March 2, 2012

FILM NOIR: FRENCH POSTER STYLE, PART TWO!

Back today with another batch of French posters for classic American crime and film noir movies. Again, most of these are in the French Grande size, 47" x 63", a truly spectacular format! If you enjoy the posters, please consider following the blog. To view the first batch, click here


Download all you like, you stool pigeons! 


The Lodger


This Gun for Hire


Touch of Evil


The Maltese Falcon


The Desperate Hours


The Detective


The Glass Key

Key Largo

The Big Sleep


Notorious

Dead Reckoning 


Saboteur 


Scarlet Street 


The Two Mrs. Carrolls


Vertigo 


White Heat 


Woman in Hiding

February 16, 2012

Just Shy of Respect: The Hollywood Life and Death of Alan Ladd


Most people believe Alan Ladd committed suicide, but the details surrounding his death are so convoluted no one can be sure what really happened. History is often guilty of erring on the side of sensationalism — but in Ladd’s case suicide is the logical assumption. In 1962 he was found lying half-dead in a pool of blood with a bullet lodged in his chest. The newspapers bought into the story of an accident, but everyone who knew him believed it was a botched suicide attempt. It really doesn’t matter whether his January 1964 death was intentional or not; Ladd’s life had been in a downward spiral for years — some could say from the moment he broke into the movie business — and it was apparent that he was hell-bent on digging an early grave.
The average movie watcher doesn’t understand how difficult life could be for the stars of studio-era Hollywood, or how truthful that old industry adage: “you’re only as good as your last picture” really was. It’s a dollars and cents, bottom line, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of business, and despite a product that was typically lighthearted, uplifting, and sentimental, the industry itself could be painfully harsh. It goes without saying that Hollywood dreamers had to be made of tough stuff, but as is often the case in life, many of those who struggled mightily to achieve success didn’t know how to hold themselves together once they made it — or what to do when the spotlight moved on to the next big thing. Certainly this was the case with Alan Ladd, a hardscrabble kid who worked a million humble jobs before he finally arrived, only to be so terrified of losing it all that he let his insecurities devour him. The foundation upon which his self-esteem stood was simply not strong enough to sustain him. His fame and wealth notwithstanding, he was the most insecure, frightened, and guilt-ridden superstar in Hollywood.
Few performers ever made as smashing a debut as Ladd did in the 1942 film This Gun for Hire — if it can be called a debut at all. Devotees know This Gun wasn’t his first appearance, though the misconception exists owing to the “and introducing Alan Ladd as Raven” treatment he gets in the title cards. Ladd had appeared from time to time, usually inconsequentially, in movies since the mid-thirties; he had a small but important part in 1942’s Joan of Paris, and a bit role as a reporter in Citizen Kane. His breakout in This Gun for Hire is unforgettable. After the first rushes came in, Paramount execs and director Frank Tuttle realized they had a potential superstar on their hands, and reworked numerous shots to build him up, shifting the focus away from top-billed Robert Preston, and bolstering Ladd’s scenes with Veronica Lake. It still fell to the inexperienced actor to make good on the investment, and within a few minutes of running time he establishes himself as a bona fide movie marvel, creating the screen persona that he would riff on for more than a decade — one that would see him ascend to the peak of Mount Hollywood, and become for a few years the most popular screen actor in the world.
Ladd emerged from This Gun for Hire as Paramount’s shooting star — bigger even than Bing Crosby — so the studio went to work carefully crafting an image that would ensure the continued adoration of the public. Adolph Zuckor felt it was important to create for him a fantastical, picture postcard life. The public loves movie stars a lot more than they do actors, so Paramount set out to turn Ladd into the biggest movie star of them all. Certain aspects of his past, such as the brief first marriage and resulting child were swept under the rug; he was given a carefully devised script from which to draw on for press interviews and public appearances. The newly-minted version of Alan Ladd would be featured primarily in romantic hero roles — still tough as nails — but always the good guy. The smiling family man on the cover of innumerable fan magazines wasn’t an outright lie, but it was surely a sanitized version of the truth — and an impossible one for him to live up to, though he felt obliged to try.
