Noir Cinema: Human Desire, Pushover

Inspecting two low-key, razor-sharp thrillers from Columbia’s Film Noir Classics II.

Though by the 1950s the popular appeal of film noir cinema continued to warrant big-budget productions including Sunset Boulevard and Ace In The Hole, its broken heart and weary soul remained in smaller-budget, smaller-scale efforts that commonly made up for in story and performance what they lacked in production costs. As Paul Shrader pointed out in his seminal 1972 essay “Notes On Film Noir,” by the 1950s noir had grown self-aware, the films’ characters realizing the despair and “disintegration” of their lives and acting through their end-of-the-line existential contempt.

The second volume of Columbia Pictures’ Film Noir Classics series contains five films from this end stage of the genre’s development, and the best two films contained in its set almost seem to groan under the weight of that ennui. Nevertheless both sets have been shrewdly compiled – perhaps better than their competitor’s offerings – providing noir fans obscure works that nevertheless can satisfy the casual observer as well.

The best of Volume II‘s set, Human Desire, reunites director Fritz Lang with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in an adaptation of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bete Humaine. Lang had previously and famously directed Ford and Grahame in The Big Heat the previous year, but where that gangland revenge saga prided itself on muscular dramatics and an almost grotesquely heated tone, the focus this time rests on despair and self-recrimination. It’s a smaller, quieter effort, but that shouldn’t be confused in any event with a less worthwhile result. Quite the contrary: that anyone attempted such a uncompromising look at working class squalor during the artificial sunshine of the Eisenhower Era cuts to the heart of noir’s lasting contrarian value, and all three principal actors are at the top of their game.

Railroad engineer Jeff Warren (Ford) returns from years of service in the Korean War to the exact same job he left in the exact same dreary Pacific Northwest town. He’s even boarding with the same family, though their teenage daughter Ellen (Kathleen Case) has matured enough to pursue him with wide-eyed splendor. Ellen wants to give Warren the stable life of fishing trips and evenings at the movie theatre he says he wants, but in short order he’s distracted by Vicky Buckley (Grahame), the sultry wife of his boozy, irascible yard boss Carl (Broderick Crawford.)

When Carl blows his cool and gets sacked, he devises a scheme to use Vicky’s wiles on a local businessman in order to regain his position. But Vicky and the big shot have a sordid past, and Carl realizes too late he’s cuckolded by their affair. Enraged, he beats Vicky and plots the businessman’s murder on the return train from the city. Warren, wandering the train’s corridors, sees a shell shocked post-crime Vicky and, after some introductory kissing, lets himself get used for her alibi.

The two fall in love in short order, holding an illicit romance in some of the least romantic locales imaginable – the railroad break yard, a sleazy apartment in the city, Vicky and Carl’s drab cottage. Nevertheless, Warren gets hooked on Vicky’s charm full throttle. Vicky, an archetypal femme fatale is ever one was put on film, wants Warren to murder her husband so that they can be together, the local gossip be damned, the better to get from beneath Carl’s blackmailing heel.

Warren is tempted, for reasons beyond Vicky’s charms. He’s bitter about his wartime experience, not just the rigors of combat but also the division of wealth and status among the troops. Asked about girls overseas, he bitterly remarks that the officers got all the pretty ones before he arrived. His affection for Vicky reflects that class envy: he doesn’t kiss her so much as try to swallow her whole.

But double crosses and treachery abound, and deciding if Vicky has been completely forthcoming all along is part of the film’s snaky allure. Lang and cinematographer Burnett Guffey fully deploy the rich potential of the trains’ visuals, showing their quick swerves and sudden jerks as lucid metaphors for fate and random twists of circumstance. Moreover, the still locations of indifferent taverns, rustically furnished tract houses and cheap apartments seem ephemeral, ready to be packed up or discarded at a moment’s notice. Human desire is fleeting, the film suggests, and fraught with disaster at a moment’s lapse of judgment.

Similarly, director Richard Quine uses tight, enclosed spaces to structure his enthralling suspenser Pushover, elevating the routine setup promised by Roy Huggins’ script into something else altogether. It’s a sharp suspense film that rests disaster on the timing of an elevator or the turn of a hallway, and makes you feel each tick of the clock along the way. It manages all this thanks in no small part to the precision of Fred MacMurray’s performance as (shades of Double Indemnity a decade previous) a previously straight arrow getting pulled into crooked acts by an irresistible blond (Kim Novak, in her debut role.)

When the early morning bank heist by a ruthless thief (Paul Richards) results in the murder of a security guard, Los Angeles detective Paul Sherman (MacMurray) cozies up to the thief’s girlfriend Lona (Novak) to help set up a stake out of her apartment. Teamed with his cynical partner (Philip Carey) and a veteran (Allen Nourse) with both feet dangling off the wagon, Sheridan finds staying away from Lona harder to do when she’s under his constant inspection. The two slink around the corners of her fortress-like apartment building to see one another, avoiding Sheridan’s colleagues and planning to murder her boyfriend once he shows up with the $200,000 taken from the heist.

Sheridan’s plan to distract his teammates seems foolproof (has anything good ever come after the phrase “seems foolproof”?), but in short order one twist and circumstance happens after another to bring the lovers’ hopes crashing down. The alcoholic detective steps inside a corner bar for a quick nip, missing his cue in Sheridan’s plan; the nurse that lives next door (Dorothy Malone) spots Sheridan coming out of Lona’s apartment. The thief gets caught, but Sheridan impulsively shoots him dead, casting suspicious doubt on his motivations that results in compels him to kill one of his fellow detectives and face the ire of their commanding officer (E.G. Marshall).

It’s the biggest treat of the movie that so much happens so quickly, and with such precision staging that the events never for a moment seem forced. Rather, Quine milks each character’s turn down a hallway or glance at the right moment to be fraught with peril, as indeed it is. In many ways all the characters, in true noir fashion, are trapped in a maze of manipulation and deceit in which each decision plays directly into the last. Cinematographer Lester White makes full use of the noir tropes of wet, glistening city streets but also takes advantage of the small sets and empty spaces of an L.A. that’s still expanding with post-war prosperity. Perhaps most chillingly, the empty darkness of a vacant lot seems to hover constantly on the horizon of every external shot, as if an abyss waiting just in the near distance. Overall, the production looks small-scale and modestly budgeted, but doesn’t look cheap, either.

MacMurray is effortlessly charismatic and repulsive at the same time, coolly planning betrayal with a minimum of moral conflict. Sheridan is something of a stock role, but he and Novak both invest their characters with a strange quality, not entirely unlike sympathy, that brings them the viewer’s support. Malone is perky and all-American, and perhaps reveals the film’s odd comment on gender roles: the women live in comfortable apartments, while the men sit in cold, wet exteriors or hunker in abandoned living rooms, watching them and imagining the happiness and comfort they promise. Carey, Marshall and Nourse are competent in largely stock roles, but their very anonymity works to give them a calm, unassuming universality that for genre fans will work firmly in its favor.

The second half of this compilation’s reviews includes coverage of The Brothers Rico, Nightfall, and City of Fear.

- Michael Kabel

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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