Noir Cinema: Somewhere In The Night

 Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film noir dreamscape is a frustrating, haunting mystery of identity.

Released near the beginning of film noir’s postwar golden age, 1946′s Somewhere In The Night includes a lot of the elements that would eventually help to identify, if not exactly define, noir as a genre: the embittered and spiritually lost war veteran protagonist, his torch singer with a heart of gold love interest, the shifty criminals with murky motives and odd personalities, the sexpot femme fatale with a heart of money. Adding to the noir atmosphere, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (A Letter To Three Wives) meticulously directs the film with an eye for the intimate, giving each scene a sense of cloistered self-containment that helps describe the protagonist’s senses of isolation. While not exactly essential noir viewing as a result of some serious story flaws, it’s still a mesmerizing viewing experience and a potent example of the genre’s potential for psychological exploration.

The film begins as Army soldier George Taylor (John Hodiak) lies in a battlefront medical tent, reeling from a concussion and with his face covered in bandages. With no memory of his life previous to waking up, in time he finds the only clues to his identity are his army discharge papers and an unsigned note written from someone who hates him. Taylor follows the note to Los Angeles, searching for his previous life – effectively searching for himself. An early break comes in the form of a checked suitcase found at a railway station. The case contains a gun and a note from a “friend” named Larry Cravat, directing Taylor to a bank account containing five thousand dollars.

Taylor goes to the bank but is met with suspicion by its employees. After another dead-end in a men’s steam room, he finds himself pursued through a swanky basement nightclub and cornered in the dressing room of singer Christy Smith (Nancy Guild). Later, following a kidnapping and beating by thugs employed by the mysterious thief and occultist Anzelmo (Fritz Kortner), a creaky plot contrivance leaves him dazed and injured at Smith’s door. She nurses him back to health, falling in love with him in the process.

Together the two pursue fringe-like clues to Taylor’s identity and the whereabouts of the vanished Cravat, despite the machinations of Anzelmo and a tawdry con woman (Margo Woode) who may or may not have known Taylor in his previous life. Eager to help the vulnerable Taylor, Smith enlists the help of her boss and potential suitor (Richard Conte), who in turn brings in a homicide lieutenant (Lloyd Nolan) who’s a lot smarter than he lets on. The lieutenant tells Taylor that his “friend” Cravat was in possession of stolen Nazi funds when he disappeared three years previous – the same time Taylor joined the service. Taylor and the lieutenant both begin to suspect him of Cravat’s murder, escalating the desperation in uncovering Taylor’s true identity. (The solution ultimately bears a strong resemblance to a similar revelation in Alan Parker’s 1984 horror noir Angel Heart.)

Mankiewicz shrewdly bends the noir aesthetic towards establishing a vague and mysterious air around even the simplest locations, giving the film a dreamlike quality that eerily conveys Taylor’s growing paranoia and self-loathing. But the complicated and rambling plot is freighted with diversions and vignettes that, while dramatically effective, don’t always serve to move the story forward. One scene in particular, in which Taylor confronts the daughter of a potential witness to Cravat’s crimes, is achingly acted and beautifully shot but nevertheless slows the movie’s momentum to a crawl. And the film is dialogue-heavy to a fault, with characters reeling off whole paragraphs even in the most mundane conversations. Conversely, the script has an annoying habit of never having characters answer a direct question with candor, lengthening the time needed to bring facts to light while working too hard to sustain suspense.

More troubling, at least regarding the script – adapted from Marvin Borowsky’s story by Mankiewicz and several others, including legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg and equally legendary British author/playwright W. Somerset Maugham – are the voids that leave vital information unanswered. Because the film is chiefly Taylor’s journey, the story most often takes pains to establish each step along his way. Yet how he came into possession of the search-igniting claim ticket is left unexplained, while the rapid growth of Smith’s affections is left underdeveloped and somewhat superfluous as a result. Such details feel important in retrospect, and unfortunately a second viewing doesn’t fill in their sizeable blanks.

Despite those failings the cast is hardworking, committed, and effective. Hodiak, sweating bullets throughout, conveys his character’s mounting panic while still retaining a sense of determination and composure – an ideal example of the relentlessness common to noir protagonists. Making her debut appearance with wardrobe and makeup apparently crafted to make her resemble Lauren Bacall as much as possible, Guild is sweet and convincing despite some corny dialogue of the “Can’t you see I’m nuts for the guy?” variety. (She and Kortner reteamed the following year in another noir, The Brasher Doubloon, an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The High Window.)

