Where Danger Lives

TRANSATLANTIC (1931)

2012-01-30T00:09:00.002-05:00

I’lladmit I’m cheating a little by essaying Transatlantichere, but the film’s final few moments — a gun-in-hand, cat-and-mousechase over the catwalks and up and down the ladders of the steamy bowels of anocean liner — is as vividly expressionistic as anything you’ve seen in thenoir movies of the forties and fifties.

Practicallyno one has seen Transatlantic (31votes on IMDb at the time of this writing), but it is not a forgotten film— plenty of folks want to seeit, but just haven’t had the opportunity. It hasn’t ever been released on tapeor disc; it hasn’t aired on any of the classic movie channels, and it isconspicuously absent from those movie download sites on the Internet. Ipurchased my copy from afar, and consequently was not surprised tosee the opening title cards displayed in French. Transatlantic is an American film from William Fox, and all of thespoken dialogue is of course in English, but my copy must have been duped someyears 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 wassufficient enough to get the point.

It’sa singularly a remarkable film, which is only partly why it’s so highly soughtafter. The primary reason is that it’s also an Oscar winner: Gordon Wiles tookhome the statuette for art direction, though if there had been a prize for filmediting 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 wasstill two years away.) Easily as noteworthy as the art direction — and tocontemporary sensibilities probably moreso — is the trendsetting deep-focus photography of JamesWong Howe, by 1931 already a virtuoso of the movie camera. And while it mightbe somewhat unfair to deny kudos for Transatlantic’sastonishing visuals to director William K. Howard, it must be said that whileHoward 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’svery little dialogue in opening sequence — though there’s a cacophony of noise. Thetitular ocean liner is preparing to leave New York for England, and we aretreated to the dizzying chaos surrounding departure, allcharacterized by such dazzlingly showy filmmaking that one wonders if BusbyBerkeley wasn’t somehow involved. Five and a half minutes of crane shots, dollyshots, tracking shots, and zooms; high angles, low angles, long shots andclose-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 adelightfully frenetic opening, compressing the entire hubbub of departureinto a few superbly edited moments. And while such a pace can’t be maintained for long, theopening sets the expectation for a fast paced and exciting film — one thatis book-ended with an expressionistic sequence that nearly matches it forsheer visual enjoyment.

Noone could claim that Transatlanticever drags, though it necessarily has to slow down through its center. In thewake of the ship’s departure we get to know and travel with the passengerscentral to the story. I’m not interested in summarizing the plot, but thenarrative concerns a group of unrelated travelers from assorted circumstanceswhose shipboard lives intertwine in unexpected ways. Yet unlike many otherfilms of the period, this is not a particularly plot-heavy film. And althoughit runs barely more than an hour, its cast of characters are all surprisingwell drawn, and avoid cliché almost entirely. Characters meet and interact, butone doesn’t have the impression initially that the film is moving inexorablytowards some resolution of story, that out ultimate goal is to find out “whathappened.” Following this, it is possible to think of this as a sort of Grand Hotel at sea, though Transatlantic is more consciouslyvisual, less star-driven, and churns on mystery rather than melodrama.

Thestar is Edmund Lowe, who plays the mysterious, yet refined and tuxedoed MontyGreer — we assume he’s a high stakes casino gambler or a gentleman thief — seemingly onthe run. Alsotravelling are the Grahams (John Halliday and Myrna Loy) — he’s a wealthyfinancier and philanderer, she’s the devoted, even if not so naïve wife. Whatshe doesn’t know, however, is that her husband’s bank just went belly-up, andhe’s absconding with the funds. The news of their misfortune catches up to themmid-voyage via the ship’s newspaper, sending into hysterics many of the ship’sother passengers, particularly the pedantic Mr. Kramer (Jean Hersholt), whoheads for Graham’s cabin and a date with destiny…

There’smore to learn about the characters, but I won’t get into that stuff here. Themovie builds up to the gem of a climax I mentioned earlier, where Lowe uses ahandgun to tie up all of the story’s loose ends. It would be a crime to givethe thing away, but this scene in particular is what I feel lets me get awaywith writing Transatlantic up on apage devoted to noir and crime films. Anyone who sees the sequence can’t denythat it must have been highly influential to the generation of filmmakers whowould immerse themselves in the noir style. Taking place entirely within themechanical confines of the ship’s darkest and most inaccessible spaces, Lowechases his quarry through a warren of pipes and pistons, up ladders and acrossnarrow grates, around corners over ledges. And through the steam — what steam! — billowingfrom countless valves seen and unseen, lit magnificently by innumerablewell-hidden key lights. It’s tense, expressionistic, and highly stylized. Theactors must have sweated ten pounds off in the filming, and had a glorious timedoing it. If it was ever true of a film, the denouement is worth the price ofadmission.

Alltoo often we think we have the lineage of film noir completely pinned down and accountedfor. Literary sources, cinematic sources, and even the studios and filmmakersthemselves — all lined up and accounted for like the neat rows of faces in amug 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

CHINATOWN AT MIDNIGHT (1949)

2012-01-16T23:09:00.000-05:00

“You’re a very paradoxical young man.”

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

The man on the lam is Clifford Ward, played byHurd Hatfield, who had a modest acting career after making a big splash as thetitle character in 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hatfield seems alittle too urbane to be credible as the unbalanced heist man-cum-killer in thisfilm, but the movie does its best to justify his casting by spinning themurderer as a multi-lingual dandy whose bachelor pad landlady raves about his “excellenttaste for a young man.” Hatfield’s Clifford is in cahoots with an upscaleinterior decorator Lisa Marcel (Jacqueline DeWit). She locates expensive piecesin expensive shops; then he shows up at closing time and knocks the placesover. 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 getthe dope on their relationship. Maybe Clifford just likes to takes risks — hecertainly has no qualms about killing. Just after we meet him, he visits acurio shop in Chinatown and guns down the young clerk; when the girl in theback room tries to call the cops he blasts her too. In a veer from theexpected, Clifford actually picks up the receiver and completes her phone call:“come quick, there’s been a robbery and shooting!” The zinger is that hisfrantic exchange with the switchboard operator is in fluent Chinese.

So that’s why we get Hurd Hatfield instead of atough monkey like Charles McGraw or Mark Stevens. Our boy is able to call inhis crime with a Cantonese dialect, convincing the cops that their quarry mustbe Chinese. From that moment onward Chinatown at Midnight is acat-and-mouse game between Clifford and San Francisco’s finest, led by thepugnacious Captain Brown, played by iconic film noir actor Tom Powers. (Hisname might not be that familiar, but Powers probably appeared in a millioncrime films — often as a cop — though he got his bust in the noir hall of famefor 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 asuspect — the best is when a clever matron poses as a census taker in order tosearch the flophouses and tenements. The film is divided roughly in halfbetween Clifford’s occasionally witty escapes and the semi-doc cop stuff, butthe thing never really gets off the ground until the final reel, when Cliffordstarts to knuckle under from a nagging case of malaria and the ever-tighteningdragnet. He finally takes to the rooftops, automatic in hand, for an excitingshowdown with the buys in blue — pity our boy Clifford: they've got Tommy guns.

This is a fairly competent and successful effortfor all involved, except the hack screenwriters. The worst moment in the storyhas to be the most eyeball-rolling example of shoddy police work in the entirecanon of B movies — one that altogether sums up the visual strengths and thenarrative weaknesses of the film: there’s a sequence in the middle that placesClifford within arm’s reach of justice. Having just killed again to keep thelaw at bay, he is forced to hide in a darkened room after his shots draw thepolice. What follows is exciting stuff, well-edited, strikingly filmed, andvery tense — culminating in a pitch black exchange of gunfire that brings tomind 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 abreak for it, shedding his jacket, tie, and .38 revolver in a back alleygarbage bin, he attempts to hide by shuffling into a queue of four or fivedown-and-outers waiting in a bread line. When the dicks come huffing andpuffing around the corner a breath or two later, they just give up — tossingtheir hands into the air without so much as a look around, completely givingup, 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 dois brace the hobos in order to put Clifford in the little green room atQuentin. They can’t even manage a pathetic “which way did he go?”

Photographed by prolific journeyman HenryFreulich, clearly influenced by John Alton, Chinatown at Midnight isheavily steeped in the noir visual style. The cardboard sets and low rent castare more emblematic of a poverty row effort than a second-feature from a littlemajor like Columbia, but the studio’s B-roll exteriors of various San Franciscolocales almost pull off the illusion of an on-location shoot, and furtherseparate it from Poverty Row. The acting here is merely passable and the scriptis a bloody shame, but Freulich and director Seymour Friedman give the finishedfilm 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 TomPowers

Distributed by Columbia Pictures

Running time 67 minutes.

UNCHAINED (1955)

2011-12-29T17:57:00.000-05:00

Jailwas on everyone’s mind in the fifties. During the war years, prison populationsin the United States had been greatly reduced while inmates were paroled intothe 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 ofprison riots that swept the country in the early fifties. One source notes twentyriots in 1952 alone. Inmates blamed overpopulation, inhumane facilities, hardlabor, and rampant corruption as reasons for the unrest — and theEisenhower government was ready to listen. In contrast to a veneer ofconservatism, conformity, and material culture, it was an era of progressiveideas, of the burgeoning civil rights movement, of the rise of the socialsciences, and of sweeping societal reform. The prevailing attitude towards theprison system underwent fundamental changes, even the nomenclature itselfchanged: institutions began to be referred to as correctional facilities ratherthan penitentiaries. Prisoners were no longer behind bars solely to be punishedor simply removed from decent society; they were there to be educated,rehabilitated, and reintroduced as productive citizens.

Inthis as in most things, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon, putting a new spinon one of the movie industry’s oldest staples: the prison picture. A spate of new movies hit theaters and drive-ins, running thegamut from prestige to B-grade productions. They focused on men, women, andjuvenile delinquents; gangsters, career crooks, or first-time losers— surviving on the inside, trying like hell to get out, or headed for thegas chamber. Exploitation, exposé, film noir, or even glossy melodrama. Thesubject 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 ofseeing it as a youth. Unchained’sgreatest claim to fame is as the source of the Oscar-nominated song Unchained Melody, sung on-screen byactor Jerry Paris and eventually recorded and made famous by the RighteousBrothers. It’s a shame, as the film has plenty to offer, especially to thoseinterested in crime and prison films.

Madein 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 andwork of Kenyon J. Scudder, and by his book Prisonersare People.” Chino opened in 1941 as the California Institution for Men,the largest minimum-security prison, or “honor farm,” in the world. The rules weresimple: no walls, no armed guards, no gun towers; the only barrier between theinmates and the outside world is a livestock fence — in an early scene thewarden shocks the new men by showing them how to go over without cutting theirhands on the wire. Inmates live in dormitory style housing and are free tovisit with family and friends every weekend. Opportunities for self-improvementand self-governance abound. Only one in four California prisoners are eligiblefor incarceration at Chino, yet any man who flees is barred from return andmust do the rest of his time with the hard boys at Folsom or the big Q. And asopposed to other such prisons, the inmates at Chino are selected for theirtemperament rather than the nature of their offense, meaning that thepopulation is composed of everyone from murderers and armed robbers to merepaperhangers and bunco artists.

Thenotion of easy escape forms the dramatic thrust of the film. All of the youngmen inside are grappling with the idea, while most of the older inmates have madetheir peace with it. Steve Davitt is a Montana bumpkin doing a first-offender sentencefor aggravated assault — he beat up an employee he believed had stolen fromhim. Davitt is young, entitled, and not used to living by anyone else’s rules. Hethinks himself unfairly jailed, and wants to get out to be with his wife andson. Joe Ravens (Jerry Paris), an older man doing time for murder, takes Davittunder his wing spends the majority of Unchained’sbrief running time trying to convince Steve to buck up and serve out his smallsentence. The unlikely friendship between the older black man and his youngwhite protégé has predictable ups and downs, and culminates in the film’sunexpected and surprising final scene. Along the way there are numeroussubplots involving other inmates, most of which riff on Chino’s rule thatallows the men weekly contact with members of the opposite sex. A piano playerwith busted fingers finds love, while a thief with a peroxide blonde realizesshe just wanted him for the loot. And of course there are the men that takeadvantage of the system, trying to gain power or find an easy way out — withplenty of fisticuffs and even a play on the famous blowtorch scene from Brute Force. At each and every turnwarden Scudder is involved, helping the good guys and sending the hoods ontheir 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 andreads his lines, albeit too stiffly for a film career that would outlast hispopularity as an athlete. His appeal to Hollywood producers was understandable— he stood well over six feet, with blonde hair, a square chin, andchiseled, all-American features. The Wisconsin-born Hirsch was an all-Americanrunning back at Michigan, the only athlete in school history to letter in foursports in a single year. He spent a decade with the L.A. Rams, eventually to beelected to the NFL Hall of Fame. He retired as the University of Wisconsin’sathletic director in 1987. Hirsch’s stint as a movie star was entirelycontained in his tenure with the Rams. His first film was Crazylegs (1953), another Oscar nominee in which the running back starredin 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.

Theslickest and most ironic bit of casting is Chester Morris as warden Scudder.Forgotten by the general public, Morris was nevertheless a movie star of thefirst order for more than two decades, from the advent of talking filmsthroughout the forties. He was often cast as a gangster, and his greatest rolescame 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) — thegranddaddy of all Hollywood prison pictures. As a matter of fact, in 1930 Morrishad 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 bestactress statuette winner, The Divorcée.In 1941 Morris appeared in his first Boston Blackie film, and would reprise therole more than a dozen times throughout the decade. The series of immenselypopular B comedies revived his acting career, and led to a further two decadesof television work. Morris’s career would touch seven decades, but ended sadlywhen he committed suicide while undergoing cancer treatment in 1970.

Inthe end, the progressive vision that resulted in a prison like Chino justcouldn’t last forever. As American culture transformed throughout the Vietnamera and politicians eventually launched the “war on drugs,” correctionalpopulations increased dramatically. Chino has long ceased to be known as the“prison without walls,” and is depicted in an entirely different light in the1998 film American History X, inwhich Edward Norton’s character serves hard time for manslaughter and Chino subjects him to the worst prison life has to offer.

Unchained (1955)

Written,Produced, and Directed by Hall Bartlett
StarringElroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, Jerry Paris, Barbara Hale, and Chester Morris

Cinematographyby Virgil Miller

Basedon the book Prisoners are People by KenyonScudder

Distributedby Warner Bros.

Runningtime: 75 minutes.

FILM NOIR: FRENCH POSTER STYLE

2011-12-12T15:39:00.001-05:00

Happy holidays! Here are a dozen French posters for various American crime / noir films — a few from my very own walls! These are all French Grande size, or 47" x 63", a few featuring poster art by the extraordinary Boris Grisson and Rene Peron. These are all cleaned up and sparkly for your right-clicking pleasure. Enjoy, you dirty rats!