In spite of the one-dimensional character types he played in his films, Ladd was a talented man. He was kind and good-natured, but horribly apprehensive about his size, his background, and most of all his acting. His costars usually found him unapproachably distant, though those he worked with more than once came to realize he was just mortified of being revealed as a fraud. Ladd’s greatest problem was that he took to heart every negative thing written about him. When Geraldine Fitzgerald encouraged him to accept the lead in The Great Gatsby he confided, “I won’t be able to do it because I can’t act, you know.” Yet Robert Preston said, “…he was an awfully good actor. So many people didn’t realize this. It’s said that the publicity department invented him, but they didn’t really have to. He would have made it without that — and I think his life would have been happier.” Virginia Mayo, who adored him, said it best: “The whole problem with Alan’s psyche was his inability to remember that he was a big star. And he was the biggest…. The lack of artistic recognition affected him, affected him tragically…” Though Veronica Lake, who appeared alongside Ladd more often than any other actress, and whose life in some ways paralleled his, characterized their time together in surprisingly professional terms: “both of us were very aloof…. We were a very good match for one another. It enabled us to work together very easily and without friction or temperament.” However, all who worked with him sensed a deep sadness in the man. When an interviewer asked him what he would change about himself if he could, he famously replied, “Everything.”
Ladd was always more at ease with the crew than he was other performers or studio executives. He had begun in Hollywood as a laborer and enjoyed being around those who worked behind the scenes. Yet he was able to form lasting friendships with a few of his costars in spite of being “aloof,” including Edmond O’Brien, Lloyd Nolan, and Van Heflin — but most notably William Bendix. The pair met while costarring in The Glass Key and would appear together in often. They began auspiciously, after Bendix accidentally cold-cocked Ladd during a fight scene. Ladd was so taken by the big man’s concern for his safety that they formed an immediate bond. Their close friendship was widely publicized — they even purchased homes across the street from one another. According to Bill’s wife Tess Bendix, things went astray when Ladd’s wife Sue Carol made an offhand remark about Bendix’s lack of military service. Stuck in the middle, Ladd was obliged to choose between his friend and his wife, and it would be a decade before the two would have a conversation that didn’t involve reading lines on a movie set. Once they finally reconciled, Ladd would lean heavily on his old friend. Bendix was constantly out of town during the early sixties, working almost exclusively on the stage. Tess remembers many late-night phone calls that involved a despondent Ladd pleading with Bendix to break his contracts and return to California. Bendix’s heartbreak in the wake of Ladd’s 1964 death was tremendous, and unfortunately short-lived — suffering from pneumonia, he would follow his best friend in death before the year was out.
The roots of Ladd’s depression can almost certainly be traced back to his childhood, which was anything but stable — his father died before his eyes when he was only four years old. When his mother remarried, the family began a Joad-like trek west and eventually settled in California. Their itinerant days cost Ladd a few years in school — and consequently he was not only the smallest, but also the oldest boy in his year. Nor did it help that he made poor grades, was excruciatingly shy, and had no stable male role model. If suicide is hereditary, then he never had a chance. In 1937, wrecked on alcohol and poverty, his mother swallowed ant poison and died before his eyes, just as he was struggling to get his first break. The incident naturally devastated him, and many insiders have speculated that he spent the rest of his life seeking to replace the doting woman who had been his only source of reassurance and approval. Sue Carol, ten years his senior, filled some of the void left in his mother’s wake, and Ladd came to consider the Paramount a surrogate home. Nonetheless, he was plagued with guilt about his mother for the rest of his days, and when he left the comfortable surroundings of Paramount his peace of mind and sense of stability deteriorated even further.
Even in the years after he achieved stardom and financial security, Ladd’s self-image and the rigors of a public life were a source of distress — he referred to himself as “the most insecure guy in Hollywood.” He wanted to be thought of as a serious actor but took to heart the whisperings that he was more a product of Paramount’s publicity machine than his own ability. He wanted to try different roles, but Adolph Zuckor considered him too valuable, and wouldn’t risk damaging his carefully constructed screen persona by giving him other kinds of parts. Ladd never complained much — he would have felt too guilty. The studio had given him his start, and after having been poor for so long he felt deeply indebted; so much so that he played ball with his bosses in ways that seem perplexing today. For much of his career, he kept his first marriage and the resulting child, Alan Ladd Jr., a secret from the public. The fan magazines, as well as Sue Carol herself, were more than happy to go along with the script. Ladd’s squeaky-clean image sold millions of magazines, and it did no one any good to rock the boat.