Richard Conte, still several years from headlining Jules Dassin’s masterful Thieves’ Highway, is underused as a foil and friend to Taylor’s respective romance and quest, appearing in only a few scenes. Finally, Woode’s radar blip of a career is puzzling given her sweet/predatory smile and crackling screen sexuality. Her character’s affected sophistication, communicated chiefly through sprinkling French expressions into her come-hither game with Taylor, gives the film both edge and a strange sense of resonant sadness. Nobody is who they seem to be somewhere in the night, but nobody is who they want to be, either.

- Michael Kabel

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Night Flights, June 2010 Edition

Films we watched instead of getting the sleep we need.   

Remember this one?

 Why do older movies – films from previous decades – seem to have a fascination that new releases cannot match? They aren’t wine, growing better and more refined as their ingredients merge and shift. They aren’t like people, either, learning from their mistakes or changing to fit the world around them. A film is exactly the way it was when it was new. But older films take on a life of their own as they recede into history, becoming something more than an object of nostalgia.   

We think staying up all night watching old movies is one of life’s great unsung pleasures. It’s an intimate, concentrated experience that sometimes allows a greater understanding of the film viewed, more even than seeing something in a theatre or among the company of friends. Over the last month of so we watched the following seven films, mostly older but a couple of more recent vintage. We were more impressed with some than others, but they were all worth staying up too late – and the consequences that that guarantees the next day – to enjoy. 

Brute Force (1947) - Noble criminal Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) schemes to break out of a fortress-like prison, both to comfort his dying wife (Ann Blyth) and to escape the machinations of a sadistic guard captain (Hume Cronyn.) Enlisting the aid of a veteran con (Charles Bickford) and his bookish sidekick (Sam Levine), the two devise a risky plan to capture the bridge leading from the prison gates to freedom.   

Though not as celebrated as his subsequent noirs Night and The City or The Naked City, Jules Dassin’s wrenching suspenser featured shocking depictions of violence intermixed with the director’s willfully – and sometimes self-consciously – artistic style. Though Richard Brooks’ (The Blackboard Jungle) script occasionally lapses into stock Hollywood melodrama, particularly in the cutaway vignettes about the convicts’ loves outside the prison walls, the climactic riot scene (based on real-life events at Alcatraz) is about as taut and riveting a set piece as can be imagined.   

   

The Last Voyage (1960) - We’d first heard of this film over fifteen years ago but didn’t see it until a recent TCM showing finally gave us the chance. It didn’t disappoint. When the boilers of the overworked ocean liner SS Claridon explode, the crew and its clay-footed captain (George Sanders) and resentful chief engineer (Edmond O’Brien) scramble to contain the damage and prevent a panic among the passengers. Meanwhile an American businessman (Robert Stack) struggles to free his wife (Dorothy Malone) from the steel wreckage pinning her from the neck down.   

Writer-director Andrew L. Stone (The Secret of My Success) understands how to build suspense by letting events speak from themselves: you’ll never feel so enthralled by men trying to fortify a bulkhead or loosen a pipe fitting, or feel terrified by the sound of rushing water. Stack and Sanders give solid if unspectacular performances, while the true pleasure of the film is seeing the under-appreciated Woody Strode stretching out in a heroic, substantial role as one of the ship’s hands. A clear and unmistakable influence on every ocean liner-disaster film to follow, including most notably The Poseidon Adventure and its sequels and remakes. By the way, the film is 91 minutes long.   

   

Slow Burn (2005) – District attorney and mayoral candidate Ford Cole (Ray Liotta) finds his lover/assistant (Jolene Blalock) may have been conspiring with a powerful, unseen drug lord to undermine his campaign.  Adding to the confusion are a suspect (LL Cool J) who may be either a thug  or a federal agent and rumors of a shadowy disaster scheduled for the coming morning. Cole has the rest of the night to get to the truth of his assistant’s rape and self-defense murder story and, in turn, prevent the disaster.   

Revelations about the assistant’s duplicity play out through a series of flashbacks that, under screenwriter Wayne Beach’s (The Art of War) journeyman direction, don’t come together as tightly as they could to elevate the film past its genre thresholds. Still, the script raises intriguing ideas about racial identity and the role of race in big city politics and law enforcement, ideas for which it shrewdly doesn’t offer explanations. As usual, Blalock brings more to the part than it probably deserves playing the chameleon-like, duplicitous femme fatale, and Liotta is solid (if sometimes unexciting) as always.   