The Postman Always Rings Twice

The Big Shot

All Through the Night

The Big Clock

The Big Heat

Call Northside, 777

Dark Passage

Kiss of Death

The Enforcer

The Killers (1966)

The Stranger

The Two Mrs. Carrolls

TIME TABLE (1956)

2011-11-22T20:04:00.001-05:00

For the men of film noir, the ones who fought thewar and returned to a changing country, the idea of a dutiful and submissivewife, a white collar, and a white picket fence just couldn’t cut it — andheaven knows our noir heroes tried to fit back in. They squirm in their suits,tugging at those tight collars, chewing their nails, always on the make forthat thing that might break the monotony and remind them of what it feels liketo be alive. Pour another drink, Don Draper.

Despitea five-decade career in film and television, Mark Stevens was most visible inthe years immediately after the war. He made his first big splash with LucilleBall and Bill Bendix in 1946’s The DarkCorner, followed by a pair of notable 1948 films: the FBI-noir The Street with No Name and the Academyheavyweight The Snake Pit. Stevens isof less interest for those projects (to me, at least) than he is for his 1950swork, after he struck out on his own. He was the force behind his own filmproduction and music publishing companies (he could sing), as well as the starand occasional director of Big Town,a popular weekly television series in which he played a crime-busting newsman.Although Stevens failed to carve out a lasting place as filmmaker, his earliestefforts, Cry Vengeance (1954) and Time Table (1956) — bothsurprisingly good noirs — beg for increased attention in contemporary filmcircles and make one wish the fledgling director had framed more crimemovies.

Unfortunatelyfor anyone who hasn’t seen Time Table,it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling its big twist — so let’s get it outof the way right now (and don’t worry, the reveal occurs in the first half ofthe film): Stevens plays an insurance investigator who — here it comes —turns out to be the brains behind the very robbery he’s asked to solve.Although it’s an old saw that may bring to mind Double Indemnity, Time Tablemore closely resembles titles like Roadblock,Private Hell 36, and The Man Who Cheated Himself. Itdraws from a myriad of noir films rather than any one in particular. This muchis certain: in spite of being a cinematic mutt, Time Table is an intriguing movie that deserves to be seen.However, if your taste prohibits enjoyment of a “derivative” film, then itprobably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you are able to connect with anoir picture that utilizes familiar genre tropes and still manages tocaptivate, keep reading. Or better yet, go track this down. It will surpriseyou.

Themovie opens with a ten-minute-long heist sequence, cleverly staged on a trainspeeding west through the Arizona night. A polished crook posing as a doctormanages to crack the train’s safe and snatch all the money inside. The job isperfectly planned and calmly executed, using high-tech explosives, a preciselydetailed timetable, and a cagey scheme involving a “sick” passenger and his“wife” — both in on the caper. The trio of bandits exit the train in a scrubbydesert town, and abscond in an ambulance with half a million dollars. Therailroad’s insurers will have to make good on the policy unless the money isrecovered, so they assign the case to Charlie Norman (Stevens), their best man,forcing him and his wife Ruth (Marianne Stewart) to delay their long-plannedMexican vacation. Charlie is partnered with railroad detective and best friend(yeah, yeah) Joe Armstrong (King Calder).

Thesecond act contains a healthy dose of cop procedure. Charlie and Joe chaseleads, pal around with the yokel cops, and generally marvel at the skill oftheir quarry — all while Charlie becomes more preoccupied and nervous. We’reconvinced his frustration owes to the lost vacation, until the twist occurs andwe discover otherwise: Charlie masterminded the entire robbery in the firstplace, and he’s torn up because his perfect crime is unraveling all around him.He dreamt up the caper, recruited the players, and worked out the all-importanttimetable. Why? For some unknown reason Charlie is fed up — with his job, withhis home, and with his marriage. He intended to pull off the heist, then usehis Mexican holiday as a means to skip out on his old life and rendezvous withhis accomplices south of the border. There he intends to cut up the money andstart fresh in Argentina with new squeeze Linda (Felicia Farr). Yet fate, as itso often does in film noir, has a different agenda: one of the crew is shot andkilled, throwing off the timetable and forcing everyone to hole up. In themeantime, Joe’s investigation starts to pay off, while Charlie grows moredesperate. He is finally forced to commit a murder in order to protect himself,scaring his remaining co-conspirators into making a run for it. Just as Joefinally gets wise to the whole scheme, Charlie heads for Tijuana in alast-ditch effort to find Linda. With the Federales riding shotgun, Joe cornersthe lovers in TJ and guns are drawn…

Whetherexplored deeply or viewed as pure escapism, TimeTable scores. Aben Kandel’s (City forConquest) accomplished script surpasses typical B movie fare, with anairtight plot and plenty of tough, pithy dialog. Kandel also has a gift forsubtle double-entendres that reinforce the story’s central theme and rewardattentive viewers. For example, early on when Ruth replaces the blanket on adozing Charlie, he mumbles, “What’re you trying to do, smother me?” All ofKandel’s characters, in one way or another and regardless of their gender, arestruggling to overcome the emptiness of a world in which they’ve discovered,all too late, that the fairy tale assurances of their younger years are simplynot meant to be. Charlie finds no comfort in his bleak, middle class existence.Fulfilling the role of the perfect wife brings Ruth little but disappointment.Linda trades her alcoholic, disgraced husband for the promise of a better lifewith Charlie, but instead leaps from the frying pan into an altogether deadlierfire. Even Joe runs himself into the ground living up to the image of a deadcop father who taught him there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. In Time Table, perfection is as ethereal asthe haze of cigarette smoke that obscures each frame.

Stevens’direction might be described as workmanlike, but he understands where tolinger, when to move quickly, and how to get a lot out of his actors — Time Table has a great cast. Wesley Addy(Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened toBaby Jane?) is fantastic as the drunken ex-M.D. who holds it together justlong enough to rob the train, while King Calder, who worked previously withStevens during his run as television’s private detective Martin Kane, excels asthe relentless railroad cop. Calder’s face and body language are so hang-dog it’shard to imagine him in roles outside of the crime genre. Two of the mostmemorable performances come from actors in small parts. Jack Klugman, appearingin his first film role after having met Stevens on an episode of Big Town, plays a chain-smoking wheelmanwho squirms under the lights like nobody’s business. Klugman has just onescene, but he steals it cleanly away from Stevens and Calder. The secondstandout is Alan Reed, whose name and face may not be incredibly familiar,though his unforgettable and iconic voice certainly is — even thirty-five yearsafter his death. Reed’s stocky build, unique look, and instant pathos made hima natural for this stuff — it’s surprising he didn’t make more crime pictures.Reed vividly brings to life the helicopter pilot most responsible for Charlie’splans going down the tube. He burns the candle from both ends and pays a steepprice for turning stool pigeon — in one of the film’s best moments.

Ata quick 79 minutes, Time Table is asecond feature — it plows ahead, sacrificing much at the altar of brevity. Yetwhile similar films are repudiated as rote exercises in “what happened next?”moviemaking, they frequently provide an instructive lens through which we canexamine the cultural values of their era. TimeTable is such a film. At its core is the question of Charlie’s motivationto self-destruct, and he offers no clues beyond a vaguely expressed desire fora change. At a critical point in the final reel, Ruth confronts him:

“Charlie,why’d you do it? Why?”

“Why?What does it matter?”

Andlater in the same scene:

“Wehad so much Charlie. Why, why?”

“Thehouse becomes a prison, the job a trap.”

“Whatdid you want?”

“Anew kind of life.”

Yetthe film doesn’t explain why Charlie so desperately wants this new life.Personally and professionally he has everything a man could reasonably ask for— his situation is even admirable. Ruth is a kind and attractive woman for whomhe has genuine affection, and his tough-guy job as an insurance cop makes him abona fide man’s man. The most telling aspect of Time Table is how it takes for granted that viewers will embraceCharlie’s compulsion to escape his circumstances without being given areason.

Lookclosely at the absurdity of Charlie’s actions: he trades his job and his honorfor a satchel of money; a fine suburban home for assuredly more squalid digs inArgentina; and a caring spouse another woman, albeit younger and a littleprettier, who nevertheless seems to be cut from the same beige piece of cloth ashis wife. It’s also worth pointing out that Linda is a Mexican — another way inwhich the film drives home the point that Charlie’s all-American situationsomehow isn’t adequate. And he knows his trades are for keeps — permanentlysanctified through blood and betrayal. After all, Charlie’s a law enforcementman who, like Walter Neff, understands the risks but believes his knowledge ofthe game provides an edge. At the same time, he is aware of the loomingpossibility of the little green room at Quentin, where one’s final blackmoments are strained listening for the plop-plop-fizz-fizz of everlastingrelief.

Unlikein other noir pictures, the protagonist’s downfall can’t be attributed to afemme fatale. Time Table doesn’t have one. Sure, there’s agirl, but Charlie’s inamorata is hardly an upgrade on his wife. Here’s a guywho is winning the rat race and still wants out — he hates everything about hissituation. The answer to his motivation lies in the movie’s unrelentingcynicism. Time Table consciously subvertsthe post-war American dream of happiness through national prosperity andmaterial achievement. It thumbs its nose at the white bread promises of theEisenhower era: the steady jobs, home-sweet-homes, and June Allyson wives thatsaturated mainstream media offerings. It gives us a protagonist who hasachieved these material things and more, yet remains unfulfilled. In many ways,Charlie’s case is even more compelling than that of the pill-popping Ed Averyin another 1956 film, Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Bigger Than Life — if only because Time Table is neither a character study nor a message picture. Forthe men of film noir, the ones who fought the war and returned to a changingcountry, the idea of a dutiful and submissive wife, a white collar, and a whitepicket fence just couldn’t cut it — and heaven knows our noir heroes tried tofit back in. They squirm in their suits, tugging at those tight collars,chewing their nails, always on the make for that thing that might break themonotony and remind them of what it feels like to be alive. Pour another drink,Don Draper.

Whatmakes Time Table so enthralling (aswell as numerous other film noirs), is that while modern audiences might findCharlie Norman’s gambit unfathomable or absurd, some of the 1956 crowdundoubtedly recognized themselves in him — feeling every bit as suffocatedwhile having to acquiesce to the vanilla model of happiness offered up oncountless roadside billboards, magazine advertisements, and sponsor-centric TVprograms. Consequently, Charlie becomes a poster child for those who felttrapped in that uncanny era of prosperous conformity — and an authentic filmnoir anti-hero. In recognizing and understanding the daring of filmmakers whoso openly questioned the fleeting promises of the American Dream, we furtherappreciate the enduring allure of film noir.

Time Table (1956)

Produced and Directed by Mark Stevens

Written by Aben Kandel

Cinematography by Charles Van Enger

Art Direction by William Tuntke

Starring Mark Stevens, King Calder, Alan Reed, Jack Klugman, and Wesley Addy

Released by United Artists

Running time: 79 minutes

EXPOSED Magazine - Sept. 1956: Lana Turner and Diana Dors

2011-11-08T15:12:00.000-05:00

Put on your Sid Hudgens hats dear readers, because it’s scandal sheet time here at Where Danger Lives.

Here are two articles from the September 1956 issue of Exposed, featuring a boozing Lana Turner and the voluptuous Diana Dors. Enjoy, but keep it on the hush-hush.

(Click to view full size!)

Let me know if this post is worthwhile, as I’d like to make this an ongoing feature. I’ve got a stack of these — and I think they are too good not to share.

Film Noir Movie Posters: BURT LANCASTER

2011-10-28T13:14:00.002-04:00

Hi all. In addition to numerous essays in the queue, I’m working on a few large poster projects (particularly a major top 100 countdown) that I’m planning to begin posting during the winter break between semesters. In the meantime, I’ve been working on some smaller star-centric movie image posts — this is the first.

Burt Lancaster made a string of fine noir films in the brief period following the war that established him as a major Hollywood talent. Despite the fact that the eight films depicted here more or less represent the entirety of Lancaster’s film noir resumé, he remains one of the performers most associated with film noir — possibly because his big splash, 1946’s The Killers, was also his first screen role.

Click to view images in hi-res, and feel free to download all you wish!

The Killers - 1946 (One Sheet)

The Killers - 1946 (Belgian 14" x 18")

The Killers - 1946 (Swedish One Sheet)

The Killers - 1946 (Still Photograph)

Brute Force - 1947 (One Sheet)

Brute Force - 1947 (Title Lobby Card)

Brute Force - 1947 (Insert 14" x 36")

Brute Force - 1947 (Three Sheet - 41" x 81")

I Walk Alone - 1948 (Half Sheet 22" x 28")

I Walk Alone - 1948 (Lobby Card)

I Walk Alone - 1948 (Three Sheet)

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands - 1948 (One Sheet)

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands - 1948 (Half Sheet)

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands - 1948 (Belgian 14" x 22")

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands - 1948 (Still Photograph with Joan Fontaine 8" x 10")

Sorry, Wrong Number - 1948 (One Sheet)

Sorry, Wrong Number - 1948 (Swedish One Sheet)

Sorry, Wrong Number - 1948 (Lobby Card)

Sorry, Wrong Number - 1948 (Still Photograph)

Criss Cross (One Sheet)

Criss Cross - 1949 (Italian 4 Foglio 55" x 78")

Criss Cross - 1949 (Title Lobby Card)

Criss Cross - 1949 (1958 Re-release One Sheet)

Rope of Sand - 1949 (One Sheet)

Rope of Sand - 1949 (Insert)

Rope of Sand - 1949 (Still Photograph with Corinne Calvet)

Sweet Smell of Success - 1957 (One Sheet)

Sweet Smell of Success - 1957 (Insert)

CRIME WAVE (1954)

2011-10-18T15:00:00.002-04:00

Noir101. The Essentials. Crime Wave.

Really?

Ifthis little policier from WarnerBros. (filmed in 1952, released in ’54) isn’t part of your vocabulary then it needs to be; and considering it wasfinally released on DVD a few years ago, there’s no excuse not to see it. Crime Wave doesn’t really stand out froma narrative point of view (despite a bucket of writers); the plot is routine, like a million other secondfeatures cranked out by the studios during the fifties. Although the story andcharacters are heavily steeped in noir tropes, it’s the direction of André DeToth that sets it apart from other low budget crime pictures and demands thatit must be seen by anyone enthusiastic about film noir. It can be argued thatno other film noir is as influential as it is unknown.

Thestory is old hat: Ex-con tries to go straight. His old crew breaks out of the Qand comes knocking. When he refuses to help, they hold his fresh new wife inorder to force him to take part in one last caper. All the while, the cops are along forthe ride, except they don’t believe for a second that our boy is on the up andup.

Thecast here is special, and although Sterling Hayden isn’t (necessarily) theprotagonist, he dominates the film. This is the sort of role the movie gods hadin mind when they contrived to get Hayden in front of a camera: LAPD DetectiveLieutenant Sims, bigger and tougher than any of the hoods on the blotter. Formy money this is the role of Hayden’s career — not the meatiest or themost well known, but the one in which he leaves the impression of having been the part, rather than merely havingplayed it. Put it this way: duringthe DVD commentary, author James Ellroy asserts that Hayden in Crime Wave simply is Bud White. There are those that prefer him in The Asphalt Jungle or The Killing, but not me. There’s a vibethat Hayden has as a cop that isn’t there when he’s playing a crook: you can crossto the other side of the street and stay out of the crook’s way (and it isn’tlike you won’t see Hayden coming a mile away) but you can’t avoid the police. Withthe force of the law behind him, cop Hayden might come looking for you— and that prospect is scary as hell.

