later in the film during a very powerful confession to her dearest friend Steve. Yet another male who needs to look after Gloria, and act as brotherly protector for her.

Not having read O’Hara’s book I am not sure if he wrote Gloria’s character as sympathetic. Taylor does her best to show us a compassionate woman in turmoil regardless of the moralizing in the film.

Dina Merrill plays Liggett’s wife Emily a “decent” respectable woman of breeding who is also portrayed as having stripped Weston Liggett of his manhood by foisting a life upon him that wasn’t of his own choosing, thus giving him an excuse for why he seeks the comfort of other woman and the excesses of booze. He too is self-deprecating and self-destructive like Gloria, but unlike Gloria, he gets the opportunity to find himself at the end, whereas Gloria had to literally crash and burn.

And yet we don’t see Liggett’s actions as being amoral. He gets a small lecture from an associate Bing who while on a train bound for Long Island, tells him he’s making a mess of his life, but people make excuses for Liggett all the way through. Liggett’s own wife recognizes her part of the blame in infantilizing her husband, therefore, taking the burden of blame off of him.

However, Gloria is a walking sexual plague, a virtual epidemic capable of taking men and marriages down with one phone call to BUtterfield 8. She is a rolling one-woman demolition team, smashing through sexual encounters like a bulldozer. Until she meets the one man she actually falls in love with, Wes Liggett. Only with this one man can she find self-worth and become redeemed. Finally, she starts to shed her life and aspire for more than taking from men, by giving over her body. Women are not allowed to be sexual beings, not in the way that men are expected to be.

The wonderful Mildred Dunnock ( she was in one of my favorite episodes of Boris Karloff’s Thriller, The Cheaters) plays Gloria’s fragile and inhibited mother Annie and Annie’s neighbor and best friend Fannie Thurber is played by Betty Field who adds some comic relief to the tension at times. She’s a constant in Annie’s troubled life, worrying about her daughter and her reputation.

Gloria Wandrous high priced call girl just dial BUtterfield 8 and wakes up in Wes Liggett’s bed in his lavish apartment. She starts calling for Liggett (Laurence Harvey) who we see stepping into an elevator. The vintage baby blue Crosley phone is off the hook. The oboe is ominous and alienating. She picks up a pack of crumpled cigarettes and flings it when she discovers it’s empty.

She keeps picking at the ashtray looking for the remnant of a cigarette butt that she can smoke. She finds a pack of Liggett’s cigars and lights up, inhales, and starts choking on it. Pours herself a glass of scotch. Walks around the swanky apartment in the bed sheets, and kicks a silk salmon dress she wore the night before lying on the floor next to her pumps. Picks up the dress and holds it to herself. Remembering last night she crumples it up and throws it back on the floor. Puts her slip on and saunters off to find Liggett calling his name. She steps into an ultra-ornate bathroom splattered with flecked pink and gold.

Her curves are accented by the silk slip. She drips sex. Looking in the mirror she wipes the night before out of her eyes. Rinses her toothbrush in the glass of scotch and brushes her teeth, gargles with the scotch, and spits into the sink.Sitting at Emily Liggett’s dressing table deciding on which perfume to douse herself with.

The film is photographed in washes of that fabulous vintage muted pink, blue, and gold tones fashionable for the 60s style. Gloria goes to the closet and fondles a brown mink coat, holding it close to her body like a lover. Sets it back in the closet and picks the other white fox-lined coat, wearing it over her slip. Goes into the bedroom and hangs up the phone.

She then goes over to her gold purse and pulls out a note written on an envelope”Gloria-$250 enough? Will phone you later. L” Lingering on the note a bit, she is visibly upset, this is not something she’s expected

The brash horns underscore her fervor when she grabs her lips stick and writes on the mirror in big red letters “NO SALE” and places the money on an ornate clock atop the mantle. She rips up the note and goes back to the closet to hang up the white fox coat, and grabs the more expensive brown mink instead.

Gloria picks up the phone and says “BUtterfield 8, it’s Gloria any messages for me…mhm, Charlie, yeah George, yeah, listen to a Mr. Liggett will try to call sometime today, He might use Mr. L…find me where ever I am…this is one call I want to take personally…and immediately” she hangs up. She picks up a bottle of scotch and then pulls out money for it and places it on the bar, and walks out into the gray New York City day. Hails a yellow cab and says she’ll double her tip for a cigarette. As is the assumption of the brash New Yorker attitude, the taxi nearly runs into an older couple crossing the street and yelling ensues. Gloria tells him that he’s in a good voice this morning.

This is how Butterfield 8 opens. We see a woman who is insulted that she has been paid for sex by the one man she thought was different. She arrives at her friend’s apartment, knocks on the door, and finds Steve Carpenter (Eddie Fisher), obviously a poor struggling composer, trying to work on tomorrow’s arrangements on the piano. She hands him the bottle of liquor and says “tribute” for his “faith, hope, and charity” and kisses him on the cheek. He says she’s got scotch on her breath, but she says it’s good scotch at 20 years old. He says “And the cigar smoke?”I always said I’d try anything once” Steve says”You ever try common sense?” and she answers “Only in desperation”

She tells him that she stole the fur coat, not for real, just long enough to get even with somebody. He made her so damned mad, he left her money,” he actually left me money!”

Steve tells her that his work is designed to get paid. She says it didn’t work. Besides, her dress was torn so she borrowed something “spiteful and elegant” She utters his name Weston Liggett, Steve’s heard of him, as very social. She says and “Very Yale” “what’s with you Yale?, always Yale,” she tells him it’s the last college left, she started with Amherst and worked her way through the alphabet to Yale” and puffs on her cigarette “I’m stuck there…of course, I could work backward again”

Steve and Gloria are childhood friends, and he is very protective of her. Steve tells her to put the coat back on”Half-dressed women make it difficult to concentrate” She tells him “Don’t think of me as a woman, after all, we’re just like brother and sister, remember” He gets agitated and tells her to put the coat back on.

He tells her.  I’m sick of opening up that door every other day and  finding you boozed up, burned out, and ugly”


She says “Sick for me or sick for you?” he comes back “For you, for everything you’re wasting…why do you come here like this?” he asks. She tells him that she always comes to him because at least she can be honest with him. He tells her to start being honest with herself.”You’re making a mess out of your life and you’re forcing me to watch it.”

Gloria says ” It’s terrible Steve, I say yes too much, when I shouldn’t and you say no too much when you shouldn’t”

She wonders how she’s gonna get home dressed in only a slip and fur coat what will her mother think? Steve says that her mother knows everything about her. She agrees but says she’d never admit it. “I’m still her innocent little girl…and she’s my dear sweet cookie-baking mother””So go home, give her an innocent smile, and have a cookie”

Gloria asks to borrow one of Steve’s girlfriend’s dresses. Steve’s girlfriend Norma played by the lovely Susan Oliver feels threatened by the friendship between Gloria and Steve. Gloria gives Steve a little of her philosophy on women.
“The more you ask her to sacrifice, the more she knows you love her…honestly”

Cross Fade

On the LIRR heading to Long Island Liggett is smoking a cigar and lost in deep thought. On the train sitting next to him is a colleague Bing who asks “Problems Ligg?” he tells him “Do you know 3 of the most overrated things in this world, home-loving, home cooking, and security”

Ligg’s got everything, lots of people would envy him, but he wonders “But am I happy?”Bing says “Obviously not” “Ever wonder why?” “I have…can you take it from an old fraternity brother…you’re a heel…a low down rotten heel…anything that doesn’t go your way, anything that you can’t have you destroy” This is the one enlightened moment of the film where there is an insight into Liggett’s pathology and the narrative holds him accountable for his behavior. Bing tells him he could still come back and be a law partner with him any time.


Now on Long Island Ligg is skeet shooting with his wife Emily. He asks when she’s coming back to town(NYC). But the question is more of curiosity than passion. There is an obvious strain in the marriage. They are shooting at targets instead of engaging in a real conversation.

We’re back with Gloria, who’s borrowing a suit dress from Steve’s girlfriend Norma. She tells Gloria, “Just remember that suit has lived a sheltered life…it shocks easily” “Well then, it’s time it had a little adventure” A sarcastic banter ensues and Norma asks what happened to Gloria’s dress  “It’s a funny thing, one minute it was there, and the next minute it wasn’t” Norma lilts her voice “much like your virtue I presume”

Gloria shows up at home in her little red sports car. Her mother says “Here’s Gloria now” Her friend Fannie says”From where, girl scout camp?” Mother Annie is holding a little Yorkshire Terrier and asks her skeptical friend Mrs. Francis Thurber who is drinking coffee. “Do I look alright?” setting the little dog down on Fannie’s lap. Fannie wriggles with displeasure, shooing it away. Gloria comes in and hugs her mother. Mrs. Thurber asks “How’s church?”Gloria snaps back “Why don’t you go sometime and find out.”

Her mother remarks about the nice suit, and Gloria tells her that she picked it up at the designer’s last week. Mrs Thurber gives a dig by saying” It must be hard changing dresses in one of those sports car trunks” Gloria shoots daggers back at her.

Then her mother tells her that the modeling agency sent some dresses, one of them they want her to wear to 3 different places tonight, but Mrs. Thurber interjects again with yet another dig “the Salvation Army, The Public Library, and The PTA in Brownsville” Gloria lets out a fake laugh for Mrs. Thurbers benefit.

Gloria’s mother is the only one who doesn’t openly acknowledge Gloria’s lifestyle “Francis don’t joke about Gloria’s work it’s very important to her…she’s one of the few girls of her kind in the city” Gloria asks if Butterfield 8 called? Her mother tells her she’s 2 weeks late on her car payment and Gloria asks to borrow some money.

Ligg is back at his apartment in NYC. He sees the lipstick writing on the mirror NO SALE and picks up the dress from the floor. He calls Gloria, they arrange to meet that night. She shows up at the bar wearing a stunning black dress, black gloves, and pearls. “He apologizes about the money. He tells her she’s with him tonight, and she comes back with “by choice, only”


Liggett says “Women are all alike, play tough,” Gloria says “I’m not like anyone, I’m me!” “That’s right I shouldn’t knock it should I?”He says she’s something different, she says “Sure I’ve got the world by the tail” He calls her doll face.

She gets up and says goodnight but he grabs her arm. “You’ve got a great act” She digs the heel of her pump into his shoe. He grabs her tighter, holding onto her wrist. It’s a battle of the wills. Neither one winces or cries out in pain. Ligg says “Go ahead rub your wrist”, and she says “Not if it killed me” Then Ligg says “I want to carry you out of here.” But Gloria slams him back “That was a lesson pal, not a treatment”

He says he won’t talk about money again, but offers her an apartment as big as she’d like, and charge accounts. “Mr. Liggett put your assets away…you don’t have enough,” he says to try him, but she tells him about offers she’s turned down “You couldn’t match what I’ve already turned down”, Yachts in the Riviera, genuine Van Goghs in every room, paid for by men with “pocket money” annuities for life, jewelry.”

She turned them down flatly, she earned her money modeling clothes. He remarks”Now I get it…you pick the man…he doesn’t pick you” “Finally, why I’m not teaching logic at Columbia I’ll never know” ” You also drop the man when you want to” and she snickers ”and without a parachute”

He’s driving her little red sports car but he purposely misses her stop. He says he’s tired of looking and listening. He says nobody treats him that way. She says “Oh Weston Liggett the wealthy,” he says “No Weston Liggett the man” I wasn’t cut out to be a chauffeur, an escort, or a straight man for your nightclub repertoire”

Gloria says “The next time you get angry just remember you sent for me, I didn’t send for you”. She puts a cigar in his mouth and lights it for him. He blows the smoke in her face and looks at her seductively, then he says “Like hell, you didn’t send for me” ” and now what you’re going to drag me up to your cave?”