   

Rancho Deluxe (1975) – A good example of a film whose time has passed, this too laid-back for its own good comedy-Western features Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston as dim-witted, affable Montana cattle rustlers and Slim Pickens as the detective hired to catch them. Along the way the rustlers steal a prize bull, romance two local cowgirls, and deal with their own family issues while the detective and his wily assistant (Charlene Dallas) manipulate their employer (Clifton James) and his two dopey ranch hands (Harry Dean Stanton and Richard Bright.)   

Frank Perry’s (Mommie Dearest) direction of Thomas McGuane’s script is loose and carefree to the point that tone and suspense suffer, and he includes too many diversions and scenes that don’t amount to much. There’s gratuitious sex and nudity, and extended gag scenes and set pieces, and ultimately the slack pacing and tone don’t matter. Like many would-be cult films of the 70s and early 80s, it’s a film to watch while you’re (to quote Bill Murray in a much better film) stoned to the bejeezus belt. To that end it also features Jimmy Buffet, schlocking it up in a live performance:   

   

Night of the Hunter (1955) – The diametric opposite of Rancho Deluxe in probably every way, this genuinely disturbing psychological thriller casts Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell, a serial-killing preacher who roams the Depression-era South looking for women to rob and murder. Sent to jail for car theft, he learns of a hidden store of money from the farmer (Peter Graves) who stole and murdered for it, hiding it upon his farm before his capture. Upon his release Powell woos and marries the farmer’s lonely and sexually frustrated widow (Shelley Winters), then kills her when she realizes his intentions. Her son and daughter, who alone know the money’s location, flee down the Ohio River with Harry close on their trail.  

Director Charles Laughton’s blending of Southern Gothic story tropes with German Expressionism imagery is probably a stroke of genius, as one disturbingly unforgettable image flows into the next. Audacious and brazenly unconventional, it’s a film that has to be seen to be believed. Mitchum played a lot of roles in his legendary career, but there’s a case to be made that he’s at his best here.  

  

The Man From Elysian Fields (2001) – Struggling novelist Byron Tiller (Andy Garcia) is recruited by the debonair head of a male escort service (Mick Jagger) to provide company for the trophy wife (Olivia Williams) of a legendary but terminally ill author (James Coburn.) Tiller needs the money and agrees to the indecent proposal, even going so far as to sleep with the woman with the author’s bemused approval. The two writers become friends, and Tiller gets the once-in-a-lifetime chance to collaborate with his literary idol even while hiding his new “job” from his own wife (Julianna Margulies) and child.  

A film that under George Hickenlooper’s (Factory Girl) direction assumes its audience is intelligent enough to connect dots without a map and verbal instructions, for much of its runtime it’s a low key and elegant big of filmmaking that’s lovely to look at and intriguing to think about in the days that follow; only towards the end does it sweat a little to reach its conclusion. All the principal cast members are subdued and modulated in their parts, getting powerful support from smaller turns by the always-welcome Xander Berkeley, Anjelica Houston, and Richard Bradford. Jagger, playing a man giving all his well-learned politesse, is a scene-stealing delight.  

  

There are cooler movie posters, but not many.

 No Way Out (1950) - Some films you have to respect for their nerve, as they tackle subjects America wasn’t necessarily ready to face at the time of their release. So with this thriller from co-writer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Somewhere In The Night), about a black medical resident (Sidney Poitier, in his debut role) assigned to treat two wounded thugs. When one of them dies from a previously undiagnosed brain tumor, his racist brother (Richard Widmark) swears revenge, going so far as to organize a race riot from his prison cell. The resident’s boss (Stephen McNally) and the dead man’s widow (Linda Darnell) find themselves caught in the middle as the ensuing riot proves disastrous for the white aggressors, and the bleeding, delusional thug escapes in the ensuing commotion. 

Mankiewicz and Lesser Samuels’ script pulls no punches, offers no platitudes, and makes no consideration for audience taste or decorum; the film flaunts racial epithets and the simmering rage of both blacks and whites with equal candor. Poitier is good but not yet the actor he would become, while Widmark’s role is one he would play probably too often in his career, a variation once again of Kiss of Death‘s Tommy Udo. Darnell gets maybe the best part, playing a self-loathing but essentially good person torn between her sense of self and her sense of right and wrong. Twentieth Century Fox knew they were holding dynamite, if the trailer is any indication: 

We’ll be back next week with a review of a new release. Thank you for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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