At abeefy six-and-a-half feet tall, Hayden towers over everyone else in the film. AndréDe Toth and cameraman Burt Glennon keep the camera low, catching the big fellowfrom underneath while looking down on everyone else, as if from Hayden’s point ofview. He has to slouch, unkempt— a toothpick in his mouth, scruffy hat,his tie perpetually twisted backwards — almost too big to be allowed. Thefilm has numerous stellar sequences, but as for Hayden’s presence one inparticular stands out; it begins at around the eleven-minute mark and finds thecop in his homicide division office, interviewing an eyewitness about theQuentin breakout suspects. The scene opens with Hayden at his desk, then itfollows him around the bureau, hovering over a half-dozen routine interviewsgoing on around the office. Ostensibly the purpose is pure semi-documentarystorytelling, providing audiences with an up-close look into the inner workingsof the LAPD: A middle-aged couple is extolling to one cop about how she and herguy (replete with bandages head) don’t really fight — she didn’t mean toconk him, they were just kidding around. At the next table, a hang dog B girldripping with mascara and dime-store jewelry sobs about some chuckleheadboyfriend from her past, while at yet another a career stool-pigeon chastises ajunior dick about bracing him in front of his neighbors. What makes the wholething work is the extraordinary authenticity: pay attention to what is going onin the frame away from subject,almost as if the extras forgot for a moment the cameras were rolling. And thisain’t no soundstage — most of the scenes in Crime Wave, interiors and exteriors alike, are filmed in real LosAngeles locations. And if Hayden wasn’t so utterly believable as a LAPDhomicide detective, circa 1952, none of it would work — he’s the glue thatholds the entire movie together. If part of the allure of these old films isseeing things as they actually were way back when, this is a scene (and a film)that will keep you in goose bumps.

Thenthere’s Gene Nelson, of nimble feet and Oklahoma!fame, who plays Steve Lacey, ex-con. It’s on the plus side how Nelsonunderplays his part. His performance doesn’t offer much beyond matinee goodlooks and rolled up shirtsleeves. Like I said, this is Hayden’s movie, andNelson keeps his character plenty quiet. Whether it was his idea or De Toth’s,Steve Lacey is Lieutenant Sims perfect foil. From a noir perspective, Lacey isa protagonist in the classic mold: trying to make good after doing some hardtime: employed, married, and with a permanent address. Crane Wilbur’s storyputs him in the classic fix: when his old cellmates come looking for help, heknows that refusing them puts everything he’s worked for at risk, while anythingshort of dropping the proverbial dime puts him squarely on the wrong side ofthe law. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: the rock and the hard place ofclassic film noir, with only fate to decide whether or not a man comes outclean on the other side.

Thewife is model-turned-actress Phyllis Kirk. Kirk did most of her work ontelevision, but if you remember her at all it’s probably as the damsel indistress in André De Toth’s most famous picture: House of Wax. Kirk and Nelson are well matched — and themature depiction of their relationship is surprising for a film noir, andrather progressive when we consider typical gender depictions in similar crimefilms. Ellen Lacey wears the pants in the family; her assertiveness perfectlybalances her husband’s diffidence — yet she’s neither a nag nor a shrew.Steve Lacey’s time behind bars has wrecked his ability to function outside thewalls. He needs this strong woman to prop him up and constantly assure him thatbetter days lie ahead. That he had been, of all things, a fighter pilot duringthe war especially heightens the unusual nature of their relationship. Gone isthe recklessness and bravado typically found in screen characterizations ofsuch men, while the wife is equally surprising — a strong, modern womanwho is neither a femme fatale nor June Allyson clone. The film gives us an ideallymatched couple, each possessed of what the other needs.

Thecrooks. Ted de Corsia: Eddie Muller says he looks like he was born in a boxinggym. James Ellroy: he “oozes Pomade.” Iconic in The Naked City, de Corsia shines reliably here as the brains behindthe breakout. Crime Wave’s theatricalaudience was familiar with him in heavy roles dating all the way back to The Lady from Shanghai. De Corsia’sscreen persona was as hard-boiled as they come, think of him as an old-schoolRaymond Burr. His young partner is Charles Buchinsky, who also worked for DeToth in House of Wax. Of courseCharles Bronson would go on to be one of the icons of seventies crime films,and one of the biggest movie stars in the world. It’s always jarring to see himthis young, his face somewhat lined, but nowhere near as weather-beaten as itwould soon become. Crime Wave offeredthe young actor one of his best early roles: he actually gets to act a littlehere, and even has a few moments where his physicality is on display. Thejuxtaposition of a studio era character actor as old school as de Corsia withsomeone as contemporary as Bronson is yet another reason to examine this film.Then there’s Tim Carey, one of the wild men of the American movie scene.There’s not enough room in any film review to dig into the strange case of TimCarey, though on the strength of his appearance alone this one is worth theprice of admission. His few brief moments of screen time are so bizarre— whether he’s at the center of the shot or mugging from the corner of theframe — that Crime Wave would benotable if for no other reason.

Enoughabout the cast, as good as they are, there are more worthwhile reasons to watchthis, especially if you appreciate how a film looks, even more if you can feel a film. Usually when a noiressayist digs on cinematography, they’ll discuss the lighting and compositionof individual shots — I’m not going to do that. From top to bottom, Crime Wave is a beautifully andthoughtfully staged movie, yet it’s not a one-trick-pony when it comes tovisual style (dig, Witness to Murder).Instead, it’s a movie that employs a variety of techniques depending on whatindividual scenes call for. The sunlit exteriors are pure documentarynaturalism: showing LA locales (Burbank, Glendale, downtown) in a blunt, “thisis the city” fashion. It’s difficult to follow the movie during these scenes;one’s inclination is to instead focus on signs and landmarks, trying to get afeel for the way the streets, the people, and the cars looked during thosespectacular post-war years. At night, Glennon goes for drama, placing klieglights in off kilter spots to create a chiaroscuro effect that seems as contrivedas the day shots seem real, yet somehow it works, and the transitions barelyregister.

Howeverthe scenes are staged, the greatest thing about Crime Wave is where they are filmed: on location all the waythrough — and not just the exteriors. De Toth somehow swung access to cityhall; the homicide bureau scenes are the real deal. Crime Wave is a superlative example of the way in which a lowbudget feature could be extraordinary: without money to build sets or dictateproduction values, De Toth was forced to find locations for the film, and it’sclear after just a single viewing that he had a peculiar talent for doing so: Crime Wave is one the most attractive,maybe even exhilarating, film noirs ever made. Hit the pause button on almostany frame, and you’ll find something to linger on. De Toth successfully capturedall of the content tropes and moviemaking techniques that had become germane tofilm noir in this tiny little film. It’s astonishing that he did it with onlyhalf of his promised budget, and in a shoot of only thirteen days. The location work of The Naked City, the backseat point of view from Gun Crazy, the tones of John Alton, the jitteryhandheld cameras, semi-professional actors, and the quagmire of the ceaseless urbanlandscape. This a mean, unglamorous movie — populated with tough guy cops readyto shoot a suspect in the back, hard-boiled killers, damaged goods, floozies,stool pigeons, strongarms, and professional losers. The good, the bad, even theinsane — all trying to claw their way through a world that no longer givesa damn. It’s a cheap but delicious buffet of everything noir buffs hunger for— the final few frames make for one hell of a dessert. It should be onmany of those ubiquitous top-ten lists, but the guy beside you still hasn’tseen it.

Crime Wave (1954, filmed 1952)

Directed by André De Toth
Screenplay by Crane Wilbur
Adaptation by Bernard Gordon and Richard Wormser
Original Story by John and Ward Hawkins
Produced by Brian Foy
Cinematography by Burt Glennon
Art Direction by Stanley Fleischer
Starring Sterling Hayden, Gene Nelson, and Phyllis Kirk
Released by Warner Bros.
Running time: 74 minutes

LAPD Prowl Car

Skid Row service station, opening heist

Daily life in the detective bureau

Looking up at Hayden

Phyllis Kirk

Typical shot of Hayden crowding the frame

Nelson cuffed, Kirk looks on

Ted de Corsia and Charles Bronson

Glennon’s creative lighting

Tim Carey

Gene Nelson

Great lighting

Classic film noir imagery

Naturally lit, beautifully framed

Crosstown car chase

THE CASE AGAINST BROOKLYN (1958)

2011-09-30T14:23:00.000-04:00

“Don’tyou know what this is? This is a million bucks every week! They’ve got hundredsof runners, a whole city sewed up! Cops right up to the top, they can squashyou like a bug…”

As Americaentered the Eisenhower era, Hollywood screenwriters began to challenge many ofthe taboos of the earlier postwar period. Beginning with the groundbreaking successof 1948’s The Naked City, the movieindustry shifted production away from the back lots and sound stages, and moreauthentic-looking kind of film came into vogue. Yet as the forties became thefifties, film producers began to comprehend that audiences were not only moresophisticated than they had been in the years before the war, but far more jadedtoo. The rote escapist fare that had been a godsend in the bleak years of thedepression and the war was less palatable than it had ever been. Audiencesinstead wanted movies that reflected the cynicism and uncertainty of the worldin which they lived — and while this new rush of films eschewed arose-colored artifice for something altogether more realistic, the crowds couldat least take reassurance in knowing they were all in it together.

Thereare numerous small tremors that occurred after the end of the war that nudgedAmerica closer and closer to the cultural upheaval of the sixties. In terms ofpopular culture, film noir is merely one of many such tremors, in much the samefashion as beat literature and the dawn of rock and roll. There are those who divide the century in terms of the waryears, though I’ve always felt that the six-year period beginning with theKennedy assassination and culminating in Woodstock more clearly signifies thequantum shift in attitudes and values that led us to where we stand today. Regardless,it might be even fairer to suggest that in the autumn of 1945, Americans weremore united than they had ever been, sharing a common desire for a peaceful andprosperous future, bound up in high employment rates, low inflation, homeownership, and previously unheard of personal luxury. It practically goeswithout saying that by the sixties this dream proved to be more or less unattainable, unsustainable, or simply unwanted — yet the twentyyears in between proved to be a critical period of uneasy and confusingtransition. One has only to watch a few episodes on television’s Mad Men to see the myriad ways in whichprevailing attitudes were imploding in the face of clashing value systems: old-fashionedand conservative versus progressive and liberal — all set in thepressure-boiler of heretofore unseen gender and generational differences, compoundedby an explosion in technology, information, and consumerism run wild. Truly thetwenty years between the end of the Second World War and the beginning ofVietnam are some of the most fascinating in our history.

Sowhat part did film noir play? While earlier films — even crime films— typically propped up the police force and civic leaders as pillars ofthe community, by the time the paranoid fifties were in full swing such institutionsbecame open to scrutiny — and the noir style was perfectly suited to confrontingthem on film. (With caution though: note the careful stance taken on the title lobby card shown at the end of the post.) The listof films that deal with corrupt officials is practically endless, thoughHollywood’s Capra-esque populism always made it easier to pick on politiciansrather than cops. Capra’s own 1939 film Mr.Smith Goes to Washington deals, as a plot point, with political corruption,while 1949’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture, All the King’s Men (1949) examines similar problems from a more exhaustive (and realistic) point of view. It took film noir, of which thereare very few films that don’t involvethe police, to expose crooked cops. TheBig Heat (1953) is the most well-known such film, though The Turning Point (1952), Rogue Cop (1954) and Shield for Murder (1954) to some degree alltread similar ground. And while those films are concerned with bent policeofficials or individual officers, few ever dealt with the systematic corruptionof a community’s entire police force. That brings us to 1958’s The Case Against Brooklyn.

Looselybased on a the story “I Broke the Brooklyn Graft Scandal” first chronicled in True magazine, the movie stars one offilmdom’s most beloved fathers, Darren McGavin, in a key developmental role.McGavin had splashed as a pusher in Otto Preminger’s 1955 picture The Man with the Golden Arm, and by 1958he was a three-way veteran of stage, film, and television. The Case Against Brooklyn would prove to be McGavin’s springboard intoa two-season TV run as the title character in Mike Hammer, where he cemented his reputation as an actor who couldexcel in tough-guy roles on both sides of the law. In The Case Against Brooklyn, McGavin plays Pete Harris, an idealisticyoung cop plucked straight out of the academy by the district attorney, a manintent on bringing down the numerous bookie joints wreaking havoc in theborough. Ironically (particularly considering Hollywood’s ongoing war againsttelevision), it’s a small-screen news exposé that sets the wheels of justice inmotion. When the news piece points the finger at corrupt cops, the DA figuresthat the only way to get untouched officers is to pull them right out of theacademy (a la DePalma’s The Untouchables).McGavin’s Pete Harris is no fresh-faced pup either (the actor was 36 when thiswas made), in spite of his inexperience as a police officer. Hisnon-traditional age is explained away as the result of a ten-year stint in theMarine Corps.

Agarage owner got in too deep and was beaten to death by the bookies — theDA’s only lead is the dead man’s wife (Maggie Hayes). Harris is told to getclose to the widow, which he is plenty eager to do. Other recruits pound thepavement, and some even enroll in college: “a hotbed of bookie activity.” Harrismakes it clear early on that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get nextto the woman, even if it means shoving his own wife (Peggy McCay) onto the backburner. This notion of infidelity for the sake of professional advancement isone of the most curious in the film, and also one that only seems possible inthe wake of the 1956 weakening of the Motion Picture Production Code. Itstrikes at the heart of placing materialism and personal prestige ahead oftraditional values, while reinforcing the film noir trope of the police officeras a thoroughly alienated character unable to maintain a healthy personal relationship.Most cinematic cops were still married in the fifties, though their unions wereincreasingly on the rocks. Howard Duff’s character in The Naked City is an idealistic young cop just like Pete Harris,but a decade later Harris’s wife is just so much extra baggage. Even when she isbrutally murdered (in a sequence lifted directly from The Big Heat) his grief barely registers; and by the final reelit’s clear that in spite of the idealized characterization of his wife, Harriswill be just as content to end up with the widow. By the early seventiesscreenwriters wouldn’t even bother with marriage — cops wore theirdivorces as prominently as their badges. This failure at personal life hasbecome an enduring factor in establishing the modern movie policemen, one ofcinema’s most well worn clichés. The idea would further evolve in the eighties,when the cop’s absent wife was just as likely to have been killed as a sympathyploy (Lethal Weapon) or in order tomotivate revenge (Hard to Kill). AlPacino’s character in Heat (1995) hasmultiple exes, yet the film exhaustively details the collapse of his currentmarriage. In Die Hard (1988), which purposefullyharkens back to the heroic bravado of John Wayne films, Bruce Willis isestranged from his wife, and he’s only able to win her back when his recklessdeterminism actually saves her life — to turn her back on him then woulddemonstrate more ingratitude than audiences could tolerate.

