The Good Die Young March 4, 2008
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s, Gloria Grahame , add a comment
(There are a lot of spoilers here, more than I usually include.)
Late in Lewis Gilbert’s The Good Die Young, Miles “Rave” Ravenscourt, expertly played by Laurence Harvey, opines that the men of the film’s title perish in war while the surviving soldiers are, in my words, sort of like sediment shifting to the bottom of a glass. Rave himself is a supposed war hero, having killed six Germans “in the desert.” Two of the other men, both Americans, have military experience as well. Eddie Blaine (John Ireland) is an air force pilot stationed in England, but about to be shipped off to Germany, and Joe Halsey (Richard Basehart) is a Korean War vet whose two years of service are held against him as little more than missed time by his boss. A fourth man, Mike Morgan (Stanley Baker), is a boxer who’s unexpectedly won his final fight and loses the use of a hand in the process.
For varying reasons, all four are placed in desperate situations and consumed by the struggle of retaining the women they love or once loved. Rave is a careless, jobless professional gentleman with a wealthy wife who’s tired of his sponging and a wealthier father who tells him in no uncertain terms that he’d rather see Rave dead and buried than live for his share of an inheritance. A £1,000 check for losses incurred while gambling is set to bounce unless Rave can talk his way into the money. Failure to do so and the lure of financial freedom (at least for awhile) causes Rave to eye the bank notes at a nearby post office, £90,000 worth. The idea is for Rave and his three new bar buddies to catch the money as it’s being transported. And, of course, no one gets hurt.
Rave is the catalyst and each man, reluctantly, has to be convinced. Mike’s the classic boxer type you frequently see in older movies. He’s made a little from fighting, but not equal to the sacrifices of partial hearing and vision loss. The money he saved up gets wasted in lost bail money for his useless brother-in-law. Mike takes his anger out on his wife, not surprising since boxers are used to unleashing their aggression on whatever’s within arm’s reach. Eddie and Joe both have marital problems of their own. When the movie begins, Eddie’s on 48-hours leave and his wife Denise (Gloria Grahame) couldn’t care less. She’s sort of an actress, sort of a tramp, but Eddie’s all of a cuckold.
There’s a funny scene the first time we see Denise, when she’s coming home with her co-star, and a group of young girls swarm around the leading man for an autograph. He urges the girls to have Denise sign something, too. After she signs for the one fan with any interest, Denise adjusts herself and announces they have to be going now, barely fooling anyone. I love how Grahame makes the character so unapologetically bitchy and completely without sympathy. She’s a wolf fully dressed in wolf’s clothing. The last scene she has is my favorite in the film, when Eddie literally kicks the actor boyfriend in his backside and quits being so submissive. Denise likes this side of her husband and we see her warm up to him for the first time - only to have Eddie throw her into a bathtub full of water.
It’s not another man that stands between Joe and his wife Mary (Joan Collins), but another woman. Mary’s mother has been sick and so she flew to England from the U.S. to be with her, but, after a few weeks, Joe’s getting antsy. He flies over himself and learns the delay was because Mary’s pregnant. But when Joe’s ready to take Mary home, her mother fakes a suicide attempt. The flight money for tickets back to New York dries up quickly and Joe’s daily trips to a bar lead him to meeting Mike first, his old pal Eddie next, and, finally, the slithering Rave. The coincidence of film manifests itself into four guys, each with a lot to lose and all close to wit’s end. Rave is opportunistic and, as we find out, full of greed and evil.
The film’s final twenty minutes or so, post-heist, are cold-hearted and fascinating, played out on grimy and uninviting London streets. The Good Die Young isn’t really a heist thriller at all. It’s a fairly dark character study about these four men, their desperation and the reasoning for their involvement in a predictably ill-fated robbery. You could make comparisons to The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing, but, aside from this being inferior and missing Sterling Hayden, I think Gilbert’s film exists in a different, more noirlike area. It’s a very good picture and fits nicely in what I’d consider to be the style of film noir. Death, desperation, darkness - what more could you ask for?
Controlled, I believe, by MGM, there’s not yet a DVD for The Good Die Young in R1. The unfortunately named Wienerworld Ltd is listed as distributor for this in R2. Horrible cover art, and I can’t speak to the quality. The broadcast version I watched from a TCM recording looked a little weak, if acceptable, but the sound had a persistent hiss.
The Cobweb August 20, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s, Gloria Grahame , 3 comments
I have seen the Technicolor light and it is good. The Cobweb, not so much. Let’s say it’s a bad film, a ridiculous film, even a hideously dangerous film. It’s still kind of fun and it still has an auburn-haired Gloria Grahame in a low-cut glamour dress, a darkly lit nightgown and a shoulder-baring shower scene. So it can’t be all bad, right? The only way to really get through Vincente Minnelli’s CinemaScope melodrama is to realize it’s a trashy mess. The film’s plot centers around drapes in a mental institution’s library, for goodness sake. Over two hours about drapes! Would a jab about The Drapes of Wrath be too much? For this film, I think not!