He says his apartment is close. She tells him “Oh no not again.” He says it was alright last night. But she says “Last night my sense of direction was slightly impaired by gin,” he tells her “That’s okay I’ve got caves all the place” She rests her head on his shoulders. He says “Hello” she answers softly “Hello” the battle is over, they are seeing each other for the first time.

They Arrive at Happy’s Motel. Happy played by Kay Medford runs this out-of-the-way motel. Liggett calls out for Happy. She looks into the car and says “Oh we always have room for 2 weary travelers” Happy wants to tell him a joke about 2 old maids but he says later. She says “A man’s gotta get his “rest” he’s gotta get it regular”(rest is code for sex of course)

Happy was in Vaudeville once. Looks at Gloria, and they enter the motel room. A Saxophone is playing sultry music and the neon lights are flashing red and green in and out invading the darkness every time they blink. We know what’s next as they embrace in the doorway of the room and as the screen darkens they shut door number 9. End scene.

The next morning in a diner, the jukebox playing torchy music, “You know you’re liable to wind up psychologically famous, a case history in a medical book” He asks “You writing it?” “No, but I have to tell my psychiatrist everything that happens to me” (psychoanalysis was becoming the trend for the bored disillusioned angst of the middle class.)…” Even down to the smallest deepest, darkest detail,” Ligg says earnestly “That’s a set of notes I’d like to read”

He asks why she needs a psychiatrist. “I’ve never met anyone direct and uninhibited as you” she smiles, “Wild is the word,” He says “First genuine wildness I’ve ever come across in a woman”

fade out

Steve and Norma always fight about Gloria so he explains “Gloria and I grew up in the same neighborhood. I’ve known her all my life, we went to the same school together. Her father died when she was very little, and her mother went to work, so I sort of became her family”He gets in closer to Norma, “Somebody’s got to look after her…I”m gonna do it for as long as it takes, now will you try to understand?”

she says “I understand, I understand that it’s worse than I thought, much worse, you are actually in love with her and you don’t even know it”

“Steve is she or is she, not a tramp?” he says” I never liked that word” “Is she not the biggest tramp in this whole city?” Steve says “I especially don’t like to hear you use it”

Norma starts to suppose about marriage and children, Steve is plunking out indiscriminate chords on the piano. She asks “Do you want her hanging around us all the time, babysitting…nipping brandy out of a handbag at 8 in the morning and telling them the story of little red riding hood and the 3 lecherous bears. Do we keep a spare room where she can sleep off her hangovers?”

Steve answers “All I know is I worry about her” “But does she worry about you?” now Steve gets up and yells in Norma’s face ” I don’t know and I don’t care, this is something I’m gonna do whether you like it or not Norma”

Continued in Part II

Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1965): Part I: “There’ll be no later, this town is clean”

 

Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss: Part III “Tell me where is the blue bird of happiness found?”

The Naked Kiss (1965) Part III Meaning it bares no emotion. It’s empty of real substance. It has the taste of perversion to it.

SPOILER ALERT!!!!  I DO THE SYNOPSIS RIGHT TO THE END OF THE FILM…

Working at the hospital while Kelly and one of the nurses are bathing the children Kelly notices that she is troubled and asks “Do you want to talk about it? Have you been to a doctor?” She has the intuition that the young girl is pregnant. Kelly instead of bringing the ‘plague’ to Grantville has brought insight and compassion to the women who are troubled in this provincial prison. In this way, the film can be viewed as feminist. She brings her strength and independence.

Crossfade, Kelly, and Grant are slow dancing at Grant’s house. Kelly tells him that she wants to talk about something, something she needs to get off her mind. “I’m afraid our dance is over.” Asks him to sit down and listen to the words. “When I came to this town, the first day I came… I was a prostitute. My first customer was my last one, next morning I quit. Now I’m in love with a man who’s the dream of every woman.” Grant is seated looking puzzled Kelly continues “Every woman who has the right to dream…but the man has got to stop seeing me before the volcano erupts.”

Grant looks up at her and grabs her hand. Pulls her close to him.“I love you Kelly.. .will you marry me?” She says “I’ve got to think it out.. .(now cheek to cheek) Oh I’ve got to think it out.”

Kelly’s in her room drinking from the blown Venetian glass from Venice that Grant gave her. She’s contemplating the marriage proposal. We hear a voice over, it’s Grant’s monologue “I wasn’t cut out to be a monk and you’re not the type to turn nun… but together we’ll prove our whole existence for each other, the only woman I want for my wife.”

Voice over by Grant “I wasn’t cut out to be a monk, and you’re not the type to turn nun. But together we’ll prove our whole existence for each other. You’re the only woman I want for my wife… If they condemn you for your past, I don’t want them for my friends. Kelly darling no one can forbid you your tomorrow. And I’m all your tomorrows. 

Kelly gets up from the bed, sighs and walks over to the tailor’s dummy, and asks “Charlie, what should I do?” Again we hear Grant’s voice “If they condemn you for your past, I don’t want them as my friends, Kelly darling…no one could forbid you tomorrow, and I’m all your tomorrows, all of them.” Kelly raises her glass and answers to Charlie “That’s right!…why should Grant want to marry a woman like me?.. .confidentially Charley, (her arm around the fake soldier now) we girls are always chasing dreams… why shouldn’t I have a right to catch mine?”

Now Kelly has an internal monologue “Many women had a past like mine, and they made out didn’t they?” She answers aloud asking the question “Or did they?… ah, of course, they did.. .and you know why because there was always the Rock of Gibraltar to give them strength” She raises the blown glass to Charlie in a toast “That’s what Grant is…The Rock…The Rock of Gibraltar.”

So Kelly needs a man to legitimize her self-worth, otherwise, she is still considered machinery. “Oh Charlie” now we hear Grant’s voice again “We’d be living an endless honeymoon” She goes back over to Charlie and hugs him “Oh Charlie, the dread of every woman in my business…is ending up alone…I know that world.”

She looks at the glass again and says “And I know his world( chuckles ironically) and that makes me a woman of 2 worlds… and that’s not good, or is it?” She looks at Charlie’s hat. She’s got her arm around his stuffed shoulders. “With him, I’m complete, a whole woman” the voiceover by Grant breaks in again “I’ll never strike at your past, not even with a flower” Kelly hugs Charlie closer, “Oh Charlie, Charlie Charlie, Charlie…what should I do?…”

Fade to Black.

in this look on Grant’s face, we sense something cold and unsavory deep-rooted in his soul. A removed reptilian hypothermic smile. It is not his fine breeding, it is something dark and unwholesome he keeps bubbling below the surface of his refinement.

At Grant’s house, the doorbell rings, and Kelly comes bursting in “Oh it’s a wonderful day Barney!… it’s a beautiful day!” Barney tells her that Grant is still asleep. She ignores him and yells “It’s a glorious day!” She goes to the stereo and puts on Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and conducts. Barney still in his robe goes upstairs to get Grant. Kelly is conducting the music, she spins the large globe as if she’ll be able to see the world now.

Grant comes down in his silk pajamas, yawning and putting his robe on, he watches as she pretends to conduct the music. She runs to him and grabs his hands “I love you…it’s a deal” He looks oddly at her, pleased but more like he’s just sealed a business deal, not the reaction from a man truly in love. As they discover wedding plans he wants to send her to Paris to buy the most expensive wedding gown. Kelly has always paid for every stitch of clothing on her back. That tells you how independent she has been while working as a prostitute. Not taking any more than for her services to get by. Kelly has throughout shown to be a woman of integrity, thus the challenge in the narrative is to balance the conflict of judging her as a whore with morals.

Dusty gets help from Kelly. Who gives her $1,000 and tells her whether the guy marries her or not she is to keep the baby. Dusty tells her, “Boy or girl I’ll name it Kelly.”

Kip’s gaze, the sadness shared with a child, as he watches Dusty crying. Sympathetic.

Now nurses and orderlies are bringing in the children one by one. And a record begins to spin. Kip the little boy wearing the First Mate pirate hat begins to sing this song which has an eerily tragic poignancy.

“Mommy dear, tell me please, is the world really round” Another little boy takes it from there, “Tell me where, is the bluebird of happiness found” Now a little girl sings “Tell me why is the sky up above so blue” now they all sing in unison “and when you were a child, did your mommy tell you?”

All of the children standing like wounded soldiers with their hats and crutches singing this sad little song together. The song creates an element of melancholy, and pathos in the film. It’s the children asking the question where is happiness?

The children are a diverse group of races, the spirit of these children fuels the film’s angst and alienation, for they are like castaways in a world that is perfect, while they are broken and striving to be whole.

“What becomes of the sun when it falls in the sea” “And who lights it again, as bright as can be” Together they sing again “Tell me why can’t I fly without wings through the sky” Back to Kip who sadly sings “tell me why mommy dear…are there tears in your eyes?”

Now Kelly joins in as an answer to the song’s questions singing “Little one, little one, yes the world’s really round, and the bluebird you search for is surely is found… and the sky up above is so blue and clear (the staff including Mac is watching Kelly serenade the children they are so sullen, yet proud) so that you’d see the bluebird if it should come near… and the sun doesn’t fall in the sea out of sight, all it does is make way for the moon’s pretty light… and if children could fly there’d be no need for birds… and I cry little ones cause I’m touched by your words.”

The children surrounding Kelly sing the song together, she has left a mark on them, she has found a different way to have worth, and she sees herself through these child’s eyes. They are ultimately truly innocent, yet they are the ones who don’t objectify Kelly.

“Tell me please Mommy dear is it true the world’s round, I will search, round the world til the bluebird is found” Then Kelly sings “Little one there’s no need to wander too far, for what you really seek is right here where you are.”

Griff and Grant are walking out of a building. Grant has asked Griff to be the best man at the wedding but Griff can’t fake how miserable he is. Grant tells him to get it off his chest. Bunny comes running over to Grant with her dolly and he picks her up and spins her around. Griff is still visibly upset, holding his cigarette and frowning. Bunny congratulates Uncle Grant on his wedding, and he kisses her cheek, she beams a smile half filled with baby teeth.

Now in the classroom back at the hospital, the children are getting a spelling lesson. Kelly is fixing Kip’s shoelace. Griff knocks on the window glass to get Kelly’s attention. Through the glass panel in the door, we see them talking seriously again a frame within a frame, symbolizing the entrapment of both characters who are stuck by their roles. They move into an empty room so they can continue to talk.

Continue reading “Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss: Part III “Tell me where is the blue bird of happiness found?”” →

The Unearthly (1957) “Here’s to youth, here’s to eternity” John Carradine the ubiquitous actor

The Unearthly (1957)

The Unearthly was directed by Brooke L Peters (IMDb has the director listed as Boris Petroff) and scripted by Jane Mann and Geoffrey Dennis. The film stars the ubiquitous character actor John Carradine, the sultry Allison Hayes, the mammoth Tor Johnson, Myron Healey, Marilyn Buferd, Arthur Batanides, and Sally Todd.

John Carradine with his characteristic cello-like voice plays Dr. Charles Conway, the archetypal mad scientist who has developed a 17th artificial gland. Conway believes he has discovered the secret to eternal youth and immortality. Dr. Conway revels “I can prolong life for thousands of years, perhaps forever this 17th gland is the secret of youth.”

The Face of Marble (1946) An Odd John Carradine Obscurity with an “Identity Crisis”

The voluptuous Allison Hayes (Attack of The 50 Foot Woman 1958, The Undead ) plays Grace Thomas, a woman who has suffered a nervous breakdown and is brought to Dr. Conway’s house for a rest cure. Grace has been tricked by her doctor, Dr. Loren Wright (Roy Gordon) who’s been working with Conway, by procuring the victims and ensuring they do not have any living family members who can trace them. Dr. Wright slips up when he doesn’t realize that Grace has a father. The plan is to take her coat and handbag and fake her suicide.

