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Archive for the ‘NOIRISH’ Category

They Live By Night

24 Aug

They Live By Night – Directed by Nicholas Ray. Young Romance Escape Drama. With the law barking at their heels, an escapee and a farm girl try for a better life. 95 minutes Black and White 1947.

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The first film of Nicholas Ray and a good one. George Diskant filmed it noirishly, but it is not noir, it is Hollywood teen romance. But with a good script and with a powerful supporting cast on all levels, particularly Howard Da Silva who sports a blind eye somehow — he’s really something to watch as the shaky violent holdup man. But you can see excellence and power in every actor: in the tragic Helen Craig the foolish wife, in Ian Wolfe who plays the bogus preacher, in Will Lee as the screwy jeweler, in eager-toothed Byron Foulger as the motel owner, in Will Wright who plays the drunken farmer, in Jay C. Flippen as the sweet but violent ex-con. Each of these performances is strong, detailed, and eccentric, and the film is carried by them. As it is not carried by the leads Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger. O’Donnell begins well – surly, withdrawn, wary, rude – but before long she dies of saccharine poisoning. Why do actresses take that route? They begin salty and turn merely sugary. The part would have been perfect for a young Barbara Stanwyck, a lower class girl and ruthless, or Cissy Spacek, a hick. But O’Donnell is clearly a nice middle class miss, and after she gets out of her dirty overalls, she’s a right proper Hollywood glazed-over thingamajig and all reality is lost. As to Farley Granger he is quite miscast as a JD on the run. Granger was 21 when he made the picture, and he’s just a nice-looking, spoiled, middle-class NYU geek, with no liaison in the character between scenes and no underpinnings either in his own character or in imagination about the character. He plays everything manfully, though, but he is just too privileged to be imperiled. However, a good strongly written story carries them all forward and holds our attention with its unexpected narrative and its individual scenic fulfillments. The film’s a gem that shines brightly and entertainingly, even though and perhaps because it is made of paste. Check it out.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Byron Foulger, CRIME DRAMA, DIRECTED BY NICHOLAS RAY, ESCAPE DRAMA, Farley Granger, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Howard Da SIlva, Ian Wolfe, Jay C. Flippen, MATING, NOIRISH, TEEN DRAMA, Will Wright

 

Border Incident

23 Aug

Border Incident – Directed by Anthony Mann. Government Agency Enforcement Drama. Immigration Authorities track down trafficking of Mexican Braceros illegally imported into the US as slaves. 94 minutes Black and White 1949.

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A strong supporting cast of Bad Guys keep putting things in their mouths and doing the cock-eyed and donning stark getups. The magisterial Howard Da Silva as the heavy is great with cigars, of course, but take a look at what the others are chewing. Ugh! Anyhow they’re all very Stanislavsky, very Russian, in their playing, and thank God for that. We have Arnold Moss, mad-hatted, with eyes like black sunflowers, wearing a checkerboard shirt as the actors engage in cards, chess, and other games of chance while the big game of chance unfolds. The great Alfonso Bedoya steals every scene he appears in simply by dint of his appearing in it. He is fascinating to watch and, as an actor, never wrong. Charles McGraw, a Mann staple, looks like he should be thrown in jail and hung.

This leaves us with the stiffs who play the Immigration Good Guys and stand up for the Mexicans who are being treated barbarously. Their on-camera representatives are George Murphy as the set-up and Ricardo Montalban, a big star in Mexico, playing the plant among the smuggled peons. But it is his bonding with the peon James Mitchell plays that holds the screen and validates the action, which consists of an insurrection of the peons. James Mitchell is very beautiful and very Mexican in his affect and his upper eyelids. He and Montalban are exactly the same age, 28; Mann has them play their scenes in great physical intimacy. They wrap themselves around one another without touching. It is interesting to see this happen in a picture of this era. In the end you believe James Mitchell would die to save Montalban’s life, for he nearly does so.

Montalban refers to it as a B movie, which at the time it was, but it’s an A movie now. He also ascribes it to John Sturges, and says nothing more except that it got fine reviews and received some awards but did not receive much attention. Though he could neither sing nor dance, he had made four musicals at MGM, playing exotics, and went back to make another. “I never did get the big dramatic role that is so important for an actor’s career. I never had gotten it in Hollywood.” He must have been dreaming. He had a strong accent and was Mexican. Anyhow, this is that role.

John Alton who shot it paints the film with light; sometimes it is dramatic; sometimes it is theatrical, but it is always gripping, as is Mann’s staging of an all-male cast, and his willingness to go to extremes.  He also ends it, as he ends He Walked By Night and Side Street, with men pursued and trapped in a narrow space, here a canyon, a death canal.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: Method, Alfonso Bedoya, Charles McGraw, CRIME DRAMA, George Murphy, GOVERNMENT AGENCY ENFORCEMENT DRAMAa, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Howard Da SIlva, NOIRISH, Ricardo Montalban

 

He Walked By Night

22 Aug

He Walked By Night – Directed by Albert Werker & Anthony Mann. Crime Drama. A sociopathic cop killer turns invisible until the L.A. Police doggedly track him down. 79 minutes Black and White 1948

* * * *

The picture begins rather flatly, even photographically, though shot by the mysterious John Alton. Then, except for a few scenes here and there, it takes off, and one detects the hand of Anthony Mann running the entertainment at us with his welcome and usual ruthless competence. Roy Roberts has the lead as the police chief in charge of finding the brilliant and elusive killer. He is assisted by Scott Brady playing the dumb cop who finally gumshoes the clues into the light of day. The film is an all-male suspense thriller, and it is riveting. On one side it is documentarian, but on the other, strange scenes follow one another in rapid order, creating a skewed sense of a loose-cannon killer holding a cannon – for instance, the long odd scene in which the killer enters the house of someone he knows, Whit Bissell, and beats him up for money. and a scene where the killer operates on himself to remove a bullet. These scenes and Alton’s treatment of them give the killer an unhinged interior for which Richard Basehart is perfectly cast, since he always looked nuts anyhow. (His apogee as an actor was the screwy tightrope clown in Fellini’s La Strada.) Here he is ingrown, mean, paranoid, and resourceful in all situations. Like the big chase scene at the end of Side Street, Mann mounts a stupendous chase through the storm sewers of Los Angeles. The excitement of these scenes completely obscures the fact that one does not care a fig for any of the characters, and that the director’s interest in the killer, signaled by the fact that only his own dog loves him, is purely for his entertainment value as someone as extreme in his attack in the film as the director is with the film itself.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, CRIME DRAMA, Directed by Anthony Mann, DOCUDRAMA, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MASTER CINEMA PHOTOGRAPHER: John Alton, NOIRISH, Police Procedural, Richard Basehart, Roy Roberts, Scott Brady, Whit Bissell

 
 
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