Carol, a former actress-turned-agent, represented Ladd tirelessly during the period leading up to This Gun for Hire. Even in the years after they were married, when her public role shifted to that of wife and mother, she remained the guiding force behind his career. Everyone from film historians to family friends has suggested that she did as much to maintain Ladd’s screen image as the studios, and that while their marriage was sound (Ladd absolutely refused to remove his wedding ring during production of his films) she nevertheless contributed to the burden of stardom that so weighed on her husband’s shoulders. She also contributed greatly to his happiness by giving him two children. Alana was born in 1943, followed by David in 1947.
Of his three kids David would follow most closely in his father’s footsteps. He appeared briefly in Shane, and then won a much larger role alongside Ladd in 1958’s The Proud Rebel. David received solid notices for his work — as well as a Golden Globe for Best Juvenile Actor — and quickly became a sought-after child star. He worked for two decades as a film and television actor, then transitioned to a long career as a film executive, and was married to Charlie’s Angels actress Cheryl Ladd for seven years.
The need to protect Alan Ladd’s image waned with his stardom, and the full story of his first marriage and son finally became public. Movie fans embraced Laddie with no hint of scandal, though the guilt the father felt at keeping his son a secret for so long was debilitating. Alan Ladd Jr. would also enjoy a significant career in the movie industry, becoming one the most successful executives in Hollywood. His tenure as president of Twentieth Century Fox saw Young Frankenstein, Star Wars, and Alien hit theaters. In 1995 he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Picture as producer of Braveheart. He continues to produce quality films — most recently Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone.
Alan Ladd spent a decade at Paramount following This Gun for Hire, in a succession of weaker and weaker films that still scored millions for the studio. By the end of the forties, he was arguably the most popular actor in the world, regardless of the second-rate material the studio put him in. Darryl Zanuck called him “the indestructible man,” and fully aware of Ladd’s reputation as a one trick pony, he longed to get him under contract at Fox. When Ladd finally left Paramount for big money from another studio, it wasn’t Zanuck but Jack Warner who placed the winning bid. Warner would quickly come to regret the deal however, as Ladd, no longer in the comforting embrace of Paramount, began to flounder. His performances got worse and worse, and even 1953’s Shane — made at Paramount but released after he and the studio separated — couldn’t resurrect his career. He got great buzz and Shane was a colossal success, but the studios responded by rushing every awful Ladd picture they had canned into release in order to cash in — before long he was back where he started, longing to appear in a decent picture and wondering where things went wrong. For the rest of the fifties Ladd made one bad movie after the next. He was hopeful about 1957’s Boy on a Dolphin. Cast next to rising star Sophia Loren, he was devastated when director Jean Negulesco favored the statuesque Italian beauty and treated him like an afterthought in every shot. Michael Curtiz helmed 1959’s The Man in the Net, with Ladd in the title role. He was excited to work with an A-list director, even if Curtiz had a reputation for being a tyrant. Both were awful failures; it was clear to all that Ladd’s tenure as an above-the-title film star was over.
Lacking the meaningful work to distract him from his thoughts, Ladd became an alcoholic. He couldn’t sleep and got hooked on Secobarbital. Neither his family, his legacy, nor his tremendous wealth could undo the damage. He believed he had never been given the chance to be a real actor and had never been taken seriously as anything other than a pretty face. His problem was that he believed every bad word the critics had ever written about him, and it was too late to rewrite history. He appeared one last time, in 1964’s The Carpetbaggers, as an aging western star. He got decent notices and there was talk of a comeback as a character actor, à la Edward G. Robinson, but it wasn’t to be. The once beautiful lead of such films as Lucky Jordan, Two Years Before the Mast, and The Great Gatsby was simply used up. On January 29, 1964, eight weeks prior to the release of The Carpetbaggers, Ladd’s butler discovered his body in his Palm Springs bedroom. Having mixed liquor and sleeping pills one time too many, his body finally failed. It’s easy to believe he killed himself, but whether he chose to end his life that night or not, the more important truth is that some people are simply not blessed with happiness, despite fame and fortune, and try as they might their pain is such that it eventually overwhelms them. Nobody in Hollywood was surprised to learn that Alan Ladd was dead.