Myron Healy is Mark Houston an undercover cop posing as an escaped convict, that Lobo finds lurking on the grounds. Dr. Conway having heard the description of the man threatens to call the police but offers Mark sanctuary because he is a perfect specimen to experiment on. Houston is purposely posing as the escaped murderer in order to infiltrate Conway’s operation.

Tor Johnson as Lobo once again (Bride of The Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space) is a giant with the mind of a child who is the caretaker, bodyguard, and overall man-servant to Dr. Conway.

Dr. Conway and his icy assistant Sharon Gilcrest (Marilyn Buferd) are experimenting on these human guinea pigs trying to find the secret of eternal youth.

Also, there is the unfortunate Jedrow, stuck in a cataleptic state, with a huge gash in his neck where the 17th gland was implanted. It’s sweet when Lobo washes his face with a wet rag. He somewhat looks like the Man Who Turned To Stone or an extra from Carnival of Souls.

Dr. Conway’s home is a front for his experiments, seemingly a sanatorium for neurotics. While his guests/patients are Danny Green (Arthur Batanides) an edgy drug addict, and Sally Todd is Natalie Anders suffering from chronic sex appeal?

They all think that Conway is actually trying to help them get over whatever affliction they’re supposedly troubled by. Sharon is drugging their milk and secreting them away for the glandular transplants.

Unfortunately, his operations have failed, only creating monstrous and insane mutants that wind up locked away in his basement dungeon.

Sally reads trashy romance novels and flirts with all the men, even Lobo, who mumbles Pretty Girl like a 2-year-old. Danny is a cranky rageaholic whose temper tantrums are irritating.

Mark and Grace discover that Conway has experimented on Natalie turning her into a horrifically scarred version of herself. Together with Danny, they stop Conway’s experiments, but ultimately as is typical it is one of Dr. Conway’s own creations that kills him. And his assistant Sharon is taken away by the police. Grace and Mark go off into the sunset.

Some memorable quotes:

“In science, there have always been some necessary sacrifices”– Dr. Conway
“The unearthly  In science nothing is taken for granted.”-Dr. Conway
“Here’s to youth, here’s to eternity.”
“Alright I wear a leather jacket and I’m not a midget, so what?” -Mark Houston
“I’m a scientist, thinking is my business.”-Dr. Conway

Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1965): Part I: “There’ll be no later, this town is clean”

The Naked Kiss (1965) Shock and Shame, the story of a Night Girl.

Directed by the maverick auteur Samuel Fuller, with a screenplay by Fuller and black, gray, and white shades in the striking cinematography by Stanley Cortez

-(The Magnificent Ambersons 1942, Since you Went Away 1944, The Night of the Hunter 1955, Shock Corridor 1961), Cortez creates a sense of space that is almost surreal and disconnected from the outside world. The Naked Kiss stars Constance Towers as Kelly, Anthony Eisley as Griff, Michael Dante as Grant, Marie Devereux as Buff, Patsy Kelly as Mac, and one of my favorite unsung actresses Virginia Grey (The Women 1939, All The Heaven Allows 1955, Crime of Passion 1956, Backstreet 1961) as Candy.

Let me say that this is one of my favorite films. I think that it’s such a bold concoction of visual style, specific alienation that we as spectators experience along with Kelly our female Protagonist. The undercurrent of sexual pathology of a perverse nature and raw energy that fuels some crude reactionary moments on film. Normally I wouldn’t write about the ending of a film so as not to ruin it for the viewer, yet Constance Tower’s remarkable performance and Fuller’s raw cinematic veritae must be experienced, the story will not lose anything by my relating it here. I actually consider this part of my Women in Peril series, but more aptly put, it’s a womanhood in peril film.

Samuel Fuller’s B post-noir films are not like anyone else’s. Fuller’s work is often confrontational and visceral considered the kinkiest of all the B post-noir auteurs. Naked Kiss is his most potent work alongside his noir masterpiece Pickup on South Street (1953) starring Richard Widmark and Thelma Ritter as Moe Williams.


Alain Silver and James Ursini’s Film Noir Reader 2 “Fuller’s Naked Kiss “boldly offers a different kind of descriptive pause. Fuller takes on Patriarchy and directly assaults the spectator with a bizarre opening”

In their book they inform us that Fuller actually attached a camera to actor Monte Mansfield who plays Kelly’s pimp Farlunde, the guy she pummels in his swanky apartment right from the tip of the film. He has shaved off her hair and in retaliation she takes her primal vengeance out on his, beating him with her purse and high heels. Kelly only takes the money owed to her. The scene already prepares us, and what is created is an off-kilter and disorienting mood. The opening of The Naked Kiss is perhaps for me one of the most audacious beginnings to any cinematic work. It sort of punches you right in the face along with Farlunde.

The greater theme of the film is its narrative of women’s role within society. In a way not unlike Elia Kazan, Fuller has created a sociological framework, to lay out questions of what womanhood, as well as motherhood, means discursively. While at the end of the film, Kelly is relegitimized as being a savior and not a whore, she is still not allowed to live amongst the clean town’s people. She is still an outsider. Silver and Ursini also correctly bring out in their noir reader the fact that the context of the film is a “discursive-based attack on men and how they define women as well as the limits they place on them”. Also notable is the displaced female rage that only became better articulated later on with feminists during the 60s and 70s.

It reminds me while watching television’s soap opera junk food Peyton Place with its pillory that sits prominently in the middle of the town square as a reminder of New England Puritanical morals and the lurking hypocrisy in the shadows of quiet provincial values, that warn girls to beware of giving away their virtue. Betty Anderson (Barbara Parkins) learns this when she is condemned as the archetypal whore, the tainted girl who gave up her purity to a boy during a summer fling and then was thrown away like autumn trash. The pillory stands in the middle of the town, 200 years prior a woman like Betty had her head shaved bald, was locked in the pillory to be mocked, and then was driven out by the good town folk of Peyton Place. Much like Kelly who we first meet at the shocking opening of the film (one reason The Naked Kiss is such a uniquely memorable excursion for me) is completely bald and striking back at the man who took her hair, her power away.

The Naked Kiss written, directed, and produced by Sam Fuller, opens wide like a steel trap, with Constance Towers as Kelly viciously beats up a pimp Farlunde in his swanky apartment, smashing away at him with her handbag. Hitting his face and neck, it’s like watching a brutal choreographed dance. Fuller creates this wavering movement to give us a sense of the dizzying brutality. Farlunde begs “I’m drunk Kelly please,” “Enough Kelly please.” The savage jazz riffs underscore the bashing. Her wig comes flying off, and now we see a bald Kelly still attacking the man relentlessly. The jazz is coherent with the hyperactive saxophone.

Stripped of her hair looking like a mannequin (perhaps to show us Kelly as an “object”) she beats him till he staggers to the floor, spraying seltzer water in his face. He’s wasted by the beating, she rifles through his pockets and grabs some cash from his wallet. “Eight hundred dollars… you parasite… I’m taking only what’s coming to me.” She starts counting out bills, throwing them down upon his chest, “Fifty, sixty, seventy-five… I’m not rolling you, you drunken leech, I’m only taking the seventy-five dollars that’s coming to me.”

She crumples up her share, shoves it into her bra, and kicks him while he’s lying there. She stares at us like we’re her mirror. Gratified she puts her wig back on and the title rolls, The Naked Kiss. Sam Fuller’s story of alienation, gender subjugation, and the question of immorality and deviant sexual pathology, opens up in a big way.

The Paul Dunlop score becomes more dreamy, with melodramatic strings and Kelly brushing her wig. getting it right. The credits roll and Kelly are applying her eye pencil transforming herself back into a woman and not a bloodthirsty she-devil. Now the blush is applied, the music fades back into the jazz number and we see Farlunde knocked out, lying on the floor. The saxophone is hurling trills at us, Kelly grabs a photograph down from a collection of beauties and she starts tearing it up to pieces, throwing them on the ground, the Farlunde stirs, coughs a bit, and starts to get up, Kelly slams the door.

As he starts picking up the debris Kelly has left in her wake he puts crumpled-up bills on top of a calendar and we see the date July 4, 1961. A quick cut, flash forward to a banner in the street touting August 12, 1963, and the melodramatic music is serenading us again. The camera pulls out for a wider angle, we can see the entire banner now, it reads 2 years later. August 12, 1963 Fashion Show for Handicapped Children Grantville Orthopedic Medical Center

The top of a bus moving through the street, a parked car, a mostly empty street, with a few people crossing it, and mulling about. This is the suggestion of a quiet, quaint American town.

Then a car horn toots, 3 men standing outside a Bus Depot, Griff (Anthony Eisley) says “Ten bucks, that right Mike?” Mike says “Why spend your own money on that punk?” Griff turns to the young man and says while stuffing it in his pocket “Here’s your ticket” smiles at him and shoves some money into his pocket as well. All the time the young man is looking down as if ashamed. He says “Thanks a lot Griff… I’ll pay you back.” Griff looks at him sternly, “I’m giving you a break, cause your brother was in my outfit… I don’t want to see you in this town again.” The young man looks down again.

Then a Greyhound bus pulls over to the curb. We see the marquee of the movie theater is playing Shock Corridor, a nod to Fuller’s other psychologically wrenching film about a newspaper reporter going undercover in a lunatic asylum, only to become one of the patients.

Continue reading “Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1965): Part I: “There’ll be no later, this town is clean”” →

They Live By Night (1948) Part Two “A woman is sort of like a dog”

They Live By Night (1948) Part One “This boy and girl were never properly introduced to the world”

It’s the first 10 minutes of They Live By Night that sets the stage for our ill-fated lovers. When Keechie comes out to the barn to get water, Bowie follows her, rattles some chains to make noise, and then he slumps down against the wall. When the headlights of a car startle him, he begins to whisper a little ritualistic number-counting verse to himself, a way to calm himself. Perhaps something he picked up in jail. Bowie is 23 years old and spent 7 years of it on the prison farm where he met Chickamaw and T-Dub.

He tells Keechie that he doesn’t really know how to talk to a woman. The old man Mobley shows up in a car with a woman. It’s Mattie, wife of T-Dubs brother still in jail trying to get paroled. Mobley is soused and nearly crashes the car, but smashes some crates and tires and damages the front tire. Mattie gets out complaining about the drive there, and the drunken fool who picked her up. “That’s the best you can send?”

They go into the cabin and leave Bowie and Keechie still in the barn. Keechie asks Bowie if he likes his old man. He says “Not much.” Then Bowie asks if it’s true that her Ma ran off, and she answers yes. He tells her his ma ran off with a guy who ran a pool hall. His Pa used to take him there. He relates to her a story of how one night, there was an argument, but there is usually an argument centered around a game of pool. This time his Pa raised his cue but the other guy had a gun. His Pa turned to him like he was trying to say something, his face went white like he was going to cry. “The blood running into his eyes” Then Ma went to live with the guy who killed him.

Here the backstory lays the groundwork for the couple, who never had a chance to live a normal life, with decent parents who could raise them with a moral code.

She asks why Bowie would run with men like T-Dub and Chickamaw, her uncle “lives for trouble” and is “wild” Bowie keeps a newspaper clipping in his pocket about a guy convicted of murder just like him, who had no due process of the law. The Supreme Court said, “Let that man out!” Bowie fantasizes about running away to Mexico. Dreams are all he has.

This is what Bowie is living for, the day he can afford the Lawyer in Tulsa, who can overturn his conviction and he can get himself “squared around” a significant phrase that will come back at the end of the film. The idea is that these young people are fueled by the desire to belong to the right side of society. Bowie and Keechie start to develop an obvious attraction to each other.