Asillogical as it might sound, Harris’s relationship with the widow actually doeslead him to the heart of the Brooklyn bookie rackets — we are deep into B-movieconcessions here: Harris goes undercover, and the DA brass don’t even give hima new name — it would have ruined a plot point. It turns out that Rudi(Warren Stevens), one of the racket boys who laid the beat down on her deadhusband, is also trying to hone in on Harris’s play with the woman. Contrivanceand coincidence work their magic and by the end of the feature we have theexpected showdown between the forces of good and evil, replete with a hospitalbed finale and newfound romance. Alongthe way, McGavin’s athleticism and imposing physical presence are on display asHarris relentlessly plugs away at his job, breaking anything that gets in hisway. (After seeing this, his casting as Hammer is a no-brainer.) When he’sfinally brought to bear by the bureaucracy of the police force, Harris turnsover his badge and his gun (The Big Heat,again) and squares the job on his own terms — again establishing precedents forthe cop dramas of the seventies and eighties.

Despiteits rather late-cycle release, The CaseAgainst Brooklyn is solidly a film noir. It makes a half-ass stab at narration, and the music is melodramatic andintrusive at times, but the cinematography is impressive. Many of the interiorsare shot in the blandly-lit middle-distance takes popularized by television,but the exteriors are often fantastic: one scene in particular finds Harris ina low-light, low-angle face off with the dirty cop who has just murdered hispartner. The framing, high-contrast, and blocking are as good an anythingyou’ll ever find in a quintessential film noir. However, it’s by other meansthat The Case Against Brooklyn’struly establishes itself as a film noir. Even the title is significant in itsambiguity: it indicts not only the civic bureaucracy of the borough, butseemingly its people as well — after all, the bookie joints couldn’t flywithout their clientele —suggesting that in the noir milieu, everyone has alittle dirt on their hands. It would have been easy enough to call this Cop for Sale, or something along thoselines, so the vagueness of the title seems purposeful. Yet it’s the charactersthat really drive the point home: Pete Harris is in the classic mold of thenoir protagonist: alienated, obsessive, driven to the point of recklessness. Themovie gives us the two classic female types: the fatale and the perfect wife.And although the script requires its fatale, Maggie Hayes, to transform fromone type to the other along the way, her initial impression (as my friendsClute and Edwards have remarked) is entirely contrived to sexualize hercharacter and motivate audiences to imagine her as something dangerous. It’sher presence in the picture that creates tension between Harris and his wife,causing us to question his motivations: is he relentlessly pursuing the badguys, or is it just the girl? In the gray half-light of the noir world, theanswer is both.

The CaseAgainst Brooklyn (1958)

Directedby Paul Wendkos (The Burglar)

Screenplayby Bernard Gordon (Blacklisted, credited as Raymond T. Marcus) and Julien Zimet

ScreenStory by Danial B. Ullman. Based on an account by Ed Reid

Producedby Charles H. Schneer

Cinematographyby Fred Jackman, Jr. (The Night HoldsTerror, Cell 2455 Death Row)

ArtDirection by Ross Bellah (The Lineup,Nightfall)

StarringDarren McGavin, Warren Stevens, Maggie Hayes, and Peggy McCay

Releasedby Columbia Pictures

Runningtime: 82 minutes

DRIVE (2011)

2011-09-16T16:43:00.001-04:00

Safe reading, no spoilers!

New releases are usually off-limits here, but it isn’t often that such a classicly rendered yet unpretentious film noir hits theaters. Make no mistake: this isn’t an L.A. Confidential-style period piece;it’s not an homage like Walter Hill’s 1978 The Driver(though it certainly nods at that film); nor is it a Tarantino-esque retread of drive-in pulp. Drive is an exhilarating Americancrime picture — one that marks the maturing of an important new directorand one that will inevitably push Ryan Gosling’s star one step close to beingthe brightest in Hollywood. And although much of its power owes to the original and refreshing filmmaking ofdirector Nicholas Winding Refn (ValhallaRising), it’s not an entirely unconventional film, nor is it one thatignores its ancestors. Perhaps it’s best to invoke Quentin Tarantino onceagain, though only insofar as the experience of viewing this film is concerned: seeing this is akin to the watching Reservoir Dogs, or in the case of most viewers, Pulp Fiction, for the first time. Thesubject matter may be familiar, but the technique is so exciting that whileyou are at once wrapped up in the story telling and performances, another partof you is simply excited at the freshness of it all. And while the film isn’tperfect it is utterly captivating. It manages to combine the central character types of forties film noir in a contemporary Los Angeles setting, yet still evoke the peculiar austerity associated with the crime films of William Friedkin and, yes, Michael Mann. All of this is bound up in a visually striking, and even more intensely sounding movie, that in spite of its overt sleekness manages to avoid wallowing in postmodern hogwash. The thing has substance.

Thisis neither a heist movie nor a car film. Those elements are part of theallure, meant to ensure ticket sales in the same way the casting of Mad Men’s Christine Hendricks is. (she’sin and out of the picture so fast (albeit spectacularly so) that if you take a breathyou’ll miss her) The core of the film is all Ryan Gosling; and while his casting in a hard-boiled tough guy role at first seems questionable, his commitment to the part is such that he makes it feel effortless and credible. In the real world, it would be difficult to fathom such prettiness in aman possessed of the unusual skills, not to mention the toughness and latent ferocity, of theunnamed (per above, see Hill’s The Driver)part-time stuntman, part-time getaway driver Gosling portrays here. Yet thefilm slips this by us by simply avoiding the question of origin: Gosling has nopast; we simply aren’t told how he became the mysterious, dangerous, andultimately sad soul we find in the movie. Whether he grew up on the streets, did a jolt at Folsom, or spent a few years in camouflage is unclear, but we learn early on that the subject of the film is a hard man who doesn’t roll over easily. Some might consider Gosling’s physical gifts a distraction that could ruin the film’s gritty veneer, but Refn embraces them. His cameras linger in close-up afterclose-up, and although the Driver barely speaks, Gosling is able to use his face totell us what we need to know. And despite being set in thehalf-light of the Los Angeles underbelly, Drive is also a romance,territory in which Gosling has already demonstrated his worth.

More than anything else though, Drive is a film noir — one that proves the enduring power of characterarchetypes and narrative conventions established well over a half-century ago.Though unlike other films that have tried to revitalize noir tropes, Drive does so quietly — it uses them, it isn’t about them. It shows that well-worn conventions don’t have to be stale, and mostimportantly it doesn’t feel compelled to continually wink at the audience. And like the best noir films out of the past, it uses visuals to reinforce the narrative. (One scene in particular (the elevator scene) took my breath away.) Drive succeeds in this all-important visual storytelling while countless other attempts have fallen short.

Particularly noteworthy is how Hussein Amini’s adaptation of James Sallis’s novel takes on numerous classic character types and successfully tackles them all. Thefilm gives us a pair of urban gangsters much more rooted in noir than those of Scorsese or Coppola — not corporate icemen or ethic supermen,but insecure sociopaths more in the tradition of Richard Widmark than AlPacino. Ron Perlman delivers everything you could ask for in a workhorse performance, but AlbertBrooks is simply astonishing — be on the lookout for an off-casting Oscar nomination. Brooks demonstrates that De Niro-like ability to switch from affable to terrifying while maintaining a humorous, unruffled exterior. His first initial impression is almost confusing; we know the actor so well but have no idea how he could possibly interpret a character such as this. By the end of the film we’re convinced Brooks missed his calling. More than a decade after his brief appearance in Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 film Out of Sight, Brooks finally gets the opportunity to really show how much he can do with a distasteful character. Gangsters are like Kryptonite in most contemporary crime films — so done to death that the mere presence of a wise guy thrusts most movies irrevocably into cliché. Butin avoiding both the New York or Boston version of the immigrant Mafioso and L.A.’s effete hoodlums, living in all-white canyon homes and aspiring to be film producers, Drive delves into thenoir canon to give us a pair of neurotic criminals who feel bothrefreshingly novel and altogether real.

BryanCranston (Breaking Bad, Malcolm in theMiddle) is Shannon, a throwback to one of noir’s most beloved character types: The Loser. He owns the garage where the Driverspends most of his days, serving as Gosling’s criminal pimp and ostensible fatherfigure. He cheerfully limps in and out of scenes, always in a good mood but never with aclear picture of what’s happening around him — a sad soul borrowed from the pages of Steinbeck. The pronounced hitch in hisstride is a visible reminder of an unfortunate life — his luck is so mythically bad that the Brooks character can’t seem to stop reminiscing about it — Shannon evensports a horseshoe tattoo under one ear. If Drivehas been made during the classic noir period, Cranston’s role certainly wouldhave been played by Harry Morgan or Elisha Cook, Jr. His luck is that bad.

Andthen there’s the girl. This is the one spot where Drive turns convention on its ear. Noir always gives us two kinds of female characters: the femme fatale or the sweetheart.Drive combines both into one. The girl in question is Carey Mulligan (AnEducation), whose form is all sweetheart, but who functions as a femme fatale. Mulligan’s Irene isn’t duplicitous — she’sso angelically idealized that she almost belongs in a Teresa Wright film — but her innocence is so provocative that it compels the Driver makes the sort of reckless choices that defy his better judgment and are typically machinated by the femme fatale. Helays everything on the line for the sake of this girl and her son — though in a post-war noir hismotivation would spring from lust, while here he seeks merely to save her, and in so doing findsome small measure of grace for himself. Nevertheless, what the Driversacrifices for a down-on-her-luck diner waitress draws a direct connection withthe films of the past and, at the same time, puts a less misogynistic spin on typicalcrime film gender roles. It might also be fair to explore the similarities between Drive and the 1994 Besson film Léon, at least in terms of redemption and innocence, though the latter film, as beloved as it is, is more thoroughly rooted in stereotype and visual pizazz than it is in the noir tradition.

Finally,in the Gosling character we have a classic and archetypical film noir anti-hero: enigmatic,melancholy, alienated, and alone; yet someone who lives by a strict code: a modern ronin. Whenhe assures his potential “clients” that as long as they do their dirty workwithin a five-minute window he’ll stick with them “no matter what,” we are absolutelycertain of his sincerity. For him such things are simply a matter of honor. Wealso know that like other film noir protagonists (and as the title of the filmsuggests) that the Driver is moving determinedly towards some final, inescapable destiny — that all of the wayward ends of his Spartan, empty life are meant— fated — to coalesce in some way unknown to him. The precise controlhe exerts over his existence — which he believes is metaphorically expressed in theway he handles an automobile — is merely an illusion. What the audienceknows, and our anonymous hero doesn’t, is that what he can do with a car has far less to do with skill than it does with art.

Gosee Drive. It’s a film that marks thearrival of something, you don’t want to get left behind.

Noir / Crime fans: 8.5 out of 10
Everyone else: 7 out of 10

Drive (2011)

Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn
Starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, and Bryan Cranston
Cinematography by Newton Thomas Sigel
Art Direction by Christopher Tandon
Edited by Matthew Newman
Released by FilmDistrict
Running time: 100 minutes

MANHANDLED (1949)

2011-09-08T15:00:00.001-04:00

“Play it smart like I said.”

“You’re not talking to a cluck Charlie. You’re talking to a guy who knows all the angles.”

The titles roll against a rain-smeared window, the night pushing hard against the glass. Inside, a man sits in a well-appointed chair. We see him only from the knees down; pajamas and slippers: posh. One hand hangs limp, trapping a cigarette burnt down to his knuckles. This is no stiff — dead men don’t smoke — he’s waiting up. The apartment door opens and couple enters. Again, only their legs. They exchange a hushed goodnight, a lover’s goodnight, and then she slinks upstairs while the man in the chair stirs, shredding the cigarette in his shaking hands. She settles at her vanity, admires herself in the mirror — finally we see a face. She’s a doll: all done up and covered in jewels — but no rock on her finger. The sleeper appears in the mirror behind her — dig the flowery pattern on his robe: silly, weak, feminine. He’s a cuckold, a patsy — though an unwilling one. He calls her a roundheels and threatens to kill her. She scoffs. He grabs a heavy perfume bottle and goes to work, his free arm wrenching her up from the chair. A few fevered moments later her lifeless body slumps to the floor, and the camera pans up to his sweaty, overwrought face. The scene melts away, only to reappear in a luxurious, wood paneled office. We see our killer, one hand clasped to his forehead, a bourbon rattling in the other, explaining to his shrink that the whole thing was just a bad dream…

That’s how you open a noir picture. Dark, tense, stylish — and with a murder. The title, Manhandled, shouts hard-boiled, and the poster is a gem: Dan Duryea dangles a flailing Dorothy Lamour from a rooftop, threatening to plunge her into the shadowy alley below, as the flatfoots look up from fire escape. Audiences should have been greedy with expectation when they took their seats in May of 1949, especially after such a tantalizing opening. The problem with Manhandled is that after those great first moments it goes steadily downhill, its grip slackening away to almost nothing. Its lasting impression is of a rote exercise in factory B moviemaking, offering audiences little more than an overly complicated and formulaic story of red herrings and diamond-encrusted MacGuffins — a parlor mystery two-decades old dusted off and resuscitated for the world of film noir. It’s too bad; this is a picture that had a ton of promise and a pair of bang-up actors.

The cast here is conspicuous, but let’s not put the cart before the horse. The story is far too convoluted to waste much time on, but some rudimentary description is apropos. The bluebeard wannabe is Alton Bennet (Alan Napier), an over-the-hill writer used to the high life, though he no longer rates even a modest advance from his publisher. His wife Ruth (Irene Hervey) is of the trophy variety, younger than her husband by two decades, and clearly won when his books were stacked high in the window facing the sidewalk rather than the bargain bin. She owns her jewelry free and clear, and the insurance policy on the stuff now shines a great deal more brightly than Bennet’s literary star. He’s been imagining her murder in his dreams and decides to tell his shrink Dr. Redman (Harold Vermilyea). In the dark about the Dictaphone and doctor-patient privilege, Redman employs transcriptionist Merl Kramer (Dorothy Lamour) to take down every word his patients say. Merl is newly arrived from the west coast. We never learn why, but she’s alone in New York after leaving her baby girl back home with granny. She’s friendly with Karl Benson (Dan Duryea), a low-life private detective who keeps a shabby office on the floor below her. He gets paid sticking a camera through bedroom windows — and over dinner Merl spills the beans to him about Bennet’s dream.

Across town, Dr. Redman invites Ruth Bennet to his office and warns her about her husband's dreams. Her oily boyfriend Guy (Philip Reed) is on his leash right behind her, and he too gets wise, bringing the number of legitimate suspects in her eventual killing to five! Ruth is finally murdered that evening, and while Benson somehow gets his hands on the jewelry, he appears genuinely surprised when his fence tells him there’s a murder rap hanging over the loot. Did Bennet confide in Dr. Redman simply to create an alibi for himself? Or did one of the many possible suspects who heard about the dream decide to take advantage in order to make a big score?

The following morning dawns at the murder scene, cops swarming around like bees in a hive. Police lieutenant Dawson (Art Smith) and insurance man Joe Cooper (Sterling Hayden) jockey for control of the situation. The rest of Manhandled is concerned with plot — the focus shifting from suspect to suspect, as Dawson and Cooper bicker over the best way to get to the bottom of things. There are twists, turns, double-crosses, and a little romance (all more tedious than it sounds) as we gradually discover the truth. It all leads up to the climactic moment depicted on the poster — the one with Merl on the brink of doom and clawing at Benson for dear life.