So The Drapes-, er The Cobweb concerns a mental institution filled with patients waiting to be “healed” and a staff as ineptly nutso as the people being treated. Richard Widmark stars as the head doctor, Gloria Grahame is his wife, Charles Boyer is the faded shell of a once-great psychiatrist, Lauren Bacall plays a new employee getting over the death of her husband and child in an auto accident, and silent film great Lillian Gish is the bitter old woman who’s the clinic administrator. The eccentric cast is rounded out by Oscar Levant as a patient who gets to say some of the best lines in the movie, newcomer John Kerr as a troubled artist (in a role originally set for James Dean until MGM was unable to strike a deal with Warner Bros.), Susan Strasberg as the “phobic” girl Kerr falls for in the institution, Tommy Rettig as Widmark and Grahame’s son and the most sane person in the film, Paul Stewart as another of the clinic’s doctors, and, finally, Fay Wray as Boyer’s wife. Whew, an exhaustingly great cast Minnelli had to work with and at least they’re not the ones who let the audience down.
I can’t say the same for the ridiculous plot and screenplay. Based on a novel by William Gibson, who’s credited with “additional dialogue” in a screenplay written by John Paxton, the film actually tells the story of the trouble surrounding new curtains in the institution library. The competing potential designs are Grahame’s expensive flower pattern, Gish’s economy cotton, and a patient-designed choice based on Kerr’s artwork resembling elementary school fingerpaint drawings. The remaining difficulties in our characters’ lives comprise the meat of the story, but they’re basically ridiculous too. Widmark and Grahame are having (intimate) marital problems, she goes out with Boyer for four hours worth of cocktails to discuss the drapes (!), and when he drops by and makes a move on her the next day she is awestruck at such nerve from Boyer, who delivers an incredulously sincere response when accused of impropriety that must be heard to be believed.
Meanwhile, Widmark closes in on the widow Bacall, who ultimately puts a stop to their short-lived liaison, but not until Grahame has discovered her husband’s impropriety. Remarkably, Widmark and Grahame end the film as a happy couple and we’re left with the words “the trouble was over,” to bookmark the opening “the trouble began” seen at the beginning of the film. This is an absurd conclusion though, as ridiculous as the film’s repeated idea that a little analysis and time at the clinic will cure the patients and make them just like new again. The couple have been in icy turmoil the entire film, one’s had an affair while the other declined her own, and nothing has made the audience see why these two would have patched things up. Widmark especially comes off like a jerk for returning to Grahame only after Bacall declined to continue their affair.
There’s also an internal struggle amongst the administration at the clinic, with Gish, Widmark, and Boyer constantly at each other’s throats, over the drapes and other matters. The patients themselves are portrayed sympathetically, as though they’re rehabilitating broken bones. This dangerously simplistic take on psychological disorder seems common for the time, but no less negligent. Furthermore, the patients appear to have total freedom of their actions. The neurotic narcissist portrayed by Kerr is first seen wading through a field near the clinic and later takes Strasberg to the movies before inciting a panic by disappearing, only to turn up ragged and wet at Widmark’s house. Oscar Levant, who struggled with time in mental hospitals in real life, seems to pop up whenever and wherever a “look how funny the crazy person is” chuckle is required.
Scenes like Levant’s create a too frequent conflict over whether the audience should or shouldn’t be laughing. A significant amount of the film is played so deadly serious (again with the drapes!) that the viewer can’t help but snicker. This is a common problem I have with melodrama of the 1950s, but The Cobweb is almost in a class of its own for such a high-powered cast and director. The score by Leonard Rosenman is a big, overdone part of why the film works better as an unintentional comedy and has the effect of a jackhammer alerting the audience to just how important every little crisis can be. Rosenman also scored Rebel Without a Cause the same year, his first in the movies, and would win back-to-back Academy Awards, for Barry Lyndon and Bound for Glory. His work here in itself isn’t particularly bad, but it really doesn’t belong as a means of simply creating dramatic tension when there should be none. By the end of the film, it already feels like self-parody.
The only bright spots in the film come from its cast of second-tier movie stars. My affection for Gloria Grahame has been well-documented here in the past, and this is one of her better leading roles. Though billed fourth, it’s Grahame’s show and her reunion with Minnelli after taking home an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful three years earlier doesn’t disappoint. I guess I could see where some might find her annoying, and she goes unmistakably over the top, but for such a wacky film it fits. Often relegated to supporting roles, Grahame made the most of her rare star turns and The Cobweb pulsates in a littler higher pitch when she’s on the screen.