***

Returning to This Gun for Hire after viewing the full arc of Ladd’s career is jarring: his blonde hair is burned into our memory, though for his debut Paramount ironically dyed his hair black — a character named Raven couldn’t possibly be fair-haired. Ladd’s mop had held him back for years —studios believed dark hair photographed better! Paramount, home of Sterling Hayden and William Holden, was the only lot where sandy hair wasn’t considered a setback. However it’s the industry’s never-ending campaign to camouflage Ladd’s height that we recall now, particularly in This Gun for Hire. Few other actors have been so stigmatized by their shortness, Ladd especially so because he was a screen tough guy. Sure, Edward G. Robinson was Little Caesar, but with him size was part of his swagger, an integral part of his screen image — and unlike Ladd, Robinson was never a romantic leading man. In Ladd’s case, everyone wished he were taller. He stood 5’6”, as tall as Cagney and just two measly inches shorter than Bogart. Yet there was something about his look — his boyishness, the pretty face, thin frame — that made him appear smaller than his older and more famous peers. Like most small men Ladd was sensitive; he would shy away from making personal appearances in order to avoid the surprised expressions and hurtful slights of his those surprised at his size. And while he could occasionally dodge the public, his stature was an inescapable issue on-set. Robert Preston would write of their time doing This Gun for Hire, “…you couldn’t use a stand-in when you were working in a scene with him because there would be so many cables and stands and reflectors you couldn’t get in or out. And this is what sort of stultified Laddie. They were photographing a doll … It’s so sad, because he was an awfully good actor.”
Yet it is to Ladd’s credit that Paramount went to such extremes to give him a public face, as well as conceal his height — for anyone else they wouldn’t have bothered. He was the studio’s golden goose; audiences just loved him. There was no need to purchase a major literary property or shoot on-location, Ladd’s name on the marquee ensured major profits — even if the picture was a stinker. Throughout the 1940s his movies were simply bulletproof: every single one made money, to the tune of $55,000,000 in the studio coffers. No other star made so much money in such cheap pictures. In the grand scheme of things, making him look taller was just good business.
Nowhere are the studio’s efforts to carefully cultivate Ladd’s screen image more apparent than in This Gun for Hire’s opening scene, which finds his Philip Raven waking from a night of troubled sleep. He sits up and reaches for an envelope, while palming his nickel-plated automatic. The camera work is all strictly low angle, and when Ladd finally gets off the bed his head practically brushes the ceiling. Whether it was the camera position, a shallow depth of field, or a cut-down set, the shot is obviously contrived to make Raven appear a great deal taller than Alan Ladd. When that famous kitten-hating maid shows up, itching for one of the best slaps in movie history, the camera angle shifts from low to high, and Ladd, now looming over the girl, is suddenly ten feet tall. This sort of cinematic sleight of hand would characterize his career. The studios used a number of tricks to make him appear as tall as possible: he might stand on a raised platform or his leading lady might step into a freshly dug hole. It’s worth noting that in addition to their great sexual chemistry, Paramount loved pairing Ladd with Veronica Lake because she was barely five feet tall — one of the few actresses who could wear heels and still look right to him.
Although Ladd is more often described as a movie star rather than an actor (which meant then, as it does now, that critics credited his success more to his looks than his ability), his performance in This Gun for Hire is damn good. The producers knew the film depended casting an actor able to portray a psychopathic killer who would come across as both cold-blooded and sympathetic. Ladd was blessed with a face that was chiseled and attractive, and his knife-edge voice was simply magnificent. His early-career experience as a radio actor had given him precise control over his pitch and timbre  — he could portray different emotions while keeping his face cold, making Raven one of noir’s iciest killers. In a few key moments throughout the movie Ladd softens his character just enough to give the audience a glimpse of the hurt kid lurking underneath the grim façade. The effect is powerful, and in terms of Hollywood currency, a star-maker. His special ability to play characters both vulnerable and tough-as-nails was unique — it was his special something, the “it” that made him a magnificent screen star. His physical beauty and potent chemistry with Lake was the icing on the cake. The Hayes code demanded that Raven pay for his crimes in the final reel of This Gun for Hire, but you ache for it not to be so. You wish that he could somehow survive to escape with the girl, his misdeeds revealed as a frame-up or as a hoax. Instead, the denouement is clumsy and artificial, with Lake and her putz boyfriend Preston awkwardly embracing as Ladd bleeds to death at their feet.
The New York critics may have had Alan Ladd’s number when they derided him as merely a movie star, and it may also be true that the “serious” career he wanted so badly eluded him. But in spite of all the criticism and Ladd’s immense self-loathing, his movies have pleased millions. He made his first splash as a professional killer in an iconic film noir, establishing a potent new character type that would stand the test of time and be exploited to the point of cliché in the crime pictures of the forties and fifties. From trendsetting early efforts such as This Gun for Hire and The Glass Key, through the more mature The Blue Dahlia, and even in less well known noirs such as Calcutta, Chicago Deadline, and the fantastic Appointment with Danger, Ladd was a key actor in the canon of film noir. His screen charisma, immense popularity, and ability to humanize the hoodlum ensured the continued development of the noir style in the Hollywood studio system; and his movies have weathered the years in ways he couldn’t possibly have imagined. His last great role came as the good-guy hero in what many consider to be the American western.
And he thought he was small. 

stripe

This essay was originally published in Noir City, the magazine of the Film Noir Foundation. If the noir community has a hub, it’s the FNF. My pals over there are working hard to preserve original 35 mm prints of classic noirs, putting on the fantastic Noir City film festivals, and publishing a great magazine. Consider clicking the link and sending ’em a couple bucks. They’ll put it to good use — you’ll become a real part of film conservation, and get some cool swag too. 