Mattie takes an instant dislike to Bowie and tells Keechie that he’s Jail Bait.

Chickamaw and T-Dub want to pull a big job in Zelton Texas, rob a bank. Bowie agrees to be the driver of the getaway car.

The day before the robbery, we see a large street clock, Bowie looks at it, always asking what time it is. He’s sitting in the car, we hear a train whistle blow. Then Bowie cases the bank. He purchases a beautiful woman’s watch for Keechie at the Zelton Jewelry Store. He doesn’t have smaller bills with him so the jewelry store owner will have to take him over to the bank to break the large bills.

T-Dub and Bowie return to the house where Mattie and Chickamaw are. T-Dub asks Mattie what’s going on. It appears there might be a sexual relationship between the pair. Chickamaw says “How long does a woman wait for one man?” Mattie gets upset “Listen you crumby one-eyed nut” T-Dub goes to slap Mattie but Chickamaw grabs him, and Mattie smashes a mirror. Bowie is spooked and says “That’s 7 years!” is there an emphasis on his superstition because he is uneducated and from a lower class?

 

On the day of the bank robbery, the same train whistle blows, the clock is standing in the same spot outside the bank, and Bowie is in the car waiting for the two men to give the signal, when the jeweler recognized Bowie and tried to strike up a conversation with him. When Bowie keeps telling him to “get away” and he doesn’t stop talking, Bowie pushed the man to the ground and he hits his head.

All 3 men are in the getaway car now, fleeing the robbery, back on the wide expanses of open land. Blue Grass music is playing on the radio. They pull off the road. Chickamaw pulls out a gas can and sets the robbery car ablaze. The radio starts to die out as the car is consumed by the flames until it sounds like a dying doo hickey.

They drop T-Dub off and Chickamaw says, they can start struttin’ and the one thing Bowie has to learn “is to look and act like other people.” Again we see the emphasis on trying to fit into normal society. They buy fancy clothes and new cars. On the way back to the house, an old jalopy cuts off Bowie and they crash the car. A police officer comes over to question them about how fast they were going and requests that they come along with him, and Chickamaw calls him “friend” and then shoots him.

Chickamaw takes Bowie, who’s sprained his back in the crash, to his brother’s place so Keechie can take care of him. Old man Mobley starts complaining about having to close the station, but Chickamaw says not to worry and shoves a wad of cash in Keechies blouse pocket. Her uncle Chickamaw has a very unhealthy boundary around his niece. He leers at her a good deal of the time and objectifies her, by calling her the girl instead of his niece. When Keechie hands the money over to her father, the old man says, “Girl that’s more money I’ve seen since we collected on that fire we had.” He takes the money, and we know that he’ll blow all of it on booze later on.

Bowie is laying face down on the bed. Keechie takes her hair down and starts brushing it. The first sign that she is embracing her sexuality, her womanhood, amidst this band of dirty thugs, her father included. Bowie awakens and is framed on screen behind a wrought iron bed, that looks like the bars of a jail. Noir characters are often trapped by framing.

Bowie asks Keechie “Who’s your fella…other girls have ’em?” she says “I don’t know what other girls have.” She rubs his back down with something, and the wind in the telephone wires from out the highway, makes an eerie noise outside. Bowie asks if she ever thinks about leaving town, most girls would want to go, again she says “I don’t know what most girls want.” Keechie has been so sheltered from the world. He tells her that he has lots of money now from the robbery, but this offends Keechie. He doesn’t mean to offend her, but she replies, “I’d do this for a dog.” Then he tells her to look in the side pocket of his shirt. She takes out the package and finds the watch he bought for her. She mentions that there is no clock in the cabin, though she wants to set the watch to the right time. Perhaps people who live outside of society have no sense of belonging so need to track the hours of the day. That’s the sense I got from all the references to time and why it was so important for Bowie and Keechie to know what time it was.

He puts the watch on her. She says she never saw any sense in having a fella, then asks him if he’s trying to say that he should be her fella. He says “I guess maybe it is.” This is a very sweet moment for the two of them. She tells him to stay until morning, by then her drunken father will have shot off his mouth all over town, so he’ll need to get away. She’ll go with him.

They leave on a bus. A baby crying incessantly, on a seat next to Bowie, but the mother could care less about quieting the child. They stop for coffee and notice a flashing neon sign Marriages Performed. The waitress pours more coffee and interjects, Hawkins class B, organ music, and everything for $20. She says the way people pop in and out of there you’d think they’re getting dog licenses. At that point, Bowie tries to tell Keechie that he’s no good for her. He’ll always be a black sheep. and she tells him “The only thing black about you is your eyelashes.” She saw the goodness in him from the beginning. After complaining about how awful that wedding place is, he asks her to marry him and they get off the bus, and enter Hawkins, to be married. The old man running the quicky ceremony says to Bowie “You don’t think much about the way I marry people” “I sure don’t” “Me neither but you gotta give people what they want.” Then he sells them a car and heads off for their honeymoon, at Lamberts Inn where they take a room all the way at the end, from Mr Vines and his little son Alvin. They set up a house there. And life seems quiet and “normal” like other people.

In the meantime, old man Mobley goes to the police and tells them about Bowie, kidnapping his daughter. Tells them where they can find him. “That boy belongs in the electric chair, and I’d like to be the one to pull the switch!”

Bowie asks Keechie about “these women who don’t wait for their men” and she gives him her philosophy. “Those women don’t love…woman only loves once. I guess a woman is sort of like a dog, a bad dog would take things from anybody, and he’ll bite anybody who tries to pet him. There was a man back up home, and after he died, his dog wouldn’t eat or do anything, and he died too.”

Chickamaw shows up “Aint you shacked up nice and cozy,” He asks for alcohol, but since there wasn’t any, he asks for candy and starts munching on it. Tells Bowie the newspapers are “plastered with his face.” Every time some dingbat robs a filling station, they say it’s “Bowie the Kid”, the Zelton bandit. “You’d have to have wings to be every place they say you did.”

Chickamaw and T-Dub are out of money and now want to pull another job. ” kid we got a bank in Cedars, just itching to be charged” Bowie offers half his loot from the Zelton robbery but Chickamaw strongarms him into coming along. “you know that’s friendly, real friendly…you aint gonna be handing me out no two bits at a time for ice cream cones, that doe you got where’d you get it?! working the shoe store, it takes 3 to pull a trick and you’re number 3, even if the papers say you’re number one.” T-Dub tells him later on that they took him out of jail over other men. Keechie is furious with Bowie for going along.

After the bank job, Chickamaw is gets righteously riled. T-Dub got killed during the bank robbery. Chickamaw tells Bowie that it “rips his guts out” All the papers do is talk about Bowie the Kid. He wants Bowie to stop for a drink, but Bowie refuses, Chickamaw grabs a pipe from the back seat and tries to hit him with it. Bowie orders him to get out of the car.

Bowie returns home that night to Keechie. “I guess you heard over the radio” “I heard T-Dub’s dead, Chickamaw was killed breaking into a liquor store…they say it runs in threes.”

She tells him she’s going to have a baby, no matter what. Bowie says “That’s right, he’ll have to take his chances just like us.”

They go out for the day and walk around the park like other “real people”, Bowie talks about going to Mexico again. they go out for supper and dancing.

A drunk stumbles into Keechie, so they decide to leave, but Keechie asks Bowie to get her some cigarettes. While in the bathroom getting the pack of cigarettes from the machine, a man crouches behind him and says “Bowie the kid” pulls the gun away from Bowie “Papers say you carry a .45” Bowie comes back “Papers say a lot of things.” The man tells him “We want you to leave town tonight, we don’t want any trigger-happy hillbillies around.”

There are no safe places for Bowie and Keechie to belong. They’re too innocent for the thugs like Chickamaw and T-Dub, yet they’re perceived as hicks by a whole other hierarchy of criminals. They Live By Night really is a story about human suffering and class disparity.

When the couple realizes that the plumber who came to fix the busted pipes in their place has recognized Bowie, they flee their little home and head out for the Prairie Plaza Hotel, a piece of property that Bowie remembers Mattie owns. Mattie is not happy to see Bowie, even though she finds out that Keechie’s ill and pregnant, unknown to the young couple, she turns them in to the police in exchange for her husband finally getting paroled.

Bowie goes back to the man who married them, asking about getting help to flee to Mexico, but the old man tells him that he’s a thief just like Bowie, but he won’t sell him “hope” when there ain’t any. Bowie realizes that there just isn’t a place in the world for “people like us.”

Note: the use of the metaphor of dogs is used a lot in the film– as obedience, faithfulness, and submissiveness. loyalty.

I won’t spoil the climax of They Live By Night, it is a poetic masterpiece of director Nicholas Ray

 

The Narrow Margin 1952: Nobody likes a fat man

The Narrow Margin (1952) Directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charles McGraw plays the sandy graveled voice of Detective Sgt. Walter Brown who’s reluctantly been chosen to escort a mob widow to the grand jury hearing in Los Angeles by train.

In the process of picking up Mrs. Frankie Neal, in Chicago, Walter’s partner is shot and killed in the darkly lit stairwell by a mysterious assassin played by Peter Virgo, the ruthless Densel, who wears a fur-trimmed coat.  This only causes Walter to further resent the woman he’s been charged to protect and see to it that she makes it to the trial to testify against the mob.

This noir film has a lot of familiar elements, gangsters, the train ride, the detective’s dilemma – as the die-hard cop fends off the criminal elements that surround him, and the wrong man/woman trope. The mobsters, Vincent Yost, Densel, and Joseph Kemp want to get hold of a valuable list of names that Frankie’s widow will bring to trial. Yost tries to bribe Det. Walter Brown, but he’s an honest cop who can’t be taken in.

The Narrow Margin also stars Marie Windsor as Mrs. Frankie Neal’s widow and Jaqueline White as the respectable Ann Sinclair, a classy woman, and mother,  traveling on the train with her little boy Tommy and their nanny.

Ann gets caught in the cross hairs of the intrigue when the gangsters mistakenly take Ann for Frankie’s widow. The majority of the film takes place on the train heading for Los Angeles. Don Beddoe plays Det. Sgt. Gus Forbes, “the fat man” who keeps getting in the way of Walter. He repeats the self-abasing proverb “Nobody likes a fat man” as he lumbers his way through the narrow passageways of the train en route to L.A.

Frankie’s widow Mrs. Neal is an obnoxious loud-mouthed dame, who doesn’t want to play by the rules and blasts her record player even after Walter warns her to hide out in the train compartment that the thugs think is empty. Marie Windsor reminds me a bit of the wonderfully quirky Ileana Douglas (Goodfellas, Six Feet Under, Cape Fear 1991). Douglas is the granddaughter of the great actor Melvyn Douglas. The fabulous actress isn’t a stranger to film noir, having appeared in some of the most underrated films of the genre, Force of Evil 1948 with John Garfield, The Sniper 1952, City that Never Sleeps 1953, and what I consider to be one of the top ten film noirs of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing 1956. Windsor is perhaps at her best in the role of the conniving Sherri Peatty who beats the spirit of her husband George (Elisha Cook) until he’s desperate to pull a heist that goes terribly wrong.

Walter: Sister I’ve known some pretty hard cases in my time, you make em all look like putty. You’re not talkin’ about a sack of gum drops gonna get smashed. You’re talkin’ about a dame’s life.You make think it’s funny for a woman with a kid to stop a bullet for ya, but I’m not laughing.

Frankie’s widow: Really well I don’t care, she got twins, you talk like you’d rather I got the bullet who’s side are you on anyhow?

Walter: Listen Jingle Jaw nothin’s happened to you yet has it?

Frankie’s widow: No, well it better not.

Walter: Well then shut up!

