movies

Yes. Yes. Yes.

This is what I had in mind when I decided to do a month of noir. An absolutely fantastic film, as well as a noir in the sense most of us think of when the idea comes to mind. I’ve been really glad to have my understanding of noir expanded over the month, but it was still  nice to get back to a film like this one. It’s a taut crime mystery, nearly every shot is a contrast between light and shadow, there are seedy characters throughout, we get a down the middle femme fatale, at the center of the mystery is a poor sap who gets pulled in over his head and loses everything, and the action is driven by an investigator who is sorting through the myriad clues to try and piece together what really happened as he follows the money.

The opening moments of the film, up until probably around the 20 minute mark, are based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway (one of his Nick Adams stories). The introduction alone is worth the price of admission. It’s amazing, electric, tense, and perfectly shot, as two hitmen blow into town on a contract, a man who turns out not to give much resistance to his coming demise. Then, the rest of the film is original, and no longer based on the short story, as an insurance investigator gets hooked by the case and keeps working the knot until the threads begin to loosen and the mystery unravels.

So good. Everyone in it is pitch-perfect. Especially Edmond O’Brien as the insurance investigator; Burt Lancaster as our ill-fated center of the action: The Swede; and Ava Gardner, who lights up the screen in her few short appearances as the film’s femme fatale. Seriously, though, everyone was really great.

I loved the writing, the acting, the cinematography, the direction, the pacing. This is a perfect noir film, instantly launched into my top three favorites so far this month.

Shadow of a Doubt is the story of a young girl named Charlie, who adores her Uncle Charlie, after whom she is named. He comes to visit the family, to the delight of everyone, but is he actually a homicidal maniac?!? Dun dun dunnnnnnn!

After a brilliant start, I’ve reached a bit of a lull in this noir version of ‘Another Day, Another Movie.’ Well, whenever something like that happens, the wisest course of action is to apply some Hitchcock to the problem. That’s what I did by watching Shadow of a Doubt. 

It’s not the best movie of the month, but it is certainly a return back to engaging stories I actually enjoy watching. There are some silly leaps of logic, a pretty unclimactic climax, and some plot holes which can’t be looked at too closely, else they’ll crumble the whole thing… oh yeah, and a really creepy dynamic between uncle and niece early in the film.

Still, with this film we get Hitchcock’s technical wonders (my favorite shot is one where a character learns something terrible, and what begins as a close-up keeps panning out until the character is seen alone in a big, dark, empty room, with the shot pulled all the way out and up to show how isolated and far away the character is in that moment), along with some genuine emotion for once. We actually get some characters who make at least a little sense. Also, leave it to Hitchcock to be the guy who subverts all of the noir pitfalls regarding women when he makes a noir. The main character is a woman, and instead of being a femme fatale (which I’ve actually learned this month is exaggerated as a primary part of noir, there have actually only been a few in the 13 movies so far), she’s the one unraveling the story’s mystery. Also, the film features a little girl who spends all of her time reading, because she has taken a ‘sacred oath’ to read two books a week, the little girl looks down on her father for the silly crime novels and stories he reads. The main character is strong, smart, and independent, the leader of her family. While she does date a guy during the film, there is never any moment where we feel he is necessary to her, or completes or… **spoiler** he doesn’t even swoops in to save her in her moment of need. **spoiler ended**

Not the typical female characters you find in early 1940’s film.

I assume some don’t consider this one of Hitchcock’s lesser works. I do, but I think it just goes to show that even his lesser works are worth my time. Up with Alfred!!

Gun Crazy (also known as Deadly is the Female) is a precursor to 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, as the story of a man and a woman who fall in love (largely over a shared love of marksmanship), and wind up running around the country robbing people at gunpoint. Inevitably, things get deadly.

Gun Crazy was another film that was hit or miss all the way through. There are some really impressive technical achievements in the film, along with several things I imagine were being done for the first time. Most notable is a really impressive single shot filmed from the back seat of a car. The shot includes our bandits driving up to a bank, the guy going inside, a cop approaching outside, the woman distracting the cop, the guy running back out of the bank, and the pair getting back in the car and starting their escape. Not too shabby.

However, while much of the filming is impressive, I wasn’t particularly engaged by the story. I never felt any chemistry or heat between the leads, nor was their ever any believable passion that led up to any of the film’s murders. The beats were all pretty flat. It was also frustrating to watch the half-assed and misguided attempts to make everything her fault, but without actually including any ambiguity or believable build of tension or feeling.

As a lover of film history, I’m supposed to love this movie. I didn’t. Maybe I need to find a bonafide film historian to start watching movies with me.

A novelist meets a woman, a friend of a friend, and falls for her right away. They get married quickly, and it turns out she’s a murderously jealous crazy person. The moral of the story, don’t marry someone you’ve known less than a week.

I didn’t particularly care for this one. It dragged most of the time, leaving me bored. Gene Tierney’s performance as the crazy woman was decent, but most of the time I found her character merely deplorable instead of chilling. The rest of the characters were poorly fleshed out, and pretty flat. I’m in the minority of people on this one, but I just couldn’t get myself interested in anything happening onscreen.

This is Glenn Ford’s second appearance of noir month, in a role that is the complete opposite of the character in The Big Heat. Ford plays cheating gambler Johnny Farrell. With a stroke of luck, he’s taken under the wing of a mysterious casino owner in Argentina, where things go pretty well. That is, until said casino owner takes a bride while on a trip abroad, and it turns out to be someone from Johnny’s past.

By reputation, Gilda is the story of the penultimate femme fatale. If you’re going to be destroyed at the schemings of a femme fatale, Rita Hayworth is a hell of a way to go. Actually, in reality, the idea that Gilda is a femme fatale is only true in part. She’s one small part femme fatale, and a much bigger part victim. It seemed to me that the male characters in the film were pretty hell-bent on self-destruction whether she was there or not. Sure, some deceit on her part got things turned in a bad direction, but if guys destroy themselves just because a woman is really sexy, that’s on them, not her. Most of the time she was just doing what she needed to do to protect herself some dangerous men, who certainly made her life pretty miserable, so she played games to keep some leverage for herself. During most of the second half of the film, it wasn’t even that she was dangerous, but more that the protagonist was an asshole most of the time.

Another solid noir film, and Rita Hayworth’s most celebrated and remembered performance.

Kiss Me Deadly is about a sleazy private detective, Mike Hammer, who picks up an ill-fated hitchhiker one night. The pair get run off the road, she turns up dead (but not from the car accident) and he gets busy trying to figure out who killed her. He does this both because they tried to kill him, too, and because he thinks there may be an angle for him in it.

I’m going to have to be honest and say it has been my least favorite film so far.

**Spoilers follow.** Mike Hammer was interesting enough as an anti-hero, and there are certainly some enjoyable bit characters, but as a whole I thought the whole thing was uninteresting. The plot is wildly implausible and senseless, the characters don’t make much sense, nothing much is explained to us, and the climax features bizarrely inaccurate nuclear science. The mystery never even gets solved, Hammer just pieces together the correct name of the villain and gets to his house in time to get shot in the gut and get his partner out of the house before the lady who opened the plutonium lights on fire. Yeah, you read that sentence correctly. WTF?

A huge cult favorite, and celebrated on a number of top film lists, it left me mostly underwhelmed.