January 30, 2012

TRANSATLANTIC (1931)



I’ll admit I’m cheating a little by essaying Transatlantic here, but the film’s final few moments — a gun-in-hand, cat-and-mouse chase over the catwalks and up and down the ladders of the steamy bowels of an ocean liner — is as vividly expressionistic as anything you’ve seen in the noir movies of the forties and fifties.

Practically no one has seen Transatlantic (31 votes on IMDb at the time of this writing), but it is not a forgotten film — plenty of folks want to see it, but just haven’t had the opportunity. It hasn’t ever been released on tape or disc; it hasn’t aired on any of the classic movie channels, and it is conspicuously absent from those movie download sites on the Internet. I purchased my copy from afar, and consequently was not surprised to see the opening title cards displayed in French. Transatlantic is an American film from William Fox, and all of the spoken dialogue is of course in English, but my copy must have been duped some years ago from a French 35mm print. There are two newspaper cutaway shots, (where the audience is shown a newspaper page that helps develop the story), that are also in French, though fortunately my grasp of that language was sufficient enough to get the point.
 
It’s a singularly a remarkable film, which is only partly why it’s so highly sought after. The primary reason is that it’s also an Oscar winner: Gordon Wiles took home the statuette for art direction, though if there had been a prize for film editing awarded at the 1931-1932 ceremony, this film and editor Jack Murray would have won it. (There were just a dozen competitive awards that year; the editing category was still two years away.) Easily as noteworthy as the art direction — and to contemporary sensibilities probably moreso — is the trendsetting deep-focus photography of James Wong Howe, by 1931 already a virtuoso of the movie camera. And while it might be somewhat unfair to deny kudos for Transatlantic’s astonishing visuals to director William K. Howard, it must be said that while Howard made a few good pictures, none of them are as striking as this one, obliging us to award the lion’s share of the credit to Howe, Wiles, and Murray.  

There’s very little dialogue in opening sequence — though there’s a cacophony of noise. The titular ocean liner is preparing to leave New York for England, and we are treated to the dizzying chaos surrounding departure, all characterized by such dazzlingly showy filmmaking that one wonders if Busby Berkeley wasn’t somehow involved. Five and a half minutes of crane shots, dolly shots, tracking shots, and zooms; high angles, low angles, long shots and close-ups; the rich and the poor; the young and the old; drunken, sober, elated, and in tears; steerage and first-class; passengers and crew; taxis and barking dogs. It’s a delightfully frenetic opening, compressing the entire hubbub of departure into a few superbly edited moments. And while such a pace can’t be maintained for long, the opening sets the expectation for a fast paced and exciting film — one that is book-ended with an expressionistic sequence that nearly matches it for sheer visual enjoyment.
 
No one could claim that Transatlantic ever drags, though it necessarily has to slow down through its center. In the wake of the ship’s departure we get to know and travel with the passengers central to the story. I’m not interested in summarizing the plot, but the narrative concerns a group of unrelated travelers from assorted circumstances whose shipboard lives intertwine in unexpected ways. Yet unlike many other films of the period, this is not a particularly plot-heavy film. And although it runs barely more than an hour, its cast of characters are all surprising well drawn, and avoid cliché almost entirely. Characters meet and interact, but one doesn’t have the impression initially that the film is moving inexorably towards some resolution of story, that out ultimate goal is to find out “what happened.” Following this, it is possible to think of this as a sort of Grand Hotel at sea, though Transatlantic is more consciously visual, less star-driven, and churns on mystery rather than melodrama.