Impact: (1949) “This is for me and Irene sucker”

Impact (1949) Directed by Arthur Lubin Impact stars Brian Donlevy as Walter Williams a wealthy San Fransisco businessman who thinks his wife Irene played by Helen Walker ( great as the dark dominating force Lilith in Nightmare Alley) is truly the adoring woman she pretends to be. Here’s a great article from Movie Morlocks about the unsung talent of sexy Helen Walker.

Movie Morlocks.com a TCM site

Irene Gives her husband monogrammed shirts with his initials and calls him softy. She so adept at delivering the saccharine flattery of a doting wife. Unknown to the misguided Walter, she’s done the same monogram initials bit for her lover Tony Barrett as Jim Torrence a ruthless opportunist who has no hesitation in harming Walter to get what he wants.

Jim utters the iconic words from the film that reverberates in Walter’s head once he awakens from the nightmare, “This is for me and Irene sucker” just before he smashes the tire iron down upon Walter’s head.

Before the married couple are supposed to leave on a trip, Irene sets Walter up by feigning illness therefore not feeling well enough to travel with him. Instead, she sends her lover who is pretending to be her cousin Jim Torrence to meet up with Walter so he can give Jim a lift. Jim plans on bumping Walter off along the roadside and meeting up with Irene later at a Hotel under assumed names.

In a moment of sheer fatalistic retribution while speeding away from the crime scene Jim Torrance dies in a horrible head-on collision with a truck, which burns his body beyond recognition. After hitting Walter on the head with a tire iron he viciously throws him down the side of a cliff and leaves him for dead.

But Walter awakens bloodied and dazed climbs onto the back of a Bekins truck and winds up in Larkspur Idaho where he takes a job as a mechanic working for a war widow, the exquisite Ella Raines as Marsha Peters. Ella is even sylph-like in her greasy mechanic’s jumpsuit and cap.

Walter is hired at the gas station using a fake name, and while Marsha is beloved in the community she is not a very good mechanic so Walter takes over for three months, living as a roomer at Marsha’s kindly mother’s home. Walter becomes part of the community, as a volunteer fireman, and starts to relish leaving the big city life behind and the double-crossing wife Irene for this quaint existence in Larkspur.

Walter is assumed to be dead, which is all over the newsprint and later his wife Irene is sent to jail accused of plotting his murder, being hounded by Lt.Quincy played by Charles Coburn.

Walter reads the news, anticipating his revenge now with Irene sentenced to death, and he and Marsha begin to develop feelings for each other. When Walter tells the truth to Marsha..she insists that he do the right thing and go back to San Fransisco and show that he’s still alive.

Ironically, the police then believe the yarn that Irene spins that it was Walter who murdered her lover and not the other way around. Now Marsha and Lt Quincy must track down Su Lin, the William’s maid played by Anna May Wong who isn’t sure if her testimony would either help or hurt the kindly Walter Williams.

While Impact has some of the essential elements of a noir film, it works really well as a MeloNoir, the merging of melodrama and noir together. Brian Donlevy gives a great performance as the paragon betrayed patsy by his ruthless wife Irene. Helen Walker is icy as ever and Ellen is just gorgeous sitting on the stoop in Larkspur.

The Narrator starts off the tone of the film by saying  Impact, the force with which two lives come together. Sometimes for good, sometimes for evil.


Visit this revised piece that covers Impact in more detail.

https://thelastdrivein.com/2021/11/27/31-flavors-of-noir-on-the-fringe-to-lure-you-in-part-2/

The Killers (1946): Brutal Noir- A green silk hankerchief with golden harps

The Killers (1946) is the quintessential existentialist film. Based on Ernest Hemingway’s 1920s short story as he was immersed in the pre-war existentialism of that time period, which fostered tales of crimes and violence. As the two French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton remark in their fantastic read and seminal work A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-153 the killer’s gunmen walking into the diner in Brentwood N.J. and begin complaining about the menu predates the dark Absurdism of the existential movement of playwrights like Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

It reminds me of how great directors like Quentin Tarantino pay homage to films like The Killers in Pulp Fiction, or the work of Samuel Fuller who didn’t hold back on the vicious realism that was groundbreaking in its day.

According to the Electric Sheep blog, “The first twelve minutes of The Killers (1946) is a faithful (almost word for word) adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's much-anthologized short story. Two hit men enter a diner (shot to look like Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks "“ itself apparently inspired by Hemingway's story) typical Hemingway heroic fatalism.”

Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946): Brutal Noir- The First 12 Killer Minutes!

The Killers (1946) the original version scripted by Hemingway himself, was produced by Mark Hellinger (The Naked City, Brute Force, and The Two Mrs Carrolls– 3 of my favorite films,) and once again boldly directed by the great Robert Siodmak. With the rise of Nazism Siodmak left Germany for Paris and then for Hollywood. He’s singularly responsible for a great deal of the noir films that are so memorable.

In my opinion, Siodmak’s film is a meatier piece of work that rendered a more brutal impression than the 1964 version directed by Don Siegel.

Perhaps due to its more neo-gangster noir style, it gave it a liminal and evocative intensity. Siodmak’s Killers has a more violently surreal tone, than the stylishly slick and richly colorful pulpy Siegel version. The effective black-and-white environment of the 1946 Killers once again sets the stage for the players to live in a world that is condemned by shadow. While I love Siegel’s version, it does seem brighter and the world more aired out than usual frames of noir desolation.

Although I’m a huge fan of Angie Dickenson and she was incredibly lush and provocative in the role of Sheila, Ava Gardner’s Kitty Collins was more subtly carnal as the temptress who becomes Swede’s downfall. Siodmak’s version gives us the noir police investigation, there is pervasive Machiavellian cruelty, and the characters have more stratum to their personas. John Cassavetes is more icy while Burt Lancaster’s Swede is a very sympathetic yet imperfect man, that fatalistic heroism.

Burt Lancaster plays Ole “Swede” Andersen ex-boxer and con, Ava Gardner is Kitty Collins, Edmond O’Brien is  Jim Reardon insurance investigator, Albert Dekker is Big Jim Colfax (Dr. Cyclops) criminal mastermind and Virginia Christine is Lily Harmon Lubinsky (she cameos in the ’64 version as the blind secretary).

Sam Levene is Lt. Sam Lubinsky Swede’s old childhood friend Charles McGraw( The Narrow Margin) is Al the killer and William Conrad (Cannon tv series)is Max the other killer. The Killers also casts Jeff Corey as “Blinky” Franklin (The Outer Limits O.B.I.T.episode) one of Big Jim’s criminal lackeys with a “monkey on his back” implying that he has a drug addiction. And Vince Barnett as Swede’s devoted and world-weary petty thief Charleston.

The film opens with Miklos Rozsa’s ominous brassy jazz score that later becomes the killer’s motif, as the two men drive into a small American town, anywhere USA,  we see them from behind in the darkest black silhouette in the car. Then a long view of them walking onto the scene still surrounded in shadow, we know they are trouble. The opening scene of The Killers is perhaps one of the most powerfully ferocious I’ve seen from a 1940s film.

The two men enter Henry’s Diner William Conrad’s Max and McGraw’s Al, are The Killers, who begin to psychologically torture George who works the counter, and Nick Adams the boy at the end of the counter. They exude an obnoxious egotism. A cruel anti-social spirit as they barrage the men in the diner with verbal assaults, having a somewhat perverse quality that begins with the menu.

George: What’ll it be, gentlemen?
Max: I don’t know. Whatta you want to eat, Al?
Al: I don’t know what I want to eat.
Max: I’ll have the roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes.
George: That’s not ready yet.
Max: Then what’s it on the card for?
George: Well, that’s on the dinner. You can have that at six o’clock. That clock is ten minutes fast. The dinner isn’t ready yet.
Max: Never mind the clock. What have you got to eat?
George: Well, I can give you any kind of sandwiches: bacon and eggs, liver and bacon, ham and eggs, steak…
Al: I’ll have the chicken croquettes with the cream sauce and the green peas and the mashed potatoes.
Max: Everything we want is on the dinner.

They continue to harass George, asking for alcohol, “Al: You got anything to drink? George tells them “I can give you beer, soda, or ginger ale. Al: I said you got anything to drink?” George submits a quiet “no.” Max says “This is a hot town, whatta you call it?“George“Brentwood” Al turns to Max “You ever hear of Brentwood?” Max shakes his head no and then Al asks George “What do you do for nights?”Max takes in a deep breath and groans out “They eat for dinner, they all come here and eat The Big Dinner” George looks downward and murmurs  “That’s right” and Al says

“You’re a pretty bright boy aren’t you”, meanwhile George is a grown middle-aged man. The term “boy” is designed  to demean him. George mutters “sure” and Al snaps back “Well you’re not!”

Al now shouts to the young man at the end of the counter “Hey you what’s your name?” he looks earnestly at Al and says “Adams, Nick Adams.” Al says, “Another bright boy.” There is an emerging sadism at work here, almost subconsciously homophobic/homoerotic, in the way they are using the terminology of “boy” working to subvert these bystanders’ manhood. Max says, “Town’s full of bright boys”

The cook comes out from the kitchen bringing the plates of ” one ham and one bacon” George starts to serve the men the food and asks “Which one is yours?“Al says “Don’t you remember bright boy?” the continued use of this phrase truly begins to flay the layers of our nerve endings. George starts laughing and Max says “What are you laughing at?” “nothing” “You see something funny?” “no” “Then don’t laugh” “Alright” Again Max says, ” He thinks it’s alright,” Al says “Oh, he’s a thinker” Here we see the anti-social backlash to an intellectual society that would perceive them as outcasts. The term “thinker” is used pejoratively as is “boy.” This is where the film begins to break the molds of the Hollywood window dressing of a civilized society when two intruders trespass on an ordinarily quiet community and shatter its sense of security. It is the death of humanism in film language.

Max and Al proceed to tie up Nick Adams and the cook in the kitchen. They further taunt George who asks “What’s this all about?” Max “I’ll tell ya what’s gonna happen, we’re gonna kill a Swede, you know big Swede, works over at the filling station” he lights a cigarette. George says, “You mean Pete Lund?” As Max takes the cigarette out of his mouth the smoke enervates in George’s face, “If that’s what he calls himself’, comes in every night at 6 o’clock don’t he?” Georges asks “What are you gonna kill him for? what did Pete Lund ever do to you?” Max replies,” he never had a chance to do anything to us he never even seen us.” The conversation is so matter-of-fact that it’s almost chillingly absurd. Again George asks, “What are you gonna kill him for?” and Max smirks “We’re killing him for a friend.” Al pokes his head in from the sliding panel window to the kitchen “Shut up you talk too much” but Max says ” I gotta keep bright boy amused don’t I?”

Once the killers believe what George tells them, that Swede isn’t coming into the diner for his supper because it’s passed 6 pm, they go to Swede’s boarding house. George unties the two men in the kitchen who have been bound up with dish rags, and Nick jumps over fences trying to head off the killers and warn Swede that they’re coming for him. Nick bursts into Swede’s room.

At first, we only see the obscured figure of a man lying on his bed, only from the neck down to his feet. We do not yet see the figure clearly. Swede is framed in shadow. Nick tells him about the men at Henry’s Diner, they were going to shoot him when he came in for supper.”George thought I oughta come over and tell ya” Out of breath Nick is panting, and we still only hear Lancaster’s substantial voice in a whispering tone “There’s nothing I can do about it,” Nick says “Don’t you even wanna know what they’re like?” “I don’t wanna know what they’re like, thanks for coming” Don’t you wanna go and see the police?” “No that wouldn’t do any good,” Swede tells Nick he’s sick of running and “I did something wrong (pause) once, thanks for coming” he ends very solemnly. Nick leaves. The last words we hear Swede utter are “Charleston was right, Charleston was right.”