Let’s get back to the cast. Dorothy Lamour’s name is not usually associated with noir — other than a part in 1940’s Johnny Apollo this was it for her. At 35 she was at the tail end of her film career. Following Manhandled audiences wouldn’t see her again for three years, when she was featured in a pair of 1952 films: the notorious Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth and The Road to Bali, one last tired fling with Bob and Bing. Her only other good part came a decade later in 1963’s Donovan’s Reef. Everyone except Duryea is mediocre in Manhandled — though Lamour is the only performer miscast. Outside of her comfort zone and unable to rely on her lovely figure, her singing voice, or her talent for comedy she gets lost, leaving audiences wondering if her casting was solely for marquee value. In that last dramatic scene on the roof she gets the chance to really act — and falls short. Her mouth moves and she spits out the words, but the rest of her face remains dead, especially her eyes. She just wasn’t cut out for material like this.

If only there were more to say about Sterling Hayden, but in just his fifth film he’s ill-used and frankly, extraneous. He doesn’t surface until more than thirty minutes in, and then he barely registers. One of the lasting lessons of film noir is that a lone, relentless police officer is much more captivating than a gaggle of bickering cops, but the latter is what Manhandled offers. This would be a markedly better film if either Art Smith or Hayden had been written out of the script — preferably Smith, apparently brought in to inject some comedy into the film, each instance of which is just miserable. Manhandled’s few comedic moments, mostly involving a prowl car with no brakes, represent the most oft-cited reason for its failure to score as a significant noir. At any rate, Hayden was on the cusp: his next job would be The Asphalt Jungle, which would cement his big-time screen persona. He’s unsure of himself in Manhandled, giving us a character that is unkempt and upbeat, similar to the newspapermen played by guys like Ronald Reagan earlier in the decade. If a rewrite had strengthened his part while eliminating Smith’s, this thing may have really taken off. Anyone who doubts the ability of the director to draw out a performer should watch Hayden in a double-bill of Manhandled and The Asphalt Jungle. The growth from one picture to the next is stunning.

Dan Duryea’s jovial, immoral scumbag is Manhandled’s saving grace. His presence goes a long way to keeping viewers invested when the going gets tough. One moment in particular is absolutely phenomenal, and is as powerfully noirish — albeit subtly — as you’ll find anywhere: Karl Benson has just learned of Bennet’s dream, and he stretches out in his office, lost in thought. The sounds of the city creep in through an open window: a woman’s laughter, a car horn. Reclined with one arm behind his pillow, Benson’s head lolls toward the window as he mutters an annoyed “Shaddup,” and “Quiet” to no one in particular. Restlessly chewing a mouthful of gum, his eyes never leave the cheap table at the foot of his Murphy bed, where a pet hamster churns determinedly in the exercise wheel of its cage — around and around, running either away from fate or towards destiny — but really going nowhere at all. It’s a superlative moment in an otherwise ordinary picture, the kind of bit that catches you off guard and reminds you why even low-rent B movies can sometimes take your breath away — thanks to Duryea.

Manhandled could have really been something — maybe even important — had it been executed properly, but for whatever reason things just didn’t work out that way. So many different planets have to align for a picture to come out well it’s impressive that it ever happens at all, regardless of the talent involved. None of Lewis Foster’s 60+ films as a director are significant, though this is the same man who nabbed a screenplay Oscar for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He wrote Manhandled as well, so it begs the question of where in the monumental process of movie-making this came to fall so short of its potential. At best, Manhandled is an uneven yet mildly entertaining film, boasting a decent cast and a few wonderfully evocative moments (including a fantastic man-versus-car chase scene that haven’t the time to get into — the poster hints at it) in a production otherwise lacking a well-constructed noir milieu. In spite of being a “night” movie, it is neither dark nor oppressive, with no pervasive sense of the determinism that characterizes good film noir. Its story is unnecessarily complicated, causing it to feel long at only 97 minutes. It has a good score that often feels clumsy, and photography that vacillates between careful and careless. By the time the thing ends and the killer is unmasked, we struggle not to point a guilty finger at the filmmakers.

Manhandled (1949)

Directed by Lewis R. Foster
Produced by William H. Pine and William C. Thomas
Written by Lewis R. Foster and Whitman Chambers, based on the novel The Man Who Stole A Dream by L.S. Goldsmith.
Starring Dan Duryea, Dorothy Lamour, and Sterling Hayden.
Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo
Art Direction by Lewis H. Creber
Released by Paramount Pictures
Running Time 97 Minutes

15 MORE Great Polish Posters for Amerykanski Crime Films!

2011-08-28T23:28:00.000-04:00

Here’s another batch of great Polish posters. In spite of the post title, I realize, of course, that one or two of these films aren’t American. No blurbs, no countdown — just great design from one of the world’s most renowned poster cultures. In a few instances, the poster was designed much later (possibly even years later) than when the film was produced and released in the United States. In those cases, I’ve placed the year of the poster design in the second set of parenthesis. Enjoy!

Angel Heart (1987)

Charley Varrick (1973)

Chinatown (1974)

The Collector (1965) (1968)

The Conversation (1974)

Deadline U.S.A. (1952) (1970)

Experiment in Terror (1962) (1971)

The Fallen Idol (1948) (1958)

The Getaway (1972) (1975)

Harper (1966)

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

M (1931) (1964)

Night Moves (1975)

Private Hell 36 (1954) (1980)

The Stranger (1946) (1958)

15 Great Polish Posters for Amerykanski Crime Films!

2011-08-19T00:07:00.002-04:00

No blurbs, no countdown — just great design from one of the world’s most renowned poster cultures. In a few instances, the poster was designed much later (possibly even years later) than when the film was produced and released in the United States. In those cases, I've placed the year of the poster design in the second set of parenthesis. Enjoy! Fifteen more of these are on the way soon!

Betrayed (1989)

The Big Sleep (1978)

Black Widow (1987)

Bullitt (1968)

Call Northside 777 (1948) (1966)

The Enforcer (1951) (1960s)

Fatal Attraction (1987)

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

Klute (1971)

The Parallax View (1974)

Rififi (1955)

The Seven Ups (1973)

Taxi Driver (1976) (1978)

Vertigo (1958) (1963)

The Woman in the Window (1944) (1958)

50 GREATEST CLASSIC SCI-FI POSTER COUNTDOWN! TOP 10! This is it!

2011-08-02T13:13:00.008-04:00

Welcome to the final post in the countdown of the 50 greatest posters of classic science fiction. It’s time for the top poster to be revealed! Remember (or refer back to the first post) that this is not a countdown of the best science fiction movies, but of the posters that marketed them instead! Without further ado, let’s wrap this thing up!

10. The Cosmic Man

Compositionally, this is one of the more striking posters in the countdown, even if we’ve seen more elegantly rendered illustrations elsewhere. What really makes this a success is how the artist was clearly thinking of the future positioning of the typography when the illustration was still on the drawing board. The title type is perfectly situated and is executed in a style appropriate to the period. The illustration itself is a stunner, particularly in how cleverly all of the disparate elements are layered into the design. The juxtaposition of the colossal figure with the planet shapes and the landscape in the foreground is incredibly interesting — especially the placement of the large planet nearest the viewer — pretty daring! The thin lines that emanate from the planet are a nice detail. Another strong element is the sunburst pattern that frames and highlights the title character’s Nosferatu-like features. If it were up to me, I’d remove the “out of this universe” tag box from the top of the poster and shift it to the bottom, allowing for the points of the sunburst to continue to the poster’s bleed. Regardless, this remains one cool poster.

9. Beyond the Time Barrier

This is just a beautifully executed poster in all regards, with an original type solution married to provocative imagery (the green figures in particular!). In a few of the higher ranked posters I’ll discuss at length some of my philosophy about hand-rendered versus computer-generated typography, but I should take a moment now to buoy my later argument by noting now that while I think hand-rendered title typography (when appropriate, of course) is almost always superior to titles formed from existing typefaces, there are plenty of beautiful examples of the latter — and this is one of them. Hang on a second — obviously I realize this type wasn’t created with a computer. I’m just referencing an argument I’ll make later and think it’s germane to mention that the title type for Beyond the Time Barrier is of the style that the modern computer can create and manipulate with ease. Nevertheless, it isn’t the typography so much as the gestalt that earned this its spot.

8. Gog

Never were the concentric circles used more successfully than they are here. The poster for Gog, with its unusually dark background, is just fantastic — one of the most designerly in the countdown. The dark background, the growing circles, the collaged feel of the imagery (especially the danger signs — brilliant!), the surprising restraint of the tagline at the top, and that great image of Gog himself all combine to make this original poster a true gem. If it were up to me I’d make the type at the very bottom smaller, but it’s the poster’s only weak point.

7. Attack of the 50 ft. Woman

Does anyone mind if I cheat a little? If so, that’s OK — just reserve this spot for Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. I included the posters for The Amazing Colossal Man and War of the Colossal Beast because in terms of theme and execution they are so incredibly similar to this one, yet the Woman poster is the best. She’s rendered with more care, and stands in her environment more realistically than her male counterpart, who appears almost to have been cut and paste into his (note The Amazing Colossal Man’s left leg / ankle).

Note also in the poster for The Amazing Colossal Man the many discrepancies in scale. The Man himself is positioned essentially in the background of the poster, yet the largest “normal” sized figure in the poster is the woman in his grasp. Okay, we’ll call that artistic license; but notice also how the two gun-shooting police officers at the right middle ground are actually larger than the tank in the foreground — that, I can’t accept. In contrast, the illustration for Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman is correct in all of its proportions. And if we are granting artistic license, it’s best used in how she appears, based on the size of the “normal” figures, to be almost 200 feet tall! If only she were looking at us!

6. The War of the Worlds

You know, that hand image is pretty iconic — one could remove all of the typography from this poster and most film fans would still easily guess the title. Yet ironically that famously grasping extra-terrestrial hand is not what I love the most about this poster, and I’d bet that most graphic designers would agree with me — it’s the type that makes this one of the best in the countdown! As often predicted in the films under discussion here, we have come to live in a world dominated by computers. For the past twenty-five years the Macintosh has transformed the world of the graphic designer — and the changes wrought by technology have not always been positive, particularly within the realm of typography.

I spend a great deal of my working life explaining to students that graphic design has far less to do with the computer they they imagined when they made the decision to pursue a design or advertising career. Those students typically enter college thinking that the designers swipe their images from Google and then match them to a faddishly gaudy (Hey designers — I said gaudy, not Goudy!) typeface downloaded from fonts.com. After four years they don’t leave that way. One of the first things they learn from me is that human beings respond best to type and imagery that appears to have not originated electronically, but instead from the human hand. A happy preponderance of contemporary designers certainly think so — pick up a copy of Print magazine’s Regional Design Annual from the last decade and you’ll find the hand-made on every page. (And while Print has devolved into a silly magazine that fails in almost every way to represent the design world, in this one way, at least, they reflect the sensibilities of the design world. Sorry, I digress.)

The simple cursive scrawl of the film title here is one of the best pieces of pure typography in the countdown. And although the work here obviously predates the era of computer graphics it’s telling to point out that what makes the typography here so timeless is that it simply couldn’t be accomplished via any digitized typeface or Photoshop filters. That’s why it’s so powerful — because it’s powerfully human, and therefore utterly original. Amazing both in it’s simplicity and level of detail, it’s an exquisite piece of work that mixes color, texture, and scale through both script and block letterforms. I may sound like a geek here, but great type like this brings out the geek in me.

5. Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Another poster that merits its ranking because of its originality. Little did I know when I began this process that so many of the top designs would qualify on their ability to avoid (or at least put a new spin on) the design and image clichés that prevail throughout the genre, and that we’ve spent so much time detailing in these posts. With that in mind, it’s easy to see what makes the poster for Invasion of the Body Snatchers so good: the handprint. It’s so central to the story, yet the designer has also used it as the primary image in the poster, gigantic and graphically powerful, the “tie” that binds all of the posters elements together. If you can, try to imagine this without the handprint — the figures would then appear to simply float in the open space of the picture plane. The print anchors them, gives them ground upon which to stand. Without it they would appear to be falling like raindrops.

And how about the colors? The red to yellow gradient really makes this one pop, and evokes the split-fountain printing technique that was so popular in the Hatch Show Print style music posters of the day. The poster is a fine exercise in compositional balance as well: note how there is a sort of zig-zag pattern that works its way through the positioning of the many figures, and especially in the application of the individual blocks of text type. These elements all weave their way from the top of the poster to the bottom, creating a sense of balance with hardly any of the individual pieces actually being centered, except for the text block at the very bottom, which acts as a “foundation” for everything else. It may at first appear haphazard and jumbled, but this is skillful stuff.

4. Village of the Damned

For a moment or two at the beginning of the process, I toyed with this in the top spot. While I think this is a wonderful design in almost every way (and easily affordable for anyone who wants a copy), it has a few problems that keep it out of the top three. My biggest issue is the image at the top-right corner — If I were the author of this poster I’d simply remove it and enlarge the blue head of the child to encompass the newly-opened space. That head is absolutely fantastic (not to mention the crux of the entire film), but compared to the relatively large size of the busts of Sanders and Shelley and the “Beware the Stare” tagline, the child’s head is just too small. Meanwhile, the image of the trench-coated figure surrounded by children is suitably strange (get a load of the kid directly behind him — weird!), it adds little to the poster’s ability to tantalize. Finally, the photographic landscape at the bottom of the design is extraneous. It’s a muddled and confusing image choice that forces the designer to make the title typography too small. I’d rather lose the image altogether and reconfigure the type treatment into two stacked lines — possibly stressing the word “Damned” in the process.

Despite my complaints, there is still a lot to like about this, and it richly deserves a spot in the top ten. Let’s not forget how creative this poster is, not only in it’s use of limited color and striking imagery, but especially in how it utterly avoids the clichés that run rampant in most of the other posters in the genre. For that reason alone it warrants a high spot, even in the design wasn’t so delightful.

Just for the fun of it, I fooled around in Photoshop for a few minutes and rearranged some of the elements. Were I taking this seriously, I would have maintained the green blob shape around the title, but I just wanted to bang this out and didn’t have the time to redraw the blob in the style of the original. Same goes for the wavy lines that indicate the child’s stare — for the sake of time I chopped them off in all of the areas outside the young man’s face. But, hopefully you get my drift!

3. The Thing from Another World

How could anyone see this poster and not head directly for the box office to buy a ticket? As a designer I’m astonished that a type-only poster could make it past the studio money-men, but what a challenge this offers to potential viewers! Be sure to click on this and look closely at the enlarged image — the level of detail in the illustrated type is truly amazing, it had to be a labor of love for whomever took the time to render the letters. Again I return to the comments I made in the blurb for The War of the Worlds: what makes this so great is that the type has effectively become the image — you can lose yourself in marveling at it, and it resonates to us even more today because we know that no computer could possibly generate such exquisite letterforms.

Yet the incredibly high ranking doesn’t spring merely from the visual risk of a type-only poster, it comes also from how appropriate doing so was conceptually. Think about it: there no way the poster can ask the question “Natural or Supernatural?” and then actually show us the Thing. Everyone knows that even though this is a first rate movie, the creature himself isn’t visually striking enough to entice anyone to go see the film. It’s the mystery that makes us buy a ticket. And this poster, because it takes that sense of mystery and puts it on steroids, becomes one of those rare pieces of graphic design that solves its prescribed problem almost perfectly.