The star is Edmund Lowe, who plays the mysterious, yet refined and tuxedoed Monty Greer — we assume he’s a high stakes casino gambler or a gentleman thief — seemingly on the run. Also travelling are the Grahams (John Halliday and Myrna Loy) — he’s a wealthy financier and philanderer, she’s the devoted, even if not so naïve wife. What she doesn’t know, however, is that her husband’s bank just went belly-up, and he’s absconding with the funds. The news of their misfortune catches up to them mid-voyage via the ship’s newspaper, sending into hysterics many of the ship’s other passengers, particularly the pedantic Mr. Kramer (Jean Hersholt), who heads for Graham’s cabin and a date with destiny…

There’s more to learn about the characters, but I won’t get into that stuff here. The movie builds up to the gem of a climax I mentioned earlier, where Lowe uses a handgun to tie up all of the story’s loose ends. It would be a crime to give the thing away, but this scene in particular is what I feel lets me get away with writing Transatlantic up on a page devoted to noir and crime films. Anyone who sees the sequence can’t deny that it must have been highly influential to the generation of filmmakers who would immerse themselves in the noir style. Taking place entirely within the mechanical confines of the ship’s darkest and most inaccessible spaces, Lowe chases his quarry through a warren of pipes and pistons, up ladders and across narrow grates, around corners over ledges. And through the steam — what steam! — billowing from countless valves seen and unseen, lit magnificently by innumerable well-hidden key lights. It’s tense, expressionistic, and highly stylized. The actors must have sweated ten pounds off in the filming, and had a glorious time doing it. If it was ever true of a film, the denouement is worth the price of admission.

All too often we think we have the lineage of film noir completely pinned down and accounted for. Literary sources, cinematic sources, and even the studios and filmmakers themselves — all lined up and accounted for like the neat rows of faces in a mug book. Then a movie like Transatlantic — an ultra-chic art deco character mystery — bubbles up from the forgotten past, and reminds us that film can be a frustratingly and wonderfully nebulous art form, and that we aren’t quite as smart as we think we are. 

Transatlantic (1931)
Directed by William K. Howard
Written by Guy Bolton and Lynn Starling
Cinematography by James Wong Howe
Art Direction By Gordon Wiles
Starring Edmund Lowe, Myrna Loy, and Jean Hersholt
Released by Twentieth Century Fox
Running Time: 78 minutes








January 16, 2012

CHINATOWN AT MIDNIGHT (1949)





“You’re a very paradoxical young man.”


Shops closing early! There’s a killer thief on the loose in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, and the cops are hot on his trail. That’s a bare bones plot description if ever there was one, yet it jibes well with Chinatown at Midnight — a rabbit punch of a movie that cashes in on the success of He Walked by Night, the granddaddy of film noir cop procedurals, released to theaters just a year before. It’s a fast paced little movie with just a few cheap sets and scenes glued together by plenty of voice-of-god narration. But it also boasts some solid basic filmmaking; looking good in spite of its meager budget, with some striking photography and a few flashy sequences that belie its doghouse budget. The film is ruined by its sloppy, often nonsensical script, though to its credit it manages to dodge the expected racial stereotypes.

The man on the lam is Clifford Ward, played by Hurd Hatfield, who had a modest acting career after making a big splash as the title character in 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hatfield seems a little too urbane to be credible as the unbalanced heist man-cum-killer in this film, but the movie does its best to justify his casting by spinning the murderer as a multi-lingual dandy whose bachelor pad landlady raves about his “excellent taste for a young man.” Hatfield’s Clifford is in cahoots with an upscale interior decorator Lisa Marcel (Jacqueline DeWit). She locates expensive pieces in expensive shops; then he shows up at closing time and knocks the places over. Maybe he loves the older woman, maybe he doesn’t — who knows the angles? She doesn’t make eyes at him and she doesn’t pay him off either. We never get the dope on their relationship. Maybe Clifford just likes to takes risks — he certainly has no qualms about killing. Just after we meet him, he visits a curio shop in Chinatown and guns down the young clerk; when the girl in the back room tries to call the cops he blasts her too. In a veer from the expected, Clifford actually picks up the receiver and completes her phone call: “come quick, there’s been a robbery and shooting!” The zinger is that his frantic exchange with the switchboard operator is in fluent Chinese.

So that’s why we get Hurd Hatfield instead of a tough monkey like Charles McGraw or Mark Stevens. Our boy is able to call in his crime with a Cantonese dialect, convincing the cops that their quarry must be Chinese. From that moment onward Chinatown at Midnight is a cat-and-mouse game between Clifford and San Francisco’s finest, led by the pugnacious Captain Brown, played by iconic film noir actor Tom Powers. (His name might not be that familiar, but Powers probably appeared in a million crime films — often as a cop — though he got his bust in the noir hall of fame for playing the ill-fated Mr. Dietrichson in the big one, Double Indemnity.) The procedural aspects of Chinatown at Midnight are handled with care, showing viewers a few of the clever ruses used by the police to ferret out a suspect — the best is when a clever matron poses as a census taker in order to search the flophouses and tenements. The film is divided roughly in half between Clifford’s occasionally witty escapes and the semi-doc cop stuff, but the thing never really gets off the ground until the final reel, when Clifford starts to knuckle under from a nagging case of malaria and the ever-tightening dragnet. He finally takes to the rooftops, automatic in hand, for an exciting showdown with the buys in blue — pity our boy Clifford: they've got Tommy guns.