It’s also interesting to see Richard Widmark head the cast of a melodrama, in a role more often played by someone like Rock Hudson or even William Holden. I like Widmark, but Minnelli’s film (and the inane script) bring out his weaknesses more than his strengths. Bacall doesn’t bring a whole lot to her role either, and, like Boyer, isn’t in the film as much you’d think from the billing, while Lillian Gish’s character has a personality switch stuck on “angry old bitch.” It’s John Kerr, though, who overacts his way into bad film infamy as a troubled youth caricature. Seeing Kerr is enough to remind the viewer just how compelling James Dean was. Everything Kerr does plays like fake histrionics, bypassing any real emotion, whereas Dean commanded the screen with disillusioned anxiety like you were seeing a young man disintegrate before your very eyes. Don’t blame Dean for Kerr’s style either; East of Eden was released in March, The Cobweb followed in July, and Rebel hit screens in October of 1955.
The Cobweb was made for MGM and its home video rights are controlled by Warner Bros. Never released on VHS or DVD, there was a laserdisc MGM put out prior to losing control of the title. As terrible as the film often is, I would still like to have it on DVD (along with another unreleased Minnelli title Some Came Running) if the color and sharpness are up to snuff. It’s certainly worth seeing if you like Gloria Grahame or, I guess, Vincente Minnelli and if you enjoy melodramas that take themselves way, way too seriously then you might like it outright. Or, you could do like almost every character in the film and soothe your problems with a nip of alcohol. I’d think that would greatly enhance the film and you can smile along to the happy ending as Hollywood tells us everything is just fine. There’s no need to worry because the trouble is now over.
In a Lonely Place May 1, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s, Nicholas Ray, Gloria Grahame , 5 comments
I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.
I can’t even pretend to feign objectivity when discussing Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place
Ray’s best and most characteristic film (edging out Johnny Guitar by a small margin) begins with Bogart as Dixon Steele driving through the Los Angeles area, his reflection captured in the car’s rearview mirror. When he comes to a stop, a female passenger of another car begins talking to him about a movie he had written, but he doesn’t recognize her, the film’s leading actress, because he’s never seen the filmed version of what he wrote. Steele is ready to erupt after the actress’s male companion chides him for harassing his lady even though she had begun the conversation, but the car drives away. We soon learn Steele is a screenwriter of dwindling commercial success and attempting to retain his creative integrity. His new project is to adapt a bestseller, one that’s destined to become an epic - “a picture that’s real long and has lots of things going on,” according to Mildred Atkinson, the ill-fated hat-check girl who’s read the book. Since Dix doesn’t seem too interested in reading his source material, he persuades the girl to relay the story at his apartment. Mildred initially balks because she has a date, but the lure of celebrity is overwhelming and she relents.
When Dix is bringing Mildred into his apartment he runs into Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), his new neighbor. Instantly, Dix seems more interested in her than Mildred, but he sticks with the latter. At his apartment, the hat-check girl enthusiastically tells Dix the novel’s plot, but he’s turned off by her childishness. He sends her on her way with two ten dollar bills for cab fare, not even walking her to the nearby taxi stand. Ray then cuts to police Det. Brub Nicolai knocking on Steele’s door at five o’clock in the morning. Dix had served as the cop’s commanding officer during the war, but he soon realizes it’s not a social visit. Mildred was found dead on the side of the road, “in a lonely place,” and Dix was the last known person to see her alive. He’s taken into questioning, but released when Laurel provides his alibi. She thinks Dix has an interesting face and he’s intrigued.
The burgeoning love story between these two lost souls is cinema of the highest level. Bogart somehow abandons any lingering artifacts of Sam Spade, Rick Blaine or Philip Marlowe. He is Dixon Steele, one of the essential characters in film history. I’m always impressed by Bogart’s performance each time I see it. The frighteningly real and dangerous portrait of a man constantly on the brink of unbridled violence was a daring choice for Bogart at this stage of his career. It came not long after he left Warner Bros. and formed his own production company, Santana, which produced In a Lonely Place and the Ray-directed Knock on Any Door. Bogart deserves credit for taking risky, unsympathetic roles which often yielded his best performances like Dixon Steele, Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the demented Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
Certainly even Bogart’s signature roles, such as Blaine or Spade, were unconventional heroes, but they’re still undeniably heroes. Their flaws are movie character flaws. Dixon Steele, by contrast, is a controlling, unstable man whose problems are fleshed out or alluded to without apology. While Cooper, Wayne, Grant, Tracy, etc. were, for the most part, retreading their personas in film after film, Bogart was inhabiting these flawed men who often bordered on madness. If pressed on his best performance, I might give the edge to Dobbs, but Dix Steele is a much more complex, difficult character and Bogart makes you think he’s not acting. Just watch the scene where he’s describing how Mildred may have been killed as he insists Det. Nicolai and his wife re-create the killing (in their own home) to be convinced of Bogart’s brilliance.