2. Forbidden Planet

I’m betting that this is the poster most sci-fi aficionados following the countdown guessed would grab the top spot. After all, this is the most justly famous image to come from the genre throughout the 1950s. In terms of color, stylization, and careful execution the image of Robby the Robot gently cradling an unconscious Anne Francis is both stunning and wonderfully fantastical. The background is a pure artistic delight. In so many ways it epitomizes the best of classic science fiction, and the quality with which it is rendered so far eclipses the similar image on the poster for Tobor the Great that any comparison almost seems silly.

So why not the top spot?

I placed it here because although this is the strongest and most representative image in the countdown, the rest of the design doesn’t hold up as well as the top poster; and while the image for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms trails this one by just a little, the other design considerations of that poster inarguably outstrip this one. The biggest problem with Forbidden Planet is the large text box at the bottom. I understand better than most that being an MGM product, the stars’ names had to be made quite large — yet certainly the artist could have continued the illustration to the bottom of the poster and simply placed those text items on top, in a readable, light color.

And then there’s the title type. It was a struggle for me to divorce my affection for this film, not to mention my familiarity with its type solution, from my judgment of the poster. And while this type is just fine, again it fails to measure up to the type in not only the top poster, but a few others from the countdown as well. In the end though, I feel comfortable placing this firmly in the second spot, in what proved to be only a four or five horse race anyway. This is one of the most familiar and beloved film posters of all time — a claim even the top poster can’t make.

1. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

I’m certain some readers will take issue with this selection, thinking that a more iconic film should warrant the top spot. But remember — this is a poster countdown, not a movie countdown, and the poster for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is simply the best of the bunch, hands down. It’s flawless in every way, and certainly deserves to occupy the top spot. Let’s break it down in terms of Illustration, Typography, Composition, and Concept:

Everything you need to know about the illustration can be summed up in the figures fleeing from the beast. We’ve seen many such figures before, but none rendered with the same style and verve as this. The artist has carefully considered each pose, and each figure is executed with the same level of care — look at those facial expressions! Nor do the figures get “fuzzier” as the recede into the background — the bus is rendered with the same degree of detail as the people. Much the same can be said of the buildings. They are as realistic as can be, even in the way they shatter and tumble to the ground. The beast himself seems to have been custom-fitted to this landscape, and he’s pretty scary — from the saliva dripping from his jaws to the steam coming from his nose, no details have been left out.

The typography — all of it — is the best in the countdown. From typeface selection to arrangement to the brilliant touch of adding scales to the word “Beast,” this is simply as good as it gets. Take special note of how the designer has used boxes to contain the various taglines and balance the composition. The poster boasts a whopping five taglines, and the designer has effortlessly integrated each. The design feels claustrophobic (a good thing) without feeling cluttered (a bad thing). That patented Warner Bros. poster shop technique of maximizing the white space around the edge at the minor expense of image size gives the designer the opportunity to dynamically overlap various design elements around the edge of the poster, inject that much more life and movement into the finished product.

If we think of graphic design as the juxtaposition of type and image in order to communicate a message, this poster is a master class.

Thanks for sticking with me through this one! Let me know how I did, and feel free to disagree with my choices. This has been a lot of fun. Up next in a few months, and probably for 100 posters: Classic Horror. I can’t wait!

50 GREATEST CLASSIC SCI-FI POSTER COUNTDOWN! 20-11

2011-07-26T15:55:00.004-04:00

Welcome back to the science fiction poster countdown — back after a brief vacation. Just ten posters remain after this week’s entry, check back next Tuesday to see which poster grabs the number one spot. I can promise it will be a controversial pick!

20. The Incredible Shrinking Man

In a world of posters with fantastic beasts, aliens, and objects only limited by the imagination of their creators, it is refreshing to see a poster that turns such everyday objects into catalysts for tension. Rarely has a housecat or a scissors been so frightening. At first glance the male figure should be centered, but by placing him to the side the designer has allows us to see at least some of his face, and the scissors fill the empty space quite nicely. Excellent type treatment backs up the concept of the film, and the competing diagonals heighten the sense of drama and instability. I’d be curious to see how this poster would look with a full-field image, but the mesh that holds back the cat would make the type design problematic.

19. Five

Fascinating title with a poster to match. This deserves its ranking simply because the designer exploited the originality of the title by making it a part of the poster’s central image. The interaction of the male figures skulking around the letterforms conceptually reinforces the film’s narrative, and makes the typography all the more interesting. The somewhat orgasmic woman at the top of the poster is a bit of a distraction, though an unavoidable one: I can’t imagine a poster from this period that didn’t have at least one large representation of a human face / figure. The concept centering around the title type is great, but it does require the figures to be quite small.

18. The Blob

The poster for The Blob promises more than the film is able to deliver, but that often goes without saying in this countdown. Provocative illustration, great big type, believable fear from the female figure, and nicely stacked boxes up top give this a lot of style.

17. The Astounding She Monster

This is dripping with mid-century style — get a load of the planets at the top of the design — the controlled precision with which they are rendered brings to mind fifties textbook illustrations, just as the rest of the design evokes the covers of countless dime novels. I love the pose of the figure, the way in which her hair isn’t just hanging down and the positioning of her arms and hands — the poster creates a strong sense of mystery by hiding her facial features from the viewer. What really makes this poster fascinating though is the male figure holding a rifle at the bottom of the design. The way in which he is engulfed in flames, and by “way” I mean the high contrast, graphically bold rendering of both the flames and the figure itself, is astonishing for a poster of this age — such graphic devices didn’t really take hold until the computer era of graphic design, which came with the debut of the Apple Macintosh in early 1984.

16. The Fly

At first the grid pattern in use here recalls the poster for The Incredible Shrinking Man, but the similarities between the two designs cease there — with the poster for The Fly coming out ahead. The sense of scale at play in the Shrinking Man poster is clearly an aspect of the film itself, whereas the juxtaposition of the large female face with the small figure just above is purely compositional, and adds a more subtle layer of meaning that the other poster lacks. The type design here is original, and representative of its era, while the large rectangular forms (both in black and red) off set the machined rigidity of the mesh pattern — which cleverly hints at the multi-faceted view from the eyes of the fly himself.

15. The Amazing Transparent Man

Entirely apart from the design, be sure to read the text in the “Warning” box at the bottom of the poster. It’s a great example of the gimmicks producers would try to increase attendance. From a visual perspective, there’s just nothing not to like here: the use of a white silhouette perfectly communicates the idea of the film, and also provides the perfect focal point to apply the title type — if we were to pick that text up and move it to another location in the design, the amount of unused, unencumbered white space would make the poster feel empty and boring. Yet the artist has given us just enough explicit information to understand that the title character is not one of the good guys. I’m less certain about the action vignettes going on around the central figure. With the exception of the bank vault that we see showing through the right leg, I think I’d prefer this if the remaining images were removed, leaving nothing but the vivid blue background.

14. Them!

I have to be careful here. The best designers in the movie poster business worked at the Warner Bros. studios B department, and they cranked out many truly amazing posters throughout the late forties and fifties. The designers there came closest to having a “house style,” characterized by a stacked box grid structure, expert text typography, large white borders, and even the consistent application of Futura Extra Bold. They also regularly used a limited color palette (as we saw in the noir countdown), though that isn’t in play for any of the sci-fi posters. The poster for Them! is emblematic of another thing that made the designs so special: carefully rendered illustrations, evident in the detail of the giant ants themselves, as well as the fleeing figures and the car in flames. Before all is said and done (as in, next week!) we’ll see an even better example of the WB poster style, but this is still one of the best.

13. Fire Maidens of Outer Space

Great subtle details make this poster: notice the male figure at the bottom of the poster actually physically interacting with one of the “see” boxes, using it for cover; also notice how the designer overlapped the “O” in “Outer” with another one of the “see” boxes — such minute attention to detail creates that hallowed sense of gestalt that makes some designs (and designers) better than others; check out the eyes on the creature — what’s he staring at?! Notice as well that the female figure has lost a shoe. And finally, the all-consuming flames and attention-grabbing colors hold the entire design together.

12. Plan 9 from Outer Space

Many of the comments I’ve gotten so far have talked about how the posters for these films are often better than the films themselves — such was never more true than it is with this example, for what is generally considered the worst film ever made. Yet the poster is not just good, it’s damn good — and I appreciate it all the more for it’s cheapness; it’s one of the only two-color posters of the era, and certainly the only one that scored a spot in this countdown. I talked at length in the film noir poster countdown of the power of strong diagonals and a limited palette, especially when the colors used are black, white, and red, and this poster is a fine example, even if the black areas could be a bit more deep. The simplicity of the poster is striking — after all, how many posters have we seen so far that have exercised very little constraint? In a genre where poster designers tried to cram in as much scintillating information as possible, the best posters often have the most stark designs. The designer does a fine job of creating depth as well, using color, scale, and layering to show a fore- middle- and background. The title type seems to anticipate the Star Wars introduction typography, curiously. A wonderful poster, yet owing to the infamy of the film far too pricey for most collectors to contemplate.

11. Invasion of the Saucer-Men

One of the posters that sets the gold standard for science fiction posters at auction, with examples selling anywhere from three to five-thousand dollars each — and it’s easy to see why: it has all the elements we have come to expect, everything about it is iconic and representative of the genre. We’ve got frightening and original creatures, a beautiful girl (inevitably in the clutches of the aliens), a cityscape besieged by flying saucers, fleeing masses, and plenty of “see” boxes. The content in this example is reinforced by a really strong design, particularly in the title typography (reminiscent of the Star Trek type-style) and the way the “see” boxes are handled. This is one of the great ones.

Don’t forget to bear here next Tuesday for the final entry!

50 GREATEST CLASSIC SCI-FI POSTER COUNTDOWN! 30-21

2011-07-12T16:26:00.004-04:00

Welcome back — we cross over the half way point in the countdown this week, with a big bonus: I switched to the updated post editor (about time) and now I am able to make the posters much larger! So settle in and enjoy; feel free to download, and watch out for all the death rays in this week’s batch!

30. Red Planet Mars

It isn’t all that unusual to find mid-century film posters with a newspaper theme — it was certainly en vogue at the time for Hollywood studios to produce films with storylines that had been “ripped from the headlines.” However the poster for Red Planet Mars is probably the best of the bunch, primarily because it carries the look and feel of a newspaper design to an impressive extreme, not merely utilizing the tropes of the typical front page, but even creating a masthead and broadsheet with columns as well. I wish there were more sense to the black shape that contains the title type, or possibly that the title type could have become the actual newspaper headline, but this poster is good enough to resist quibbling over the details.

29. The Crawling Eye

My grandmother used to terrify us with stories of The Crawling Eye when we visited her house as children: “It came from behind the TV!” she’d say to my sisters and me in those dark moments before we went off to bed. We repeated the stories for years and years. Nostalgia aside, this poster is here because it presents one of the more original visions (ha!) of the most popular of science fiction poster tropes: the woman in the “arms” of the fantastic creature. I’m especially impressed with how easily my eye accepts the blending of photography and illustration here, and the designerly fashion in which the tentacles themselves change as they leave the black box that frames the titular creature. The woman looks truly afraid, and the title typography has been contrived to successfully integrate with the other elements in the poster — nice lettering as well.

28. Earth vs. The Flying Saucers

There’s nothing about the way the spaceships and robots themselves are rendered that makes the poster for Earth vs. The Flying Saucers any better than many of the other posters in the countdown, but the illustration does create a sense of awe and wonder that is conspicuously absent from other designs. This just feels big, quite literally earth shattering. It appears that the invaders seem in endless supply, receding into space forever and ever, against a wasteland of shattered town and buildings. Given the global nature inherent in science fiction, one would imagine more posters would attempt to create such monumental vistas in their posters, yet few do, typically focusing on a single creature or incident. From the designers’ point of view, the application of the title in one of the saucer shapes is inventive and successful, but not very well balanced with the box containing the tagline above. I’d have shifted the tag to the other side of the poster to create a little more balance — even though it would have meant reconfiguring parts of the illustration as well.

27. Tarantula

There’s so much to love here, I wish I could have placed this higher. Alas though, if we believe the tagline and this spider is actually 100 feet high, then our ubiquitous captive female is at least 50 feet tall herself! I also wasn’t aware that giant arachnids could also fly — that spider’s feet are nowhere near the ground! My only other gripe about this truly wonderful poster is that the man and woman in front look less like people running away than they do relatives at a family picnic who have just been goaded into doing an impromptu tap dance. She practically has jazz hands. In all seriousness though — is there a better instance anywhere out there of title type that really exemplifies fifties sci-fi poster design?

26. Missile Monsters

Like Satan’s Satellites, Missile Monsters is another feature film cobbled together from a previously released serial. In this case, Republic Pictures Flying Disc Man from Mars. Beyond the absurdity of the idea of the poster’s central image: Martians attacking the earth concealed in gigantic missiles, the design here is quite good, even if traditional: A graphicly bold color palette, strong central image, and solid custom lettering — all arranged nicely. None of the elements seem intrusive or out of place, and the combination of drawn and photographed elements barely registers. That bright red sure pops!

25. Queen of Outer Space

One of the campiest movies in the countdown sure has a sexy poster. It’s all about Zsa Zsa in Queen of Outer Space, famously based on a made-up-on-the-spot story be Ben Hecht, one of Tinsel Town’s premiere screenwriters. We have to award points when a poster gives a great inclination of what we’ll see if we plunk down money for a ticket, and this one does it as well as any other — even if the promised scenery is merely a cheesecake show. Nonetheless, dig that fantastic background illustration of Venus, and the iconic late-fifties type design. The guys over at House Industries got rich turning the typestyles from posters such as this (and many of the others in this countdown) into commercial typeface designs. Who can blame them, the type (and the girls) are all beautiful!

24. The Man from Planet X

The problem with Ulmer’s titular extra-terrestrial (one of the movies’ first), is that viewers could never get a sense of what he was actually looking at, and the big-headed, unreal sensation carries through to the poster. Yet it is refreshing to see a meeting between a visitor from space and beautiful girl that, for once, does not involve the girl passing out and being carried off in the visitor’s arms. The design here is very simple, and while I wish the title didn’t hide so much of the two figures, I’m happy to be able to see so much of the spooky, deserted moor in the background behind them. It’s vividly rendered in a wonderfully cool color palette, lending an air of mystery to Ulmer’s signature low-budget strangeness.