This is a fairly competent and successful effort for all involved, except the hack screenwriters. The worst moment in the story has to be the most eyeball-rolling example of shoddy police work in the entire canon of B movies — one that altogether sums up the visual strengths and the narrative weaknesses of the film: there’s a sequence in the middle that places Clifford within arm’s reach of justice. Having just killed again to keep the law at bay, he is forced to hide in a darkened room after his shots draw the police. What follows is exciting stuff, well-edited, strikingly filmed, and very tense — culminating in a pitch black exchange of gunfire that brings to mind Henry Morgan’s big moment in Red Light. It’s an exhilarating scene, the sort of thing that draws us all to film noir. Yet after Clifford makes a break for it, shedding his jacket, tie, and .38 revolver in a back alley garbage bin, he attempts to hide by shuffling into a queue of four or five down-and-outers waiting in a bread line. When the dicks come huffing and puffing around the corner a breath or two later, they just give up — tossing their hands into the air without so much as a look around, completely giving up, but not before adding for our sake, “Funny, he didn’t look Chinese to me!” Too bad for them that their rabbit is five feet away, and all they have to do is brace the hobos in order to put Clifford in the little green room at Quentin. They can’t even manage a pathetic “which way did he go?”

Photographed by prolific journeyman Henry Freulich, clearly influenced by John Alton, Chinatown at Midnight is heavily steeped in the noir visual style. The cardboard sets and low rent cast are more emblematic of a poverty row effort than a second-feature from a little major like Columbia, but the studio’s B-roll exteriors of various San Francisco locales almost pull off the illusion of an on-location shoot, and further separate it from Poverty Row. The acting here is merely passable and the script is a bloody shame, but Freulich and director Seymour Friedman give the finished film has a strong visual identity, even if everything else is from hunger.

Chinatown at Midnight (1949)
Directed by Seymour Friedman
Produced by Sam Katzman
Written by Robert Libbott and Frank Burt
Cinematography by Henry Freulich
Art Direction by Paul Palmentola
Starring Hurd Hatfield, Jacqueline DeWit, and Tom Powers
Distributed by Columbia Pictures
Running time 67 minutes.

December 29, 2011

UNCHAINED (1955)




Jail was on everyone’s mind in the fifties. During the war years, prison populations in the United States had been greatly reduced while inmates were paroled into the armed services. Yet in the years immediately afterwards crime rates spiked, heavily taxing the federal prison system as well as those of many states. Conditions worsened as convict populations rose, leading to an epidemic of prison riots that swept the country in the early fifties. One source notes twenty riots in 1952 alone. Inmates blamed overpopulation, inhumane facilities, hard labor, and rampant corruption as reasons for the unrest — and the Eisenhower government was ready to listen. In contrast to a veneer of conservatism, conformity, and material culture, it was an era of progressive ideas, of the burgeoning civil rights movement, of the rise of the social sciences, and of sweeping societal reform. The prevailing attitude towards the prison system underwent fundamental changes, even the nomenclature itself changed: institutions began to be referred to as correctional facilities rather than penitentiaries. Prisoners were no longer behind bars solely to be punished or simply removed from decent society; they were there to be educated, rehabilitated, and reintroduced as productive citizens.  

In this as in most things, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon, putting a new spin on one of the movie industry’s oldest staples: the prison picture. A spate of new movies hit theaters and drive-ins, running the gamut from prestige to B-grade productions. They focused on men, women, and juvenile delinquents; gangsters, career crooks, or first-time losers — surviving on the inside, trying like hell to get out, or headed for the gas chamber. Exploitation, exposé, film noir, or even glossy melodrama. The subject of this piece is 1955’s Unchained. With only 53 votes on IMDb it’s one of the forgotten films of the period — every one of its reviews was written by someone with vague memories of seeing it as a youth. Unchained’s greatest claim to fame is as the source of the Oscar-nominated song Unchained Melody, sung on-screen by actor Jerry Paris and eventually recorded and made famous by the Righteous Brothers. It’s a shame, as the film has plenty to offer, especially to those interested in crime and prison films.