Steele starts off the film as a cynical, extremely bitter man who seems completely unfazed to learn that the young woman who had been at his apartment the night before has been brutally murdered. Even photographs of the corpse stir no emotion. The question is not whether he committed this unspeakable act, only whether he was capable of it. His guardian angel is Laurel Gray (whose last name surely represents the purgatory she treads between Steele’s violent aggression and her own empathetic curiosity), a new neighbor who happened to see Steele when Mildred was still at his apartment. She lies and tells the police she saw Steele after Mildred left to provide him with an alibi. He then pursues her romantically, resulting in a fruitful relationship eventually tainted by the screenwriter’s inability to overcome his unchained violent behavior.
It’s not the plot, though, that makes In a Lonely Place so hypnotically mesmerizing. The characters Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt give us are terrifically flawed individuals doomed by their own fates. Steele is controlling, paranoid and unabashedly vicious, but Grahame’s character somehow tames him for a brief period. As the line that Dix wants to work into his screenplay goes, quoted here at the beginning, Laurel has given him new reason to live and work and blossom. His creativity peaks when she enters his life, even if it’s while working on a script he’s not incredibly proud of writing. She’s the best thing to ever happen to him and he likewise becomes a source for her happiness during their few weeks together. The stars only briefly align though, and he manages to sabotage their relationship through his savage violence while driving home on a road similar to the one where Mildred Atkinson was murdered. Suddenly, Laurel is no longer sure if Dix is innocent and it becomes clear that he was capable of the crime regardless of whether he actually did it.
Like other films directed by Nicholas Ray, In a Lonely Place works on many different levels. There’s the romance between Dix and Laurel, ill-fated but fleetingly happy prior to Steele’s inevitable self-destruction. We also have a scathing look at the superficiality of Hollywood, exemplified by Mildred’s mothlike attraction to Steele’s “fame” that directly leads to her murder. It’s also frequently categorized as film noir, and the murder investigation, with Dix remaining a prime candidate despite Laurel’s alibi, is constantly lingering in the background. Laurel’s confidence in Dix steadily erodes and she begins to fear what he’s capable of and what he might do to her. Like other great noir protagonists, Dix Steele is unable to overcome his fatal flaw and adapt to the outside world. More atypical is that it’s not death or imprisonment that Steele must face, but loneliness after knowing and feeling the happiness that a change of temperament could have yielded.
It’s that reason, through the film’s brilliant portrayal of the pangs of loneliness, that the relationship between Dix and Laurel surfaces as the most compelling aspect of Ray’s film. Rarely has Hollywood been able to expose with such painful truth the rollercoaster realities of finding someone to heal our innermost pain. As Dix slices open a grapefruit and tenderly exposes part of his soul to Laurel, whose own feelings have begun to ebb, his words about how Hollywood is always getting love wrong become poignantly ironic. The film’s title thus works simultaneously as a literal description of the place where Mildred Atkinson’s body was discarded and the painful, metaphoric emotional state shared by the two main characters. The common denominator, since Dix is a screenwriter and Laurel a struggling actress, is the equally lonely setting of Hollywood.
Early on, Dix accuses studio men of being “popcorn salesmen,” a brilliantly denigrating truism. Even by 1950 (or 1949, when the film was shot), it’s reasonable to assume that Nicholas Ray didn’t have too fond of an opinion of Hollywood. This was only his fifth film, but the director had already suffered through RKO forcing him to make A Woman’s Secret, a forgettable melodrama that has hardly any of Ray’s fingerprints. He was then eager to work with Bogart and Columbia on Knock on Any Door and the partnership flourished with In a Lonely Place. Given his political persuasion, there’s also little doubt that Ray was very much against the burgeoning Hollywood witch hunt at the time. (Art Smith, who played Steele’s loyal agent Mel Lippman, would soon be blacklisted as one of the names given by his former Group Theatre collaborator Elia Kazan.) Surely it was more than coincidence that Ray modeled the apartment complex where Dix and Laurel live after his own first home in Hollywood.
Regarding the director’s personal life at the time, there’s no indication that any tension stemming from the collapse of Nicholas Ray’s marriage to Gloria Grahame hurt the film. After meeting on the set of A Woman’s Secret, Grahame married her director, but their relationship was, privately, over during the filming of In a Lonely Place. Columbia head Harry Cohn had originally slotted Ginger Rogers to play Laurel, but Ray’s insistence on his then-wife proved right. This might be Grahame’s most accomplished role, an emotionally scarred woman who’s run away from a wealthy lover and finds refuge with a man completely unequipped to protect her. Grahame had a tendency to play less-refined, pouty females, which she did to great effect. Here, though, she’s much more restrained and Laurel is a mature, confident woman who’s still not afraid to make her intentions known. Grahame’s unique speaking voice and habit of raising her right eyebrow are mostly reined in as well, giving the character a natural, reserved effect.