Now we see Swede’s face just staring and waiting. Sitting up, as the killers come bursting into the room, blasts of light from the gun spray, we are left looking at Swede’s hand lying limp against the side of the bed, surrounded in shadow once again, he is dead.

The Killers relies a lot on the noir mechanism of the flashback. At times there are flashbacks within flashbacks.

We’re now at the police station with Nick and Sam the cook giving their statements. We see a silk scarf with harps among his effects. Swede left a death benefit life insurance policy for $2,500 that goes to a woman in Atlantic City. The case is now being investigated by an insurance detective for the Atlantic Casualty and Insurance Company. Edmond O’Brien plays Reardon, who refuses to drop the case even after his boss insists that it’s not financially worth the company’s time. But Reardon wants to know what happened to this man who had “8 slugs in him, nearly tore him in half.”

Reardon goes to the hotel in Atlantic City and talks to the old chambermaid, Queenie, who is the beneficiary of Swede’s death benefit. She tells Reardon that at least he could be buried in consecrated ground and Reardon asked why she thought it was a suicide.

Queenie tells him in flashback how she was working that night and came into Swede’s room to clean, and he was visibly disturbed, smashing and stomping the furniture crying out “She’s gone, she’s gone!” Queenie asks “Who’s gone, mister?” He picks up a chair and breaks the window and tries to jump out, but Queenie grabs him and tells him” For the sake of God, you’ll burn in hell for all time” and stops him from killing himself. The death benefit was his way of saying thanks for her kindness.

Reardon embarks on a journey to get the bell to ring in his head, about why the green silk handkerchief with the golden harps is on the tip of his mind. His boss says that claims are piling up and he’s off running around with a 2 for a nickel shooting, but Reardon wants to know why 2 professionals put the blast on a filling station attendant, a nobody. He also notices his hands, scarring which indicates that Swede had been a boxer at one time.

He meets up with Swede’s old boyhood friend from the 12th ward in Philly. Lt Sam Lubinsky who is now married to Swede’s one-time girlfriend Lily played by the young and ever-present character actress Virginia Christine who was also in The Killer Is Loose. In The Killers, she is absolutely beautiful as the “nice girl” playing opposite Ava Garner’s femme fatale role as Kitty. Sam joined the police force and Ole Swede started fighting professionally. They always kept in touch, but “when you’re a copper, you’re a copper” and eventually after taking a savage beating in the ring, Swede breaks his knuckles beyond repair and has to stop boxing. Sam winds up putting ” the pinch” on his friend Ole later on.

In a flashback, we see Lily and Swede at a party thrown at a swanky hotel by Jake, one of Big Jim Colfax’s men. Lily doesn’t like Jake, he’s got mean eyes. Swede sees Kitty for the first time sitting at a piano. Swede is mesmerized by Kitty. The women share competitive glances. Kitty says, “Jake tells me you’re a fighter,” he says “Do you like the fights?” Kitty says “I hate brutality Mr. Anderson the idea of 2 men beating each other to a pulp makes me ill.” Lily tells Kitty that she’s seen all of Swede’s fights, but Kitty comes back with “Oh really, I couldn’t bare to see the man I care about hurt” At that point Lily is finished once Swede remarks how beautiful Kitty is Lily leaves the party.

Lt. Lubinsky tells Reardon that “It seems like I was always in there when he was losing, ever see him fight? He took a lot of punishment.”

Ole’s manager leaves Swede after he isn’t any good as a money-making fighter anymore since the bones in his hand are crushed. It’s why he didn’t use his right hand to fight the night he lost the bout to Tiger Lewis. That night his manager says “No use hanging around here, never did like wakes”

In a flashback within a flashback, Ole starts dating Kitty Collins, Big Jim’s girl. Evidently, she shoplifts a diamond pin, Reardon recognizes it as she’s wearing it at a table sitting with a group of thugs who work for Big Jim Colfax. She drops it into a plate of soup, but Reardon stops the waiter, fishes it out, and rinses it off in a cup of coffee then tries to take Kitty in, but then “Ole” Swede walks in and winds up taking the rap for her spending 3 years in jail for Kitty’s robbery then he gets released for good behavior.

Kitty’s given him this green silk scarf with golden harps of hers, which he strokes in jail. Swede has a cellmate and friend in a man named Charleston, a petty larceny crook and old-time hoodlum who bonds with Swede while in prison. Charleston brings up Jupiter one night. He liked to look at the stars after lights out, he knew their names because he got a book from the prison library.

“You can’t learn any better about stars than by staring” Swede and Charleston stares out the window at the stars, while Swede is stroking the silk scarf Kitty gave him. He asks Charleston if he knows what “harp” means. He says “Yeah, angels play ’em” “They mean Irish, Kitty gave me this scarf.” But Kitty hasn’t come to see Swede once while he’s in prison for the robbery she pulled. Swede asks Charleston to look up Kitty when he gets out because he’s worried about her. But Charleston knows she’s not sick or in trouble. Swede is too much in love to see it.

Later on, Charleston relates to Reardon at a pool hall where he was told to bring Swede on the day after his release from jail because Big Jim is planning a “big set-up.” Also in the room is a thug named Dumb Dumb and Blinky Franklin. Charleston opts out, he only wants easy pickings at his age he’s spent half his life in stir, but Swede seeing Kitty in the room, still Big Jim’s girl, says he’s in. Kitty becomes Swede’s mistress again. We see the glances between the two, and Swede knocks Jim down when he tries to hit Kitty. The two men swear that after the heist, they will even up the score with each other.

The last thing Charleston says to Swede before he leaves the room is “Want a word of advice? stop listening to golden harps, they’ll land you in a lot of trouble.” We now know what Swede meant by his last words. Charleston leaves the room. Closing the door, hoping Swede will follow, but ” he never showed up, and I never seen the Swede again” We see the character Charleston in flashback standing outside the door. Framed by the shot making the door a principal moment in the film. Charleston stared at the door waiting, looking trapped and small. The door symbolizes the unknown and what lies behind or ahead.

Back at Atlantic Casualty and Insurance Co. Reardon tells his boss the “bell rang” he remembered hearing about it in relationship to a big caper that was pulled on July 20th, 1940 at The Prentiss Hat Company. Armed gunmen got away with a quarter of a million of Atlantic’s money. One of the robbers was seen wearing a green scarf with golden harps wrapped around his face like a bandit. Swede was one of the people involved in the heist. Now hiding out under an assumed name, and working at a filling station supposedly hiding all the loot from the Hat Company heist, taken away from the other members of the gang. Who sent the killers to assassinate Swede and did Kitty Collins sign his death warrant?

The Killers, details double crosses of all double-crosses, as ‘the killers’ go to the sleepy town of Brentwood to even a score with Swede, who didn’t take Charleston’s advice and stops listening to golden harps. In noir films, there is often a fetishistic quality to an item or action. I think the scarf is a sexual symbol of Kitty for Swede. It bares her scent, it was a token of her sexuality being made of “real silk” as if her skin. the idea of touching something golden. The scarf acts as a surrogate for Kitty’s body, as he strokes it in place of the real thing.

Panic In The Streets 1950: Elia Kazan’s Socio-Noir A Plague of Immigrants

Panic In The Streets 1950 – Directed by Elia Kazan who sees the world of film through a Socio-Noir lens.

Noir has it’s socio-political roots in post war Europe, and was strongly influenced by German Expressionism. In America the post-war atmosphere engendered a realism which manifested in the noir film as well as the crime/police drama with a documentary sensibility.

Kazan himself an immigrant is one of the great American directors well known for such seminal films as A Streetcar Named Desire, A Face in The Crowd, On The Waterfront and Boomerang.


Starring Richard Widmark as Lt. Cmdr Clinton Reed M.D. naval officer and family man, Paul Douglas (Douglas gave his best performance in Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night,) as Captain Tom Warren. Barbara Bel Geddes as Clint’s wife Nancy (also in a great episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents Lamb to The Slaughter) and the always great Jack Palance as the nefarious Blackie. Also, co-stars the wonderful Zero Mostel as Raymond Fitch, Blackie’s slovenly flunkie.

Elia Kazan’s sociological perspective reveals to us the human condition in a naturalistic style. His films elucidate the way in which the collective soul reacts to an existing situation. Kazan was part of the movement of the New Realism, which bared witness to the state of paralysis of a post-World War II identity and shed light on the stunted psychological elements of that current time.

In Panic In the Streets Kazan’s opening shot, we are plunged into a world of immigrants and trains. The trains cut through the grimy metallic city nightscapes. Here, New Orleans is as mysterious as its inhabitants. New Orleans, the seaport shipping city, is filled with lowlifes and a sense of desolation. Imports/exports, and the working class immigrants who suffer and toil for their daily bread and muddle their way through life in the slums, row houses, on the streets, and in local bars. They are an anonymous, shabby yet tenacious community of otherness existing but not quite persevering. The aggregate disdain for authority and the mistrust of the surrounding influences form the power structures that control and look upon them as subservient class.

There is a commanding scene in a diner, Clint stops in for a coffee and the people sitting at the counter look isolated and sullen. Dirty and sickly and downtrodden. They all have cracked faces. There is a photographic quality as if capturing the weathered souls of the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath.

What I call socio-noir is present in particular for Panic In the Streets. The film works as much as social commentary as it does dark crime drama, with protagonists and anti-heroes. Panic in The Streets is in keeping with the police documentary moral where the hero, Lt Clint Reed M.D. sets out on a righteous path as savior. He is incorruptible and courageous.

Along with the trains cutting through the grungy metallic night in the city and its din, the film creates the unwashed environment and the oily screechy noises of movement. struggling people trying to survive. Desperate criminal elements abound amidst the sounds of blaring ship horns coming into dock. The city is an alive filth stained entity.

There is evidence of Kazan’s attitude crystallized when dialogue towards the end refers to community and what that truly means. Kazan shows us cityscapes and panoramic views to evoke how people can be swallowed up by the enormity of urbanization. An urbanized society is split by class and race.

The people in these city settings do their unnamed tediums, and rituals, sitting solemnly at bars, sitting outside the building on steps and street corners. These are people outside of society as the cinematography would frame them, Living together, collections of tired faces, ethnicities, and class distinctions. The working class, the bureaucrats, the law enforcers, and the riffraff feed off the weaker of the herd.

There is an extreme juxtaposition of the clean lily white suburbia that Richard Widmark’s character Lt Reed, lives in, to the filthy environmental mechanisms of the inner city dweller. Reed comes home to a freshly scrubbed house, a refined and virtuous wife in a pristine neighborhood, the idealism of post-World War II America. With all the amenities that are afforded the white-collar social class.

Even Paul Douglas’ hardened cop Capt. Warren, at first feels standoffish about the naval officer Dr Reed invading his territory. There is an obvious hierarchy amongst who serves the community. Questions of rank of the military, and education background amongst the civil servants and professionals.

Captain Warren’s dynamic of feeling threatened by the authority of a possible Naval Academy Elite and the hard-working class cop on the beat. The struggle of power between the two coming to terms with working with each other.

Panic In The Streets is less about the pneumonic plague and more about the way people are reacting to each other around the situation. It is the catalyst for them to expose their inner demons and fears. Mistrust and paranoia. The need for self-preservation. Blackie’s character is a very paranoid personality, that symbolizes the mistrust of a society that would cheat him out of what he perceives to be rightfully his.

The story begins one night in the slums when the ruthless criminal and paranoid Blackie aided by his miscreant cohorts kills Poldi’s illegal immigrant cousin who Blackie believes cheated at cards because he won too much money. Once again the angular rock-jawed Jack Palance projects himself as an imposing Minotaur who holds sway over his subordinated companions. Within this community, there are hierarchical sub-structures set up in order for the vicious opportunistic Blackie to maintain survival and control.