Made in the spirit of rehabilitation and reform, the Unchained tells the story of Chino, or the “Prison without Walls,” and, as stated in the film’s closing title card, is “suggested by the life and work of Kenyon J. Scudder, and by his book Prisoners are People.” Chino opened in 1941 as the California Institution for Men, the largest minimum-security prison, or “honor farm,” in the world. The rules were simple: no walls, no armed guards, no gun towers; the only barrier between the inmates and the outside world is a livestock fence — in an early scene the warden shocks the new men by showing them how to go over without cutting their hands on the wire. Inmates live in dormitory style housing and are free to visit with family and friends every weekend. Opportunities for self-improvement and self-governance abound. Only one in four California prisoners are eligible for incarceration at Chino, yet any man who flees is barred from return and must do the rest of his time with the hard boys at Folsom or the big Q. And as opposed to other such prisons, the inmates at Chino are selected for their temperament rather than the nature of their offense, meaning that the population is composed of everyone from murderers and armed robbers to mere paperhangers and bunco artists.


The notion of easy escape forms the dramatic thrust of the film. All of the young men inside are grappling with the idea, while most of the older inmates have made their peace with it. Steve Davitt is a Montana bumpkin doing a first-offender sentence for aggravated assault — he beat up an employee he believed had stolen from him. Davitt is young, entitled, and not used to living by anyone else’s rules. He thinks himself unfairly jailed, and wants to get out to be with his wife and son. Joe Ravens (Jerry Paris), an older man doing time for murder, takes Davitt under his wing spends the majority of Unchained’s brief running time trying to convince Steve to buck up and serve out his small sentence. The unlikely friendship between the older black man and his young white protégé has predictable ups and downs, and culminates in the film’s unexpected and surprising final scene. Along the way there are numerous subplots involving other inmates, most of which riff on Chino’s rule that allows the men weekly contact with members of the opposite sex. A piano player with busted fingers finds love, while a thief with a peroxide blonde realizes she just wanted him for the loot. And of course there are the men that take advantage of the system, trying to gain power or find an easy way out — with plenty of fisticuffs and even a play on the famous blowtorch scene from Brute Force. At each and every turn warden Scudder is involved, helping the good guys and sending the hoods on their way to San Quentin.

Unchained has an intriguing cast, beginning with star Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch. Certainly Hirsch was no actor, but he isn’t terrible either — the sort of guy who hits his marks and reads his lines, albeit too stiffly for a film career that would outlast his popularity as an athlete. His appeal to Hollywood producers was understandable — he stood well over six feet, with blonde hair, a square chin, and chiseled, all-American features. The Wisconsin-born Hirsch was an all-American running back at Michigan, the only athlete in school history to letter in four sports in a single year. He spent a decade with the L.A. Rams, eventually to be elected to the NFL Hall of Fame. He retired as the University of Wisconsin’s athletic director in 1987. Hirsch’s stint as a movie star was entirely contained in his tenure with the Rams. His first film was Crazylegs (1953), another Oscar nominee in which the running back starred in his own life story. He followed with Unchained, and then played co-pilot to a nervous Dana Andrews in 1957’s Zero Hour!, his last film.

The slickest and most ironic bit of casting is Chester Morris as warden Scudder. Forgotten by the general public, Morris was nevertheless a movie star of the first order for more than two decades, from the advent of talking films throughout the forties. He was often cast as a gangster, and his greatest roles came as the good-looking lead in a pair of crime films, Alibi (1929) for which Morris was a best actor nominee, and The Big House (1930) — the granddaddy of all Hollywood prison pictures. As a matter of fact, in 1930 Morris had one of the best years in film history: he was the male lead in seven films, with eight Oscar nominations between them, including the Norma Shearer best actress statuette winner, The Divorcée. In 1941 Morris appeared in his first Boston Blackie film, and would reprise the role more than a dozen times throughout the decade. The series of immensely popular B comedies revived his acting career, and led to a further two decades of television work. Morris’s career would touch seven decades, but ended sadly when he committed suicide while undergoing cancer treatment in 1970.


In the end, the progressive vision that resulted in a prison like Chino just couldn’t last forever. As American culture transformed throughout the Vietnam era and politicians eventually launched the “war on drugs,” correctional populations increased dramatically. Chino has long ceased to be known as the “prison without walls,” and is depicted in an entirely different light in the 1998 film American History X, in which Edward Norton’s character serves hard time for manslaughter and Chino subjects him to the worst prison life has to offer.

Unchained (1955)
stripe
Written, Produced, and Directed by Hall Bartlett
Starring Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, Jerry Paris, Barbara Hale, and Chester Morris
Cinematography by Virgil Miller
Based on the book Prisoners are People by Kenyon Scudder
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Running time: 75 minutes.