Though Ray is uncredited with the screenplay, and the opening titles list Edmund H. North for the adaptation despite his questionable involvement in the final effort, his stamp is all over the film. The book by Dorothy B. Hughes (who also wrote the source novel for Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse) shows Dixon Steele as a serial killer who repeatedly murders and rapes women in a psychosexual rampage. The first-person narrative of the novel differs significantly from Andrew Solt’s screenplay. In Bernard Eisenschitz’s Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Ray’s personal script notes illustrate his substantial contribution to the finished film and make clear that the director’s impact was critical in turning the writing of Hughes and Solt into what would become the archetypal Nicholas Ray movie.
The poster tagline (”with the surprise finish!”) is nearly laughable for its unintentional accuracy. The real surprise is not what the poster is most likely referring to, Steele’s innocence confirmed by Sgt. Lochner over the telephone, but the utter disintegration of the relationship between Dix and Laurel. Movies are supposed to end happily (or they were in 1950, at least), failed romances conclude on good terms and the characters learn something in the process to make them better persons. Nothing even close to that happens here. Dix is only prevented from probably murdering Laurel when the phone rings. His exit is painful, pronounced and final. He walks out of Laurel’s apartment, not headed for his own home, and the audience is left with no indication of happiness, learning or redemption. It’s over between Laurel and Dix and we’re given no hint as to the future.
The original ending had Grahame’s character, Laurel Gray, not being saved by the telephone and Dixon Steele murdering her. Returning to his script to type out the lines quoted here at the top of the page, Dix was then arrested by Det. Nicolai for the murder. Ray was unhappy with the conclusion that violence was the only way out for the characters and quietly set up the final scene on his own. He cleared the set except for the principal actors and claimed to have improvised what eventually became the ending in the film. It would prove to be much more powerful and sad than the scripted version. An ambiguity now hovers over Dix and Laurel. Instead of a physical prison, Dix is relegated to a lifetime of loneliness. The great, emotionally devastating ending that remains is unrelenting and unsparing.
Odds Against Tomorrow April 13, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s, Gloria Grahame , add a comment
Despite a title befitting a daily soap opera more than a melodramatic post-noir caper movie, Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow
The film begins with a terrific opening title sequence and ends with a dynamic bleakness. The problem is the remaining hour and a half, where we’re introduced to scheming ex-cop Burke (Begley) who enlists a white racist (Ryan) and a black man in debt (Belafonte) to help him rob a bank in upstate New York. Where other heist films often try to make audiences sympathize with the robbery participants, Odds Against Tomorrow makes no such attempt. Ryan’s character Slater is a Southern-accented, ex-con killer who hates black people (giving Ryan, who apparently was much nicer than the roles he played, a bigot companion to his anti-semite, Oscar-nominated turn in Crossfire). Belafonte is Ingram, a nightclub performer who’d rather bet his money on horses and cards than provide for his young daughter, putting him $7,500 in the hole to a bookie. Rounding out the main cast are two empty roles for Winters and Grahame, who are pretty much wasted as Ryan’s girlfriend and upstairs neighbor, respectively. Grahame, in probably her last notable film role, is still effective as a really strange woman whom Ryan beds in one of those misogynistic “no means yes” scenes we sometimes see in older movies.
Characters certainly don’t have to be likeable or easy to relate to for a film to be interesting, but it helps, at least, for them to either have some redeeming qualities or something else to give the audience an identifying action or characteristic. We just don’t get that here and the majority of the picture, leading up to the climactic bank job, subsequently disappoints. Are we supposed to feel something for the Ryan character because he’s a war veteran? I’m not sure, but I can’t imagine how it’s possible to find anything of interest in him. Ryan often played the villain in movies, but, even in many of those roles, he had a “good guy” to play off of and made his character more interesting, such as in The Naked Spur or House of Bamboo. The only other main character we have here is Belafonte, who is likeable enough but never seems to want to stop gambling. The brief scenes between him and his daughter do little to change our perception. Instead of being with her on the carousel, he gets off to talk to a couple of his bookie’s goons. The balloon he’s supposed to be taking care of for her gets popped by some teenagers as he calls Burke in a phone booth.
Even though the performances are fine, the characters are unoriginal and uninspiring. By the film’s release in 1959, Ryan had played nearly every possible stripe of bad guy and watching him portray such a repulsive character becomes tiresome. Bigotry, whether in 1959 or currently, is as easy and unwanted of a short cut to portray an antagonist as the black hat we too often see in simplistic westerns. The scene between Ryan and a pre-M*A*S*H Mike Farrell as a young soldier does nothing to alleviate any hostility the audience has for him and the character’s actions never allow him to fit the disillusioned war veteran mold. Ryan is annoyed by Farrell’s behavior, including his treatment of a young woman, but then he goes home and works over Grahame’s ditzy neighbor, whose intentions make little sense outside of the realm of other movies. Belafonte’s fellow war vet is just as lacking in depth and reason, but he manages to come across a tad better.