What wasn’t known at the time of Poldi’s cousin’s murder was that he was already dying of the plague by the time his body was dumped like garbage.

The next morning on the docks a child shows the cops where the dead body is. Lt Dr Clint Reed of the Public Health Service confirms that the dead man had pneumonic plague. In order to prevent an epidemic of catastrophic proportions, Clint and Capt. Warren, must hunt down the killers, and inoculate anyone who came in contact with them all in the span of 48 hours. This they must struggle with under secrecy, holding the news agency at bay as not to panic the public, chase off the carriers of the plague and thus create chaos in the streets. They are also met with resistance and suspicion by the very community, a melting pot of ethnicity they are trying to help.

We see dock workers and ships populated by foreigners. We hear a comment made about the dead man being a foreigner after they bring the body on a gurney through the back hospital entrance. Kazan uses a semi-documentary style, constructing a neo-urban naturalistic environment. Framing the story on a mis en scene proscenium stage. We see real people going about their daily lives, along the fault lines of the surrounding class and ethnic differences in the community.

The two medical examiners are more concerned about where and what to eat for lunch, while there’s a dead man lying on the table. For them it’s business as usual, they show no empathy.

The city has taken a life, and these two medical examiners are just doing a job, while the only thought is about food and getting their needs met as a priority. After discussing the sexy waitress that one has his sights on, one of the guys says that it might take longer than he expected. Another man comes in and asks “Is that the foreigner that they brought in?” Again, emphasis on otherizing this human being.

The examiner named Cleaver orders the less attentive man to get out. He realizes something doesn’t look right with the body. Then Clint Reed is called in to look at slides. Photographs are snapped. He’s asked who else has come in contact with the body. He wants everyone inoculated. The FBI doesn’t have any info on the man. But obviously, he was carrying something infectious. He also wants to know if it was the bullet or the infection that killed the foreigner.

Kazan himself a Turkish immigrant used a lot of social commentary on the American Dream, the people who live outside the context of that framework, and how foreigners were treated here in the U.S. when after World War II the fear of foreigners was rampant. In Panic in The Streets, they carry the plague. They are dirty and suspicious. They represent a dangerous element.

Clint is now sitting around a table of suits. He is relating a tale about a woman in 1924 who was carrying a disease that killed 26 people, who died suddenly and horribly from an outbreak. The disease was found to be pneumonic plague, a pulmonary form of the black death, of the middle ages.

One of the men sitting at the table is asking “Who is he” about Lt. Clint Reed. Reed asserts himself with authority in this room of skeptics. “One of the jobs of this department is to keep plagues out of this country. This kind of plague can be spread easily like the common cold. Through sneezing”

“The committee is asking why are you telling us this.” “Because this morning the police found a man who was infected with this disease.” “Our reports show the man died of 2 bullet wounds” “Regardless of what the police surgeon said, he would have died within 12 hours.”

Paul Douglas as Capt. Warren is at the table. He’s arguing that he did die from 2 bullet holes. The mayor and the other men around the table want them to check but Lt Clint Reed tells them that he had the body destroyed. Cremated so as not to spread the infection. The men seem outraged. There is a power struggle going on about who is in control of this situation. Panic is very much a film about control.

Everyone has been isolated and inoculated but there’s still one man “The man who killed him” whoever dumped him might be walking around with incipient plague at this moment. Capt. Warren exudes his disdain and is being stubborn, he doesn’t feel that there’s going to be a problem. But Lt. Reed insists “We have 48 hours. If the killer is incubating the plague then time will be running out. before it spreads amongst the city. You’ll have the makings of an epidemic.”

He burned all the dead man’s possessions because they were contaminated too, so they don’t have the identity of this man. The commissioner is saying that the police department can’t be held responsible for it. Captain Warren is highly skeptical and the commissioner is only concerned about his own accountability. They can’t find an unnamed man in 48 hours. The commissioner doesn’t believe Dr. Reed and acts like he’s making a big deal out of it. He tells the mayor, if you want to believe him then give the story to the press. Then Dr Reed says “I may be an alarmist. but I’ve seen this disease work and it can spread all over the entire country and the result would be worse than anything you could ever imagine.” Reed implores them that the key to the whole thing lies here, now and what they decide to do with the next 48 hours will be crucial. They ask Lt Reed “What can we do?”

Reed says “Find this man” and so the plot becomes focused on finding Blackie before he can spread certain catastrophic diseases. They all leave saying that they will give Reed their full cooperation, but Captain Warren remains behind with his hand on his chin while Lt Reed remains seated at the table.

Warren asks Reed “An Annapolis Man?” he answers No, Why? Warren says “No reason” but he’s got a quizzical look on his face. His question of whether Reed went to the elite military school shows the rift between the two Warren says “Now I’d start worrying what you’re going to do when we don’t turn up your boy” and mentions again, he doesn’t want him to think he’s one of the sailors in his navy. Again we start to see some kind of class battle, a distinction between the two men.

Outside in the hallway, a reporter starts snooping, but they brush him off. Shades of trouble come about from the right of the press to full disclosure and the responsibility these people have to the public’s safety. What is good for them? Again we see a paradigm of hierarchy at work.

At the police station Mostel’s character Fitch who is no stranger to the police is being questioned. He says “You can’t do this to me I’m a US citizen, I got rights.” Here again, is the assertion of the foreigner being alien and the paranoia of the American people that their rights will be taken away by the people in positions of power, the U.S. Government, and most especially the foreign element.

They shove the photo of the dead guy at Fitch. He says he hasn’t seen that guy“ he’s interrupted, “Where were you, fat boy? I think you’re a constitutional liar” Again, the patriotic ethnocentric zeitgeist is evoked during the exchange.

Capt. Warren is back at the morgue with Lt Reed~ they think he might have been Armenian, Czech, or mixed blood. Reed tells them to notify the immigration authorities immediately. They find traces of rust, fish, and shrimp on him which shows that he might have come in on a boat. Warren still annoyed at Reed, says “unless he walked through a fish market, bought 5 pounds of shrimp, and brushed against a freshly painted fire escape.” Warren is still so resistant to help Reed and doesn’t want his company or input at all. Reed insists that Warren get inoculated like everyone else.

Reed gets to assert his manliness by making Warren take his shot because he told the commissioner, and Warren just got through telling the other cop in the room why the boys had to take their shots when they were complaining and Warren barks “because the commissioner said so” Reed says ” roll it up” makes him roll up his sleeves. Again, the film asserts that control is an underlying issue at play. The dynamic between these two men going head to head is building and you can tell that Warren comes across like a strong-willed Bull Mastif but we sense that he is a decent man with principles of his own. “Half the two-bit criminals in town are in the precinct. Sneak thieves, wife beaters, and pickpockets. It isn’t going to work though”. Reed gets mad. “Why are you doing it this way then if it isn’t going to work?” Warren tells him that he’s rounding up all the usual suspects because it’s the only way he can make progress in finding the dead man’s identity. Warren then accuses Reed of making this case a big issue just to make a name for himself.

Reed asks Warren to come to have coffee across the street. Now in the diner. “Look Captain do you have a family, are you married?” “No, my wife died 8 years ago.” We start to get a closer look inside this man Warren. Kazan loves to build his characters, to unfold them like an artichoke heart, peeling away the layers, until we see the core. Reed is trying to appeal to Warren’s human side, the family man.

“The doctors said it was neuralgia but it was a brain tumor.” This reveals a bit more of the picture of Warren’s mistrust of doctors. Reed replies “You don’t think much of me as a doctor do you” Warren shoots back “You keep asking questions you finally get answers. NO.” So we see Warren not only has a dislike for military snobs, but a mistrust of doctors as well. Reed’s just a plain working-class slob, a cop who is trying to sort through the trash of human debris that he comes across. Warren again says “Civil Service, you get a pension, what do you make?” Reed says it runs about the same as police.

Capt. Warren frowns, he looks like he took a hit. “Look this man obviously came off a boat, he was obviously smuggled into the country. They probably don’t want to talk to the police, they’ve been coming to the docks and the streets but no one is talking.” “Maybe they want to talk to their mothers,” Warren says, then Reed “Offer them a reward, promise them immunity for information. Bring in another set of experts from Washington to help me out. Well, you could use it.” “You’ll never see the day,” says Warren glaring proudly. Reed gets frustrated. “I’m not gonna wait til the facts penetrate that thick skull of yours, there just isn’t that much time”

Now at a dingy laundromat, Fitch runs, up to a woman, his wife, who says “Blackie makes you tag around like a dog on a leash. He’s a big goon.” “He pays me,” Fitch asks if his bags are packed. She says “Why don’t you stand up to him sometime? Why don’t you tell him off.” He says “Angie will you shut up! Why don’t you go inside.” She says she doesn’t want to be alone with that big Ape Blackie,

Fitch calls out “he’s coming down the stairs.” He doesn’t want Angie hanging around. He doesn’t like a smart cracking dame. He yells at her to get away from the washing machines. Fitch keeps insisting to Blackie that they should leave the city, they’re picking everybody up. He wants to know why Poldi hasn’t shown. Fitch tells him “He’s got a date with a dame”. Concerned Blackie says “Where’d he get the doe? You know I got a hunch about him. They’re not gonna pick me up. You see those machines. That’s business. Legitimate even. They ain’t gonna pick up a legitimate businessman.” 

 

Blackie begins to rant. Argues, Fitch tells him that they’re picking up legitimates. “They’re picking everybody up?” “Why, why are they picking everybody up Fitch why? You don’t know. You got a high school education you’re a smart fella. This guy Kolchak (the dead man) is just a floater. He gets off a boat, gets very unsocial, even pulls a knife that he’s gonna use on Poldi. So they turn the town upside down for one crumb. They got every cop in town huffin and puffin, trying to find out who he is. Why are they doing it?”

Fitch says he doesn’t know. “Well, I’ll figure it out for you. I got a hunch he brung something in. I got a hunch he brung something in and they’re looking for it.” Blackie’s alienation is beginning to grow, he suspects he is being cheated out of something big, that rightfully should be his. This man is filled with Egomania. Classic anti-social behavior. He continues his rant.

“Only he ain’t got it, and you know why. Cause friend Poldi’s got it.” Fitch comes back at him “Poldi do you think he’d do something like that? He’s his cousin ain’t he? I told you I had a hunch about that guy.” Blackie snorts back. Fitch sweating says “look Poldi is a nice guy he wouldn’t do something like that.”

“Poldi is trying to put something over on me, I saved his life and that’s how he repays me.” Blackie is paranoid,  big dark, and brooding. He tells Fitch there’s one thing he doesn’t like, Fitch says “Sure Blackie” “It’s somebody trying to put something over on me. I never liked it”

Now there is a long shot of Blackie sitting at the counter, framed by the landscape, the atmosphere of alienation. He is in black a quiet powder keg and Fitch l in the backdrop going out the door looking so small and insignificant. The shot frames how the power is manifested by Palance’s character and Mostel is just a periphery character powerless and subordinate. Again we hear train whistles. Trains symbolize the ever-changing movement, the transients of urban city life. We now see Blackie all alone in the cluttered unattractive room.  Sitting alone. A man with thoughts on his mind, paranoid, greedy, and angry.

A seaplane lands. We see the Nile Queen. The captain of the Nile Queen denies that the man could have been on his ship. “I’m not calling you a liar, I’m calling you a fool. Most of your crew will be dead.” The captain won’t listen. Warren and Clint look over the people on board. They look away. There are almost 200 “rats” on the ship. He yells “See, you might be carrying plague.” Rats, a double entendre.

The captain yells for the men to get back to work. but the crew says they want to hear what Clint Reed has to say. “Never mind what he says.” But the crew resists and fights ensue. Chaos. “Break out the weapons. You’re inciting my men to mutiny. I’m the master here.” Again the prevailing hegemony of xenophobia in this film is highlighted. An Asian man says, one of the cooks is down with a fever. “Right now I want to put everyone in quarantine.” They inoculate them. “They got on in Iran. They just dumped him over the side.”