23. The Day the Earth Stood Still

I struggled to come to grips with this poster possibly more than any other in this genre. The “sum” of the design somehow manages to succeed — and succeed quite well, but when each of the individual parts are considered they come up rather short. Possibly it’s the detail in the illustration, or merely the inventiveness of the content, or maybe even the earthy (!) color scheme that makes this work, but I’m drawn to this poster like few others, in spite of its many faults. Here’s the laundry list of what bothers me: 1) The image of Gort firing a beam and clutching at the is quite well-rendered — why cut it off? It’s an awkward crop and it’s hard not to believe the poster would improve if the robot and his captive were moved to the center of the composition. 2) The hand reaching to encompass the planet is absolutely one of the most striking images on any of the posters in the countdown (partly accounting for the high ranking of this design), so why not move it up where we can really see and enjoy it? Notice the large horizontal band of unused and ineffective space above the hand and to the left of Gort’s head? Move the hand / globe element up into that space, which would make it more prominent and allow for better integration of the title typography, which … 3) is haphazardly handled and crammed into the design. All of the text feels very mechanical and dry, but given the unusual composition of this poster (especially that awkward negative space mentioned earlier) the title could certainly be better positioned, and would have been more provocative with a more organic, tense, or hand-drawn look rather than cold typography where all the letterforms in the title are given the same size and weight. This is the sort of title, using the word “THE” twice, that would give most designers fits — there’s no reason why that word should be as large as the title’s action words in either instance of its appearance. Nevertheless …

22. The Atomic Man

One of the most designerly posters in the countdown is also the one most rooted in modernism. It would be easy to believe the fractured visuals and collage-style arrangement of the poster of The Atomic Man came from the drafting table of Paul rand or even a youthful Saul Bass. The title typography in this example is somewhat ill-fitting in both style and placement, and gets lost against the more vivid visuals of the poster, but not enough to detract from what is one of the more original designs (and color schemes) in the countdown.

21. Target Earth

Betcha didn’t notice this: take a gander at the man and woman in the lower right corner. Compare the line of his body to the imaginary compositional line created by the tagline and the title typography, then compare the line of the female figure to the diagonal created by the robot’s raw and crab-like arms. See how the couple’s bodies reinforce the overall composition of the poster? Folks, that’s why composition and critical thinking are of a great deal more importance to designers than the ability to “draw,” and what makes this such a darn good poster. There’s even more to appreciate here: the rather soft style of the illustration, an overall clean and simple composition with strong diagonals, a vivid color scheme, and a great piece of custom lettering. A fantastic poster.

Back next Tuesday — ten closer to the finish!

50 GREATEST CLASSIC SCI-FI POSTER COUNTDOWN! 40-31

2011-07-05T15:54:00.020-04:00

Welcome back! Let’s take a look at ten more posters this week!

40. This Island Earth

Another problematic design, great artwork marred by a busy composition and workmanlike typography. Yet the illustration is worth the ranking here: the facial expressions, the explosions, the spaceships, and especially the creatures are all fantastic and gorgeous. Here’s a poster where I wish the artwork area was scaled down so that all of the text could be placed above and below, leaving the artwork to stand on its own. We don’t even require the tagline, “The supreme excitement of our time!” The artwork says it all for us. Love the “2 ½ years in the making” under the title (designers call such things ‘violators’) — the “atomic flower” is really cool!

39. Twelve to the Moon

Admittedly, the poster design for Twelve to the Moon is quite similar that of Battle in Outer Space, which came in at #50. And while I appreciate aspects of each poster (especially the action going on in the poster for Battle), from the design perspective the upgrade in quality here is straightforward: the imagery is more highly resolved — especially considering the treatment of the two figures in the foreground; the overall composition is less busy, with fewer elements clashing with each other in such a tight space; and most importantly, the typography in this example is a much more sophisticated than in the poster for Battle. The strength of which lies in the vertiginous alignment of the tag, leading the viewer’s eye directly to the title, as well as the cropping of the box behind the two figures, creating another layer of pictorial space. And while it strikes me as a little careless how the placement of one of the stars in the artwork makes the word “THE” difficult to read, the gestalt of the composition makes the designer in me rate this one a little bit higher.

38. Devil Girl from Mars

Hooray for cheesecake, even if it is Martian. Artistically this isn’t one of the stronger entries in the countdown, but it scores big points for content. There are only few examples in fifties sci-fi poster design that have a strong female character out front, and this is one of them. We’ll see one or two others in the coming weeks. While the typography here is not particularly inventive, the artwork is: these are some of the more original spacecraft of the period, and take special notice of how the robot depicted on the right has an almost … feminine quality. If the Devil Girl herself didn’t appear to be floating, if one of the taglines at the top could have been removed, and if the title could have been lettered with a little more panache — and maybe a bit bigger, this would have rated higher — maybe even as high as The Queen of Outer Space, which we’ll be seeing soon.

37. When Worlds Collide

One of the better films of the cycle, this was an Oscar winner in the effects category and a nominee for its vivid color cinematography. Hooray for good type! When Worlds Collide gets one of the strongest type-treatments in the entire countdown. For once we have a poster that does a good job of addressing the actual content of the film — showing a streaking rocket exiting the planet as the “worlds collide” destroying all those left behind. Simple, narrative, striking, and with realistic expressions of terror on the faces of those caught in the tumult. I beg the pardon of anyone bothered or offended by the inclusion of a poster that depicts a NYC skyscraper toppling over, no offense was intended.

36. Attack of the Crab Monsters

Another Roger Corman no-budget gem. Classic artwork with a cute blonde menaced by a terrifying otherworldly creature. There’s something strangely unsettling and … human … about the crab monster’s face. What this lacks in dynamic composition and jazzy type it makes up for with iconic imagery.

35. Satan’s Satellites

I might be cheating by including this, as Satan’s Satellites is nothing more than a slapdash feature cobbled together at Republic Pictures from their Zombies of the Stratosphere serials, but I think the poster for Satellites is stronger than that of Zombies, and rates a spot in the countdown. Satan doesn’t actually make an appearance in the film, so the title itself is a little confusing, but the poster isn’t: fairly well executed photographic image of a Martian clutching at yet another passed-out young woman, with spaceships above, a campy robot below, a crumbling city in the background, and a eyebrow-raising watercolor wash (rare for film posters) holding it all together. The title typography is a good custom-job, and the tag line is handled even better — “cosmic thrills” is in a wonderful script; I wish I could do that! At first I wished the title was a little larger, then I realized how it is employed to cover up the inadequacies in the photograph: Our damsel-in-distress oddly has no fingers or toes, and for some inexplicable reason the Martian himself has no right hand! Where is it? He must be using some sort of extraterrestrial power to hold her up with the power of just one arm!

34. The Wasp Woman

One of the campiest entries in the countdown (another from Corman) boasts a surprisingly elegant and pretty poster. Most people tend to get hung up on the admittedly awkward way in which the female face has been applied to the wasp figure, but if you are able to get around this what remains is a stunning poster: vivid colors, a simple composition, appropriate title typography, a well-organized tagline, and fine artwork. The way in which the wasp woman is grabbing at the male figure — and the resulting expression and body language is superb. Notice also the quality of the fleeing figures, the loosely rendered urban landscape, and most of all: the skulls. If you happen to download this one be sure to zoom in on the skull area — the rendering is very impressive. Bad movie, great poster.

33. Beginning of the End

OK, so this one is over the top — it’s so busy one almost doesn’t know where to look first. There is so much wrong happening here that I’m amazed this poster somehow manages to be a winner. First, allow me to applaud the artist for taking a film where the radioactively enhanced creatures are … grasshoppers … and turning them into some of the coolest looking sci-fi creatures in the history of the genre! Rest assured folks, if you get to see this film you won’t find these critters anywhere inside — and while that’s definitely a let-down of sorts, it really makes for a great poster.

All of the typography struggles to be seen: yellow tags against yellow buildings at the top, and a red title against a red-ish background in the middle. Why not swap red and yellow and make both pieces of type a bit easier to read? It’s also a little unfortunate how the title typography covers up so many of the soldiers firing on the creatures, and even worse how the creatures themselves are so strangely out of proportion: the ones in the background are as large as buildings, yet the one in the center of the design is small enough to have a woman in its maw — who knows, maybe she’s the 50 ft Woman.

Yet in spite of all of these flaws, this is an amazing poster: get a load of the cubism-inspired buildings in the rear, and the creatures themselves! Fascinating juxtaposition of illustration and photography, all within a design that hides a million secrets — I find something new every time I look at this.

32. Killer Shrews

Great stuff, especially from the design point of view. Part of the allure of science fiction / creature films is that moment at the end of the show when the monster is finally revealed. Here’s one of the only posters in the countdown that actually titillates the viewer, just begging them to step up to the box office and buy a ticket — after looking at this poster who doesn’t want to see the rest of the killer shrews? The inclusion of a blood spatter and a high heel push this dangerously close to horror, but considering the nature of the beast, this film is right at home in science fiction. Instead of the previous poster, which looks cool but ultimately disappoints ticket buyers, this does just the opposite: it teases and delivers.

31. Destination Moon

A simply beautiful poster for the quintessential film that set off the sci-fi boom in Hollywood. Required viewing, enough said!

Back next week with ten more!

50 GREATEST CLASSIC SCI-FI POSTER COUNTDOWN! 50-41

2011-06-29T15:46:00.013-04:00

Let’s do it again! The noir poster countdown was such a success that I’ve decided to make poster rankings as much a regular feature of the blog as possible. Up next is classic science fiction. I chose sci-fi instead of horror (which is on the docket) because the genre is of slightly more interest to me. I confined my selections to films released from 1940 to 1960, which roughly parallels the period of classic film noir and is in keeping with WDL’s mid-century theme. While it’s easy enough to begin at 1940, some readers will undoubtedly point out that there were many brilliant, or at least notable, science fiction films made during the sixties, such as 2001, Fantastic Voyage, Barbarella, and many others. I chose to cut off at 1960 for a few reasons, the first being that I wanted to make an “apples to apples” comparison of posters: as much as it pained me to exclude at least one favorite (1961’s Mysterious Island), visual style evolved so rapidly in the sixties that by the time the iconic poster for Fantastic Voyage was created in ‘66, designers were making posters that had a markedly more modern look and feel from those of the fifties — such comparing and ranking was a can of works I was unwilling to open. Between you and me, Fantastic Voyage would have been the only other film poster with any real chance at cracking the top fifty:

I worked on this for about six weeks. It took a few weeks to narrow my choices down to the top 50, another session or two to develop a rough ranking, and then at least ten sessions of Photoshop work where I reevaluated all of my choices. I’m likely to make at least one or to more changes in the course of getting all the posts up. The noir countdown generated more than 200,000 hits, so I want to make sure I do my level best — all of those “commercial artists” (ouch!) who worked in anonymity deserve it.

These images are all fairly hi-res, so feel free to download as many as you like — they make a marvelous fodder for screen-savers. I have much larger print quality files than those posted here. If you’d like a set get in touch with me and we’ll figure something out.

As with the noir countdown, I gave myself a set of parameters from which to make selections. I’ll repeat them here, and briefly with every post. I learned the hard way that some of the readers of the noir countdown didn’t understand that it was a ranking of poster designs instead of the representative films, and were stymied when they couldn’t find the bright pink poster for Double Indemnity anywhere. With that in mind, I’ll leave a reminder with each of the five posts. Here though, just this once, is a fair amount of text about who I am and how I go about this:

This is not a ranking of science fiction movies themselves, but the posters that marketed them. In the real world I’m a university graphic design professor (as well as chair of the department of art and art history here at my school) and longtime professional designer. My designs have appeared in what designers refer to as “the annuals,” (like Print, How, and Graphis) more than 300 times. So while all of the choices shown here are subjective, there’s some small measure of heft behind my opinion.

What’s eligible:

1. Only films from 1940 –1960.

2. Only American issue posters of American films — no European versions: apples to apples, not apples to oranges.

3. Only standard one-sheets. (No half-sheets, 3 or 4 sheets, lobby cards, inserts, day bills, etc.)

4. No re-release, reprints, or retrospective posters allowed. Only original, first-run, theatrical release posters.

Judging criteria (In order of prominence):

1. Design / Artistic merit. Composition, color, balance, typography, use of illustration / photography, graphic power, etc.

2. Execution of Imagery. A new parameter for the Sci-Fi countdown because so many of the posters are illustrated. The trick is how well?

3. Concept. How well does the poster communicate the film’s message? Is the poster authentic? Is it misleading? Does it reach the intended audience?

4. Originality / Novelty. I reward artistic risk-takers!

5. The Blank Slate rule. All films are equal, from prestige production to Poverty Row. In all likelihood, many readers will not have heard of all films on the list, and many will be seeing the posters for the first time. That should be half the fun.

6. My personal taste … is the least significant of the criteria. My choices are guided primarily by the above, but it would absurd to imagine my personal likes and dislikes didn’t play some part in my choices. However I’m not hiding behind opinion: this is not a list of my favorites. This is an empirical ranking of what I consider to be the best, with my likes and dislikes shoved as far to the side as possible. And while any such list is, of course, purely opinion, not all opinions carry equal weight: this one is highly educated, professionally seasoned, and exercised daily! Oh, and I’m a pragmatist to boot!

50. Battle in Outer Space.

A great film to start with: get a load of everything happening here! We’ve got fighter jets squaring off against spacecraft in a scene reminiscent of Independence Day, a 2001-style space station, a well-rendered moonscape, and a pair of astronauts. The figures in the immediate foreground are striking, and anyone who was with me through the previous countdown knows this poster has two things I like: well-organized typography and well thought out fore-, middle-, and background. The sense of depth coupled with competent rendering makes this all work. Sure, it’s a little busy, but without a movie star or a rampaging beast, spaceman, or robot to showcase, or even a scantily clad girl, the artist did well with what the film provided.

49. Gamma People.

It didn’t take long for me to invoke a favored word, one I’ll use from time to time when discussing the posters: designerly. It usually means the image in question has idiosyncrasies that graphic designers in particular will be drawn to. Gamma People is such a poster, here’s why: The color scheme is unusual for a film poster, eschewing bright reds and yellows for turquoise and black — a color scheme oft-employed by contemporary designers. The use of a reversed, or photographic negative image is especially impressive as well, as is the substantial sense of pictorial depth the designer has created, solely through the scale of the marching “gamma people.” The waves emanating from the transmitter in the upper left corner are also an asset — we’ll see such waves again and again. They look good (they pop!), and also successfully tie together the disparate compositional elements in the design, as well as reinforcing the sense of depth by going “behind” the marching characters and pushing them forward. The typography here is nothing special, and I’m a little disappointed to see the film’s stars at the bottom. Nether Douglas or Bartok was ever such a star that I would acquiesce to their getting in the way of such a great design. This could have gone higher, but I’m comfortable with it here.

48. It Conquered the World.

See what I was saying about those waves? Here they are again. Roger Corman gives us a frightening creature here, the first of many on the way in the next few weeks. The same is true of the horrified woman in the foreground — we will see her time and again in the countdown, in many different guises and states of wakefulness. Fantastic creatures and damsels in distress are a few of the most popular poster tropes in classic science fiction. There are many others, and we’ll see them all in abundance before we reach #1: tanks and soldiers, people fleeing catastrophe, SEE! boxes, dinosaurs, buildings tumblings, and so forth. While one could argue that this genre in particular is populated with somewhat derivative posters, I’d argue that while we’ll see a few robots holding passed-out young women, the posters are all done with such expert skill and passion that they never feel like knock-offs of one another. Instead, vintage science fiction posters often capture extraordinary prices at auction, just as the films they represent have captured audiences for decades.