Much of this is due to Belafonte himself, who had few film roles and, in contrast to Ryan, was less established as one particular screen character. I’d say he’s the main reason to watch Odds Against Tomorrow and he doesn’t disappoint. Though far from a great actor, Belafonte, whose company produced the film, was probably on par with other (white) singers who dabbled in acting such as Frank Sinatra (Oscar winner), Bing Crosby (Oscar winner), and Bobby Darin (Oscar nominee). His nightclub performances, both the solo of “My Baby’s Not Around” and “All Men are Evil” alongside Mae Barnes, are the highlights of the film for me, as Belafonte shows a natural, unrestrained easiness that doesn’t really pop up when he’s reciting his scripted lines. The film’s outstanding score, by jazz pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, is reminiscent of Wise’s previous feature I Want to Live!, which won Susan Hayward a deserved Academy Award but didn’t live up to the promise of the brilliant, jazz-infused first few minutes.
Leaving the viewer somewhat unsatisfied seems to be a familiar problem with Wise’s directorial efforts. Maybe his pictures haven’t aged well, but I find myself almost always wanting to like Robert Wise’s movies more than I actually do. From what I’ve seen, only The Set-Up, his previous teaming with Robert Ryan, would earn an unqualified recommendation. Both Curse of the Cat People and The Day the Earth Stood Still have their admirers, but I’m not entirely convinced. He also won two Academy Awards for directing West Side Story (shared with Jerome Robbins) and The Sound of Music, so his versatility is difficult to question. There’s just something that I can’t quite put my finger on that seems lacking in his films though. Truth be told, I can’t come down too hard on the man because, firstly, he edited Citizen Kane (even if his subsequent work on The Magnificent Ambersons is more dubious), and, second, he was kind enough to respond to a letter I wrote as a teenager with an autographed picture. His distinctive penmanship even showed that he had addressed the return envelope himself.
Even if that thoughtful gesture made me a fan for life, it didn’t pierce my objectivity in regards to his films. Odds Against Tomorrow is far from an entirely successful film. It meanders along, focusing on underdeveloped (or possibly unworthy) characters and climaxes in a bank robbery that’s too short and inanely executed. The final “which is which” scene is impressive in its culmination of the relative likenesses and differences between the main characters, but it’s too little, too late for a film that should have been better in nearly every way. The racial aspects are mildly interesting, but still lack any real introspection or provocation into why the characters act as they do.
We’re given the sense that Belafonte’s character is distrustful of whites, though seemingly less than Ryan is of blacks, but nothing more is really made of it. As hokey and unrealistic as Stanely Kramer can be, his film from the previous year, The Defiant Ones, does a better job of exploring the relationship between a white man and a black man who have no previous reason to dislike one another aside from skin color. Even though the Kramer film has a predictable resolution, whereas Wise and his screenwriters stand firm, it still attempts to examine irrational prejudices with an eye toward improvement instead of simply linking racial hatred with ultimate downfall. The almost offensively stereotypical homosexual character in Odds Against Tomorrow sort of drowns out much of the pro-equality message the film strives for as well.
The R1 DVD release from MGM is a satisfactory, though supplement-free, affair with very good image quality and presented in the original academy ratio (a seemingly odd choice considering Wise had previously been using wider formats). It’s definitely not a bad film, but Odds Against Tomorrow is a disappointment because of the talent involved and the limp product delivered. I read that Jean-Pierre Melville was an admirer of Wise’s film, and that actually makes sense. The great French director, however, knew how to use suspense and a methodical frigidity much more than we see in this movie, which takes too much time focusing on the lacking personal lives of the main characters and fails to deliver the memorable heist that had been simmering throughout the film. There’s also an inexplicable lack of tension between Ryan and Belafonte when the movie desperately needs it. Odds Against Tomorrow may have inspired great films, but it falls short of approaching that level itself.