Another Asian cabin boy brings the men food. “They ever talk about anything else. They want a shish kabob.” He asks what it is. “Lamb on a stick, some of the Greek and Armenian restaurants serve it.” Warren hoped they had a lead to the eats place where the illegal immigrants who got smuggled on board would have gone to get food. Athena Cafe they’ve covered 11 joints and had no luck.

At the Athena Cafe, the diner owner’s wife says to her husband in the back kitchen, about Kolchak that Poldi brought him. She says he was contagious but tells Warren and Reed that we know nothing. “I got a headache”. Although the man wants to tell them who Kolchak was, he does not.

Warren and Reed get into the car. Blackie comes up along the street. A midget tells him they found Poldi. He gives the little man money and rubs his head like a child. Blackie goes inside, Fitch says “I found him.” Blackie says what’s that smell. Have you been trying that stuff on your head again Fitch? Blackie takes a piece of food and asks if it’s been touched yet. Ironically Blackie’s paranoia extends to his being a germaphobe as well. The food had been touched by a foreigner.

Now it’s nighttime and the cops find a very sick person in the emergency, a high fever case.  The cops call out to Captain and Reed. Another woman is sick fever case. The Athena owner’s wife. They run up the stairs of the tenement, it’s too late- she is dead. They have to quarantine the whole apartment. “Dr put down on death certificate tentative pneumonia. That’ll have to do for now. Clothes will have to be burned”. All of a sudden the Greek owner comes in and calls for Rita. asks for his wife. Reed looks disturbed. “Where is she.” “What you do. I can’t let you go in there.” “Your wife is dead” “She can’t be, you lie. She said she just don’t feel good.”

“Remember me Matharis. We showed you a picture. If you told us the truth the chance your wife alive.” “Poldi brought him. Kolchak. Gloria Hotel. Find Poldi” They run down the stairs. Tell the police to get a list of people in the food place. Nobody in or out and then they speed away to the Gloria Hotel, the reporter Neff hears them and goes after them. They ask to be taken to Poldi’s room.

Neff confronts them. Why wasn’t this story released to the press? “I figure you guys running around town, he probably had smallpox or cholera.” Reed reasons with him. Tells him it’s the plague. “We can’t let you have the story.” “With the chance of an epidemic. You guys are crazy. You’ve wasted a day. I represent the public. No two-bit civil servant.” Reed says “There’s a chance we can contain it.” Warren tells the cop to take Neff into custody and luckily finds out the editor doesn’t have the story yet, Reed asks the police officers on the scene if Neff can make trouble, and they said Warren would be lucky to get a job mopping floors.

By now, we have a sense of how foreigners are dirty, mistrustful, and alien to us, even when the one cop jokes about liking shish kabob. The foods are unfamiliar. The foreigners don’t trust the Americans, cops, doctors, and vice versa, This film shows the disconnect and separation between immigrants and the America they live in.

Reed goes home for a bit to get some rest and is met by his wife. “Don’t come any closer. Another contagion case. Another uniform to be decontaminated.” “You didn’t catch it yourself hon, you look a little beat.” “Yeah, I look so good normally.” He blows up at her. He spent the money for the cleaner’s bill on the reward money. “Whenever you’re tired you think I’m scolding.” “I spent it on something for the dept. You can put in a voucher No one has figured how to get money back from the U.S. gov. I have to go out again” Gruffs, “Just get me some coffee.” He looks at a piece of furniture being refinished in his yard and taps it. This is part of his real life before this filthy mess. This belongs to his clean life.

He didn’t call his wife last night. “It’s a plague case.” “Here in New Orleans? At least they have you, you’ve been through it.” “Now look hon, let’s not be little miss sunshine.” “We went through it in California.” “What’s eating you?” “I’m tired and fed up” “Stick around, just afraid if I lie down I’ll fall asleep. If I fall asleep I’m dead. Just don’t let me fall asleep. Today I took a perfectly nice guy, a cop not particularly bright, but what do I do, I push him around, make a lot of smart cracks about him. And I tell him off all day long. He winds up proving he’s 4 times the man I am. I do the same thing to you. Why do I do that?”

Capt. Warren meets Reed on the corner. Reed tells the mayor that Warren arrested the reporter Neff on his orders. Someone starts talking about how a woman died last night in their own community. Reed yells, “Community. what community, do you think you’re living in the middle ages.”

“If they alert the media the man carrying the plague will leave.” All these men in power are only concerned about their portion of the responsibility. “Anybody that leaves here can be in any city within 10 hours. I can leave here today and be in Africa tomorrow and whatever disease I had would go right with me” The mayor says “I know that”~“Well think about it when you’re talking about communities we’re all in the community, the same one.” Reed who is finally smiling asks Warren for a cigarette and says “Take the pack.” He finally sees Reed as a regular guy fighting the same bureaucracy he does. This comment about community, I suspect is Kazan injecting his point of view about the universal ideal of what community truly means into the film.

The chief couldn’t hold Neff and admits that he agrees with Reed but he couldn’t stop him. They’ll have 4 hours before it hits the papers. and Neff can color the story any way he wants. One of the other cops says he will be in the morning but he has to be honest he’s taking his wife and kids up to the grandmothers they’ll be safer there. Reed says  as he turns away, “Well here we go” “Don’t misunderstand he’ll be there, Oh sure he will, never the less here we go, kids are kids.” “Tell you the truth I’m scared to death I want to call Washington and get some help here.”

The next morning, church bells are ringing, and the old woman Poldi’s mother and the midget are walking. The midget brings Poldi’s mama and introduces her to Blackie. He speaks in his unctuous manner “Yes I heard he was sick but I couldn’t find him, mama.” “No, he’s dying. I’m gonna send for a doctor, neighbors already sent.” “No mama this is my doctor he’s the best.” Fitch is helping Poldi drink water. Blackie walks in. “I didn’t want to leave Poldi, I was gonna get ya, but he’s so sick.”

A nurse comes in. She yells at Blackie. This man has to go to the hospital. Blackie says he aint going. High fever. rapid pulse. The nurse tries to convince Blackies doctor that he needs to be in the hospital Fitch says I had an aunt who once went in but never came out. The doctor says “I know these people, they are very superstitious.” Again otherizing them as alien and strange in their ways.

They start to move Blackie down the stairs when Lt. Clint Reed confronts them saying he wants to talk to Poldi. Blackie violently flings Poldi and the mattress off the stairs as if they were mere garbage and runs away with Fitch as we hear the police sirens closing in.

The film is proliferated, as in all his films, Kazan’s proto-naturalistic style within the environments he shoots. Richard Widmark displays an inward discontent while Paul Douglas has a more restrained anger and hardboiled everyman quality. This heterogeneous chemistry between the two actors fuels the film and is as potent as their mission to hunt down the plague-carrying killers from every coastline dump and cheap rooming house.

Jack Palance, whose strong saturnine looks often put him in the role of villain is marvelous as the unmerciful Blackie under Kazan’s directing. The Verite of the grittier moments feel as if we are watching the actors up close on a stage. I’m reminded of Street Car and how much I felt like I was in the room with Blanche when Stanley taunts her ruthlessly.

The narrative is sharp and driving and the tautness of the plot at times sensational, is tense during the investigative process when Warren and Reed interview people from the film’s collection of characters some, brutish misogynists, gruff dock laborers, cliched grinning Chinese ship cooks, worn out street dames and superstitious immigrants who are still living outside of the conventions of the American experience.

At the end Reed returns to his home, back in the neat world that he inhabits with his untainted family, to live out the American dream once again.

The Killer Is Loose: Gutsy Crime Noir: Get Lila (1956)

Part of my Women in Peril series.

The Killer is Loose (1956) directed by Budd Boetticher revolves around a bank robbery in downtown L.A. While the police have set up a wiretapping operation it is revealed that the meek bank teller Leon Poole is the inside man. Leon had faked going after the robbers and getting struck by one of them in the process. This impresses his old army Sargent who was in the bank at the time. We learn that the nickname Foggy was given to Leon by his superior officer and the entire company apparently to poke fun at Leon” Foggy” Poole for being a simple-minded coward. Starring Joseph Cotten as Detective Sam Wagner, Rhonda Fleming as his wife Lila, and Wendell Corey as Leon “Foggy” Poole.

During the apprehension of Leon, Detective Sam Wagner accidentally kills Poole’s young wife who wasn’t supposed to be home, and at Leon’s trial, he swears to get back at Detective Wagner while staring at Detective Wagner’s wife who is present in the courtroom.

This is the inception of the woman in peril theme once Leon sets his gaze on Sam’s wife Lila the object of his hatred fixed on her from here on in.

In a very chilling manner, Leon asks why Sam’s wife Lila should still be alive. Leon’s lack of affect shows us a more deranged man than someone who might be prone to violent outbursts, and it is this subtlety of his underlying psychosis that is so frightening.

About three years later, Poole (until then a model prisoner) abruptly takes his chance to kill a guard and escape. It’s clear during the ensuing manhunt that Poole is obsessed in pursuit of a single end; but not quite the end everyone supposes.

After serving 3 years in prison, Leon gets assigned to an “honor” work farm, where because of his mild manner and seemingly model behavior is trusted to go on a ride with one of the prison guards to unload a truck. Leon seizes the opportunity to escape by brutally killing the driver and then proceeds on his odyssey of revenge. Like a shark that never stops moving, Leon is driven only by his desire to exact the same outcome for Detective Wagner, to target Lila as retribution for the killing of his beloved wife. Leon becomes a killing machine. Going from one opportunistic murder to the next until he can reach Sam’s wife. So begins the full-scale manhunt for the killer on the loose.

Budd Boetticher gives us a very bleak yet dramatic landscape of America’s man vs society, cop vs criminal, and good vs evil. Like some of the wild west pictures that Boetticher is known for, except here it’s played out in an urban city setting. Leon is a man set on revenge with no other driving desire and void of a consciousness that we can see.

The Killer is Loose is uncompromisingly realistic and often brutal in its portrayal of the ordinary machinations of a psychotic murderer, especially for its time. I’m not a huge Rhonda Fleming fan, but I do love Joseph Cotten in anything even his later cult and horror period like Baron Blood, Airport ’77, and Soylent Green.

The really memorable star of this gutsy Mise en scene police vs criminal noir is the killer himself Leon “Foggy” Poole played brilliantly by Wendell Corey who defined his sober character with simplicity, and an almost naivete childlike quality. This is what makes the film so compelling. Leon doesn’t understand why he shouldn’t kill the people who are getting in the way of his fixing Detective Sam Wagner for having inadvertently killed Leon’s wife during a raid on his apartment.

Wendell Corey’s Leon never comes across as unhinged in an overt way, it’s the way he holds back his emotions that makes his killer enigmatic and makes your skin crawl.

There are moments of exasperation in The Killer Is Loose for me. The police often miss the mark when trying to effectively do their job, and I find Rhonda Fleming’s character as Sam’s wife Lila annoying most of the time. I  was more sympathetic to Mary, the wife of Sam’s partner Michael Pate (Curse Of The Undead)Detective Chris Gillespie played by great character actress Virginia Christine.

Still, The Killer Is Loose is a compelling watch, because of its existential informality in some of the more brutal moments which are powerful. The tone of Killer overrode the failings of this film for me and so  I was able to separate myself from the few things that irked me like Lila’s stubborn harping and the police’s ineffectual fumblings.

There are some other great veteran actors in this film like the always jovial Alan Hale Jr and John Larch who plays Otto Flanders, Foggy’s superior officer in the army who gave him the nickname Foggy as an insult.