47. Mothra

Not much to note here beyond agreement with Pentagram partner Paula Scher: “Make it bigger.” This is a poster, just like the film, that benefits from making it bigger. Super-gigantic typography married to an equally huge image. The babes in the foreground and the jets in the background really give a powerful sense of scale to the type and image, while the stylish black tagline and the vibrant red background give this plenty of punch. The flames at the bottom of the title typography are a nice detail, as is the beautifully elegant rendering of Mothra’s antennae!

46. The Land Unknown

There were many dinosaur films produced in the fifties, yet most of the posters don’t cut the mustard. This is one of the better ones, wholly on the strength of Ken Sawyer’s excellent painting. I’m not buying the relationship of the T-Rex to the group of people standing at its feet, but there’s so much detail otherwise, especially in the “unimportant” areas of the composition, to make this poster a success. The couple in the foreground can take a flying leap as far as I’m concerned (you gotta let ‘em know there’s romance) — but the sea monster and the mountains in the background are positively Tolkien-esque. And how about that whirlybird?

45. Tobor the Great

Hopefully I won’t be giving too much away if I acknowledge that the poster for Forbidden Planet is still a few weeks away? At that time I’ll offer a more complete comparison of that poster to this one, but for now I think it’s important to point out that Tobor the Great is the earlier film by two years, and consequently can make a claim to having the original image. Yet it falls much further back in the countdown because, in spite of what’s become an iconic image in the annals of science fiction, the poster here just isn’t as well designed. The typography is carelessly arranged — shoved and crowded into the corners of the poster, with the title type covering up important parts of the central image. Audiences wanted to see the robot, not the type! Let’s design a poster that can gracefully show both. Two more quick notes: what is that diagonal slash that divides the poster in two? Surely it doesn’t need to be there. And finally, take a close look at the body angles of the robot and the girl: Tobor is seen in a three-quarters view, while the girl appears in profile. For this to hold water, she would have to be a cardboard cutout. An iconic poster, but crudely rendered.

44. Invaders from Mars

Here’s another poster with a creature holding an unconscious girl — I told you there would be plenty of them, just wait! Yet in this poster the relationship of the two figures is much more believable. We also have tanks and army men with guns trained on the invaders, as well as a terrified group of people running away from certain destruction. While this is a well-composed and skillfully rendered poster, it’s impossible to escape the feeling that the titular invaders are nothing more than actors in tossed-together get ups — and it hurts the overall impact of the poster. This is particularly surprising considering the film was directed by famed production designer William Cameron Menzies. The overall feel of the film is surreal and beautiful, but the 'martians' themselves leave a lot to be desired. In this instance I would have encouraged the artist to be a little more creative in trying to hide the cheapness of the film’s costume design — even if some measure of artistic license could have been taken. I’d also seek some improvement in the title typography, which is stacked and difficult to read; it even gets lost amidst the colorful artwork around it. To its credit, and as opposed to the Tobor poster, the text typography, or “fine print,” is deftly handled. Nonetheless, I’d happily hang this one on my wall.

43. Not of This Earth

This is the first poster I struggled to place, another gem from Roger Corman. I’m not very happy with the color scheme or the overall graphic impact of the design, but I appreciate the simple image-type-image horizontal arrangement and the clever way the tagline is stacked into the composition. However my primary reason for including the poster in the countdown is the use of the extreme close-up of the female character’s face — which more than almost any other poster in the countdown, anticipates the design tropes of later decades — though if for better or worse I’m not certain. This poster could have been improved by eliminating the gray text box at the bottom and extending the artwork through the entire image area. There would have been plenty of room at the lower right to easily include such a small amount of text type.

42. The Lost Missile

Hooray for SEE! boxes. This odd poster is the first to have them, and while they aren’t very well organized in this example (they come at the expense of title typography that is too small to be so busy), such boxes are one of the campiest and best-known aspects of science fiction posters. This is such an offbeat poster though — more suggestive of Luis Buñuel than Lester Berke, with its surreal disembodied eye and colossal hand. All of the elements in the composition seem cobbled together in a way that brings to mind the use of clip-art — get a load of those buildings in the background — but the overall effect is unsettling, and ultimately pleasing. This might improve if the SEE! boxes could be nixed and title was scaled to encompass the entire bottom of the poster. However upon reading the content of the boxes it becomes clear how necessary the producers felt they were to properly sell the picture.

41. I Married a Monster from Outer Space

If you haven’t seen this, I suggest you do so — in spite of a title that drips camp, the movie itself is surprising and universally exceeds viewer expectations. The poster hits a home run for simplicity. Red, yellow, and black are oft-utilized colors in poster design from this or any genre, and this is a good example of why such colors work: when juxtaposed correctly they create a lot of graphic zing— making a poster stand out on a crowded wall. Don’t forget the value of a poster that tells a story, giving viewers enticing hints about the narrative Even though this design uses just a few simple images and, for once, no tagline, it provides plenty of information about what we can expect if we buy a ticket. I also appreciate that the aliens are merely suggested, leaving something to the imagination and making them all the more frightening because of it. The designer of the poster for Invaders from Mars would benefit from viewing this one.

Back next Tuesday with ten more!

CAGE OF EVIL (1960)

2011-06-20T01:31:00.009-04:00

“You know it’s real funny. Since I’ve been on the force I’ve been around hoods and thieves and killers, the real stinking part of the human race. I always wondered if it would rub off on me. Now I know.”

Most people who stumble upon 1960’s Cage of Evil won’t linger much before they start trolling for something else to watch. Yet it’s the sort of thing that I luxuriate in; 70 minutes of pulpy goodness, with sharp stylish dialogue and a second-rate cast giving it everything they’ve got. It’s made on the cheap, with every B movie trick in the book: unfamiliar performers, cheap sets, rear projection, long takes, and so forth — half the plot is related through voiceover narration. Even with its 1960 release date, it still exists in that magical, purely cinematic world that lent itself to such delightful crime films — the one in which a police officer who skews towards brutality wasn’t looked at with scorn by his fellow officers and the LAPD brass. Such cops and cultures don’t function well in the world away from the screen (as the long and storied history of the real LAPD easily demonstrates), but they sure make great fodder for films and pulp novels. In the case of this film, a culture inclusive of the brutal police officer is quite necessary: Cage of Evil would never get off the ground if its protagonist’s violent behavior made him a suspect in the eyes of his colleagues. Instead, he enjoys the support of his fellow officers and the encouragement of his captain. He’s clearly the sort of officer that Dudley Smith would want in his LAPD. (Edgy detectives would become the heroes of seventies films, then cartoonish superheroes during the eighties. By the early nineties they would demonized in a spate of “internal affairs” thrillers.)

The film stars Ron Foster, the kind of squinty, oily actor who does every scene with a cigarette in his hand. Plenty good looking enough with carved features and a dour expression, Foster was cut from the right cloth to play Detective Scott Harper, a cop who gets passed over one time too many and decides to take his chances on the opposite side of the law. His slicked-back jet hair and habit of looking at his costars crossways only add to his unctuous credibility. Harper’s hardboiled bona fides are established early on, when he beats up a hapless diamond cutter on the slight suspicion the man may have abetted in the diamond heist central to the story. It costs him dearly: even after having placed third on the lieutenants’ exam, Harper gets passed over for the promotion when the jeweler signs a complaint.

Foster has had a surprisingly long career in Hollywood considering how spotty his resume is. After starring in a number of B films in the late fifties and early sixties with director Eddie Cahn (including this one), he spent most of the last fifty years appearing sporadically in character roles on television. He had a recurring role in the cop series Highway Patrol, but his longest run was during the mid-nineties on the CBS soap Guiding Light. More recently Foster has lent his voice to popular video games such as Max Payne and Grant Theft Auto.

Pat Blair plays Holly Taylor, the ‘hostess’ who acts as a go between for the diamond thieves and their San Francisco fence. Harper goes undercover to get next to her, and naturally they fall for each other — in pure Phyllis Dietrichson style, she sweet talks Harper into crashing the exchange and murdering everyone involved, but on the other hand she sticks with him even after she finds out he’s a cop! Like many other cheap crime movies, Cage of Fear is heavy on plot and light on character motivation; anyone who forgets that going in is bound to exit disappointed.

Blair is a doll, though she must have grimaced at her image on the film’s lobby card. (By the way, Her eyes don't really look like that, and the set up depicted appears nowhere in the film.) Pushing six feet in heels she runs the risk of towering over the guy opposite her, but she and Foster have surprisingly good chemistry. It took me a little while to make up my mind about her — her facial features and statuesque figure make her come over more like a contestant in the Miss America pageant, but after a change in hairstyle and wardrobe I was on the same page as the casting director. I knew Blair previously as the second female lead in the better-known 1956 film noir Crime Against Joe, but she surpasses that work here. There are still a few green moments during the Cage’s final action sequence, but for the most part Blair shines — especially in those sultry moments opposite Foster. Blair is somewhat more conspicuous than Foster — she had a seven year run opposite Fess Parker on the popular Daniel Boone series.

The arc of the story should be familiar by now: cop gets the shaft, meets a bad girl, and does the crooked thing. Cage of Evil ends along those same lines, though it manages to spin a few of the more tired clichés along refreshing lines. The climax cleverly borrows from Kubrick’s The Killing in a way that almost feels more like homage than outright theft. It’s also slickly ironic: in a sea of films that find their protagonists desperately attempting to make it across the border into Mexico, ours manage to do it in style — yet they bungle their getaway nevertheless.

Cage of Evil is not shot in the noir style, but I was still struck by the economical filmmaking. Cahn almost always uses middle-length shots with a single camera set-up and TV style lighting. This technique has ruined plenty of good material, but he manages to pull it off through pans and zooms, particularly when his characters relocate from one spot to another on a given set in between zooms. He gets a lot of bang for his production dollar by moving his actor about, and the movie feels more prestigious than it really is. Rear is used whenever characters are driving around Los Angeles, but those shots are bookended quite effectively with on-location exteriors at assorted LA locales. One of the rear-projection moments is striking: as Harper and Taylor are making their getaway, he uses the pause at a red light to explain to her why they have to run, “you can never surrender on a double-murder charge.” As he speaks, a large sedan barrels toward them from behind. The car’s arrival on their back bumper coincides with the best part of Foster’s monologue. Though it’s possible the moment may have been inadvertent, the notion of pursuing fate as embodied by heavy Detroit metal makes the moment powerful. The sense of clever B moviemaking evaporates just afterwards, as the rear projection shows Harper’s car turning into the airport parking lot, while his hands remain stalwartly at ten-and-two.

None of this stuff should amount to anything, but Cage of Evil is a much stronger film than I imagined it would be, and it lends a great deal of credibility to the notion that a movie rendered in earnest doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. This title is available instantly on Netflix, and is worth a shot.

Cage of Evil (1960)

Directed by Edward Cahn

Produced by Robert Kent

Written by Orville Hampton and Alexander Richards

Starring Ron Foster, Patricia Blair, and Harp McGuire

Cinematography by Maury Gertsman

Art Direction by Serge Krizman

Released by United Artists

Running time: 71 minutes

The Professor is dead. Long live Netflix!

2011-06-18T01:45:00.015-04:00

A few days ago, Netflix took another step in their determined plan to remove all user-generated content from their site. They nixed all avatars, profiles, and individual user review pages. Now all reviews show up in an anonymous format, consequently denying customers the ability to peruse all of the reviews written by any given member, and queue rentals from those pages. The links to commentary from Roger Ebert and other pros are gone altogether. It seems that corporate Netflix has decided to create a video-store approach to the way they do business, thinking that all most consumers need is box art and a blurb; if someone wants to read reviews from critics or other users, they can visit IMDb to do so. The reviews are still present in their generic form, but they’ll be gone before too much time passes. (If you have reviews, I’d begin the process of archiving them via a Word document.) The link to the Netflix Blog where this all is announced can be found here. The blog post certainly insults the intelligence, but there you have it.

Over the past few years Netflix has steadily shifted their focus from DVD to streaming, something that will continue into the future until at some point the streaming catalog becomes so robust that DVDs are discontinued (woe be to the USPS when that happens). This is going to happen eventually folks — DVDs simply won’t be viable forever. And along the way Netflix discovered something about the way their service is used that they couldn’t have imagined in the days before streaming: for many people $8.99 a month for unlimited streaming, especially considering the extraordinary amount of television that is available, is a much better option than $89.99 a month for cable. Besides, it makes a lot of sense for Netflix to get out of the mail order business as soon as they can profitably do so. They no longer reorder titles when their stock of discs are lost, damaged, or stolen — they simply apply the dreaded green “save” button to that title’s page. That button used to have a purpose: one could “save” a title, and when Netflix restocked it would automatically be queued. Now it almost always means the title will never be available. These days when I see that button I know to go ahead and request such a film via interlibrary loan.

I’ve paid very close attention to the way Netflix does business over the last ten years, and I’ve even gotten to know a few key employees. Here’s one thing I’ve learned: Netflix is one of the most well-run companies in the world, and they make decisions with the goal of pleasing the largest segment of their customer base. Unfortunately for hard-core movie fans, that biggest of segments is not comprised of people who are interested in watching Children of Paradise. Instead, Netflix is thinking about the folks who want to stream an episode of Ice Road Truckers at the end of a hard day’s work — and there’s not a thing wrong with that. The dirty little secret that the executives at Netflix know through and through is that they don’t have to cater to the movie buffs — the people who write reviews and read pages of them before queueing a film — because pretty much no matter what happens we aren’t cancelling our Netflix memberships. For the time being, there’s just nowhere else you can rent a copy of Children of Paradise.

The Netflix website is constantly changing — many power users would say for the worst. Whenever a site feature has been removed or modified there’s an uproar from the heavy users that lasts a few weeks over at the Netflix Ning Community and in the comments section of Hacking Netflix posts. Meanwhile, the changes barely register with the broad customer base — or if noticed, they are usually met with approval. The most beloved of all these dead or dying aspects of the Netflix site were the community features: ratings, reviews, reviewer ranking, profile pages, similarity percentages, friends and fan lists, the ability to view a friend’s queue, those blasted notes, and so forth. All gone or on the way out soon. And while I’ll miss many of these things as much as the people ranting at Hacking Netflix, I recognize that things change quickly in life as on the Internet, and nothing as cool as the community features on Netflix could last forever. It’s also worth pointing out that Netflix is a spectacular success story. They stay far ahead of the curve and have made few, if any, poor business decisions. Whatever they want to do to their site is fine by me. The only part of this that really scares me is that Netflix seems unwilling to maintain their service in order to please multiple demographics, and I'm in the demographic that no longer appears relevant to them.

But I loved writing the reviews! And I certainly would never have turned to blogging if I hadn’t begun writing on Netflix. I’ve been a loyal customer for a very long time — a decade — almost the entire time Netflix has been in business. (Heck, I remember credits and cardboard mailers!) In that time I’ve contributed nearly 1,000 reviews to their site; and in so doing I’ve made many friends and received hundreds of valued film suggestions from them. I posted my email and blog address on my profile page and received a dozen letters a week and a ton of blog traffic from fellow movie fans — I love hearing “Hey, you’re The Professor!” It has been a blast, and I enjoy that people in the blogging community see my avatar and know me from Netflix. (Funny story: while I am a college professor, the name is only a coincidence — I got