The Big Heat April 9, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s, Fritz Lang, Gloria Grahame , add a comment
What’s the best director-actor-actress triumverate that made at least two non-sequel pictures together? A good choice might be John Ford, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, who made The Quiet Man, Rio Grande and The Wings of Eagles together. There’s also Howard Hawks, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who did To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. Otto Preminger, Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney followed up Laura with Where the Sidewalk Ends six years later. The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman paired Liv Ullmann with Max von Sydow three times and Erland Josephson a total of eight times. My personal favorite, though, might be Fritz Lang’s two films with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame - The Big Heat
At the risk of repeating myself, I find Fritz Lang’s films, both from his days in Germany and after working in America, remarkably timeless and entertaining. Each time I watch a film he directed, with very few exceptions, I refuse to believe Lang isn’t one of the top five or ten filmmakers of all time. You could isolate his output in either language and his legend is still secured. When combining the two periods, it becomes apparent that he had a career to rival most anyone, in longevity, quality and quantity. His ability to evolve from silents to sound films is equally impressive. Only a handful of other directors were successful in both, and arguably none as much so as Lang. If there’s any knock against him, it would seem to be that he never reached the heights of films like Metropolis and M after fleeing Germany Obviously unfair, this criticism fails to take into account the creative and monetary limitations he faced in Hollywood. Perhaps it also undervalues how impressive his English language work often was.
I previously touted Scarlet Street as a good candidate for the honor of Lang’s best English language film, an irrelevant title only important for discussion purposes anyway. Though I’m not exactly wavering on my suggestion since it is a vital and essential piece of cinema’s darker side, maybe I wasn’t being completely fair to The Big Heat, a film that typifies everything great about movies before they became modernized with foul language, nudity and blood-soaked violence. Those three additions to movie screens all have a time and place and have been used brilliantly by scores of filmmakers, but wouldn’t films have been a lot less interesting if taboos had never existed so that creative filmmakers could circumvent them? I see classic movies as fascinating precisely because they don’t have those forbidden elements out in the open.
In The Big Heat, we see shocking moments of violence that make much more of an impact than the climactic hail of bullets exchanged between Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin. Ford’s character, Dave Bannion, is a respected police sergeant with a loving wife (played by Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s older sister) and young daughter. He seems to have a happy marriage and a blossoming career, stunted only by corruption in the upper ranks. There’s no hint of a dark or sadistic side and Bannion appears to be the rare noir cop protagonist without an obvious fatal flaw (the violent tendencies of Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground and Dana Andrews in Where the Sidewalk Ends are two examples that immediately spring to mind). Then he perceives his family being threatened and Bannion becomes possessed by the struggle to protect them.
The wallop he gives George, a goon of the syndicate boss Mike Lagana, is unexpectedly vicious and forceful. Ford transforms from stand-up police officer to live wire in an instant. After tragedy strikes home and he’s forced to go on leave, Bannion’s hair-trigger violence begins to parallel the sadistic Vince Stone (Marvin), never more so than when he throws a conniving police widow against the wall and begins choking her. His savagery, interrupted by a couple of uniformed officers barging in, had progressed from an earlier altercation with Larry Gordon, the man who planted dynamite in his car. Bannion had just set up Gordon for a certain death at the hands of his mobster buddies, grinning almost uncontrollably as he tells the thug his plan. There’s never any indication that Bannion feels a twinge of conflict that this guy will be in the river in a few hours.
I’m not saying I disagree with Bannion’s actions, but the lack of emotion from Ford (who’s really superb throughout), that he’s giving Gordon a fate much worse than if Bannion just shot him at that moment, is downright startling for a film from 1953. This is Death Wish territory in the decade of Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie & Harriet. Lang was able to defy the more conservative audience’s expectations by peeling away at what was generally considered acceptable at the time. By showing such unexpectedly violent behavior from the good guy of the story, with whom we empathize, The Big Heat provokes the viewer to take notice at what’s being shown. This type of audience stimulant is an exhilarating and effective use of violence in film. If a character did the same thing in a film or television show today though, it would barely register at all.
The more famous scene of violence from The Big Heat, and one that actually might still prompt quite a reaction if it were done today, is when Lee Marvin’s character Stone scalds his girlfriend Debby’s face with a pot of steaming hot coffee. The act is not shown on camera, but we see the aftermath in the form of the scarred left side of her face just before Debby gets her own revenge against Stone. The scene is reminiscent of Cagney shoving a grapefruit into his lady friend’s face at the breakfast table in The Public Enemy, 22 years earlier but prior to the implementation of the production code. A big difference between the two is that Cagney’s fit seems more humiliating and degrading than the sadistic rage that comes from Marvin. A little grapefruit juice is nothing compared to a half-scarred face.
The java-burned victim is played by Gloria Grahame, who, in full disclosure, I think I may be in love with. Grahame has long been one of my favorite actresses and, despite popping up in classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and winning an Academy Award for The Bad and the Beautiful, deserved a better film career. The talented beauty had perhaps her best role as the female lead in Nicholas Ray’s brilliant In a Lonely Place, my favorite of Ray’s films and one I try to mention here as often as possible. After Odds Against Tomorrow in 1959, she pretty much stopped acting in films, instead taking television and stage work before dying from cancer at the age of 57. She also had the odd distinction of marrying both Nicholas Ray and his son (her stepson) Anthony Ray, star of the John Cassavetes film Shadows, and having children with both men.
Grahame’s character in The Big Heat knows the type of guy she’s involved with in Stone, but accepts his volatility as part of the price of living a financially charmed existence. She hints at a sadness from a poverty-filled past she never wants to revisit, even if it means being with crooks like Stone. Unlike so many gangster molls and femmes fatale, Debby is refreshingly honest with Bannion, never hiding her motives or betraying his loyalty. Her initial seductive interest in him, probably as a result of seeing Stone cower away from the suspended cop like a retreating puppy, changes when Debby takes refuge with Bannion following the coffee scalding. The sensitive, almost domestic kindness she shows Bannion seems to help him find redemption from his spiraling violent streak. Grahame is memorable and compelling in her performance, showing us a woman much brighter than she initially seems.
Likewise, Glenn Ford embodies Bannion with an everyman quality that separates him from so many main characters associated with film noir. He’s neither a ticking time bomb, ready to explode when given the littlest opportunity, nor an emotionally wounded shell who’s unable to function in society. Bannion is the seemingly reasonable man, an ordinary citizen who could be any one of us. For me, what makes The Big Heat fascinating is its exploration of the depths a man can plummet to avenge wrongs committed against his family. Unlike many of the articles I’ve read, I really don’t see the film as primarily about one man against a city of corruption. The focus instead seems to be on the riveting transformation of Bannion as his family life disintegrates and he becomes bent on exacting revenge. His motivating factor is the vengeance he craves, not a noble fight against corruption.
There’s another interpretation I’ve read about The Big Heat, most notably by Roger Ebert in his “The Great Movies” essay, that places Bannion as an oblivious angel of death for the female characters he encounters. I disagree with this take as well, and would argue that each death is more a result of circumstance than Bannion’s actions. Lucy Chapman, the mistress of the dead police officer, is murdered shortly after contacting Bannion, but his involvement is completely tangential to her death. Chapman’s demise comes as a result of her own actions, with Bannion’s role merely as a dutiful police officer doing what he’s been instructed to do. Their meeting and her death subsequently get Bannion involved with Lagana, escalated by the threatening phone call to his house. It’s also unlikely Bannion could have foreseen his car being loaded with explosives based solely on his visit to Lagana’s house since the murder of a police sergeant would logically raise several eyebrows, even in a city plagued by corruption.
The death of Mrs. Duncan, the police officer’s widow, comes the closest to being caused by Bannion because it came as a direct result of telling Debby the consequences for Stone if she were dead. However, by this point, Debby began to serve as a substitute for Bannion’s wife and he was telling her about his work (now being done without the aid of his police credentials) just as he had his wife at the beginning of the movie. There’s little reason to think, based on what we’re shown, that Bannion was intending for Debby to kill Mrs. Duncan. Debby’s own death, an inevitable conclusion given her circumstances and her actions, comes as a result of her quest for revenge against Stone for scarring her face. Bannion is present, but far from directly responsible. The idea that his encounters with women lead to their deaths is certainly an interesting one, but any theory as to his culpability, whether implicit or direct, seems flawed.
The three principals of The Big Heat re-teamed the next year for Human Desire, based on an Emile Zola novel and previously filmed by Jean Renoir as La bête humaine. The plot involves Ford’s Korean War vet returning to his old railroad job and becoming involved with Grahame, whose husband (played by Broderick Crawford) is Ford’s co-worker. It’s probably second-tier Lang, but it makes a nice companion piece to the earlier film. Grahame gets more time on screen and her character’s ambiguous actions give the film an interesting spin on what at times appears to be another variation of the Double Indemnity/The Postman Always Rings Twice kind of story. Even if it’s just to watch Ford and Grahame again, I’d imagine strong admirers of The Big Heat would also enjoy Human Desire quite a bit.
While The Big Heat can be found on DVD in a good (if overpriced) edition from Sony/Columbia, Human Desire is still unreleased from the same studio. The disc for the earlier title has only a re-release trailer and an advertising gallery, but the picture quality, after the first few minutes of frequent dust and debris spots, is especially impressive for a DVD that came out in 2001. The Columbia Pictures library was well-represented in the earlier days of DVD, with strong transfers and occasional featurettes, but Sony has more recently been content on mostly re-packaging a few titles here and there in sets without turning their attention to the unreleased films still waiting for their digital debuts. That’s rather disappointing for consumers anxious to get their hands on deserving titles like Human Desire, though there is a Japanese release that appears to be of good quality in the DVD Beaver review (here) and is enhanced in anamorphic widescreen. Both of the Lang-Ford-Grahame films are excellent and worth owning, but The Big Heat is an essential, a borderline masterpiece of raw, visceral violence and man’s animalistic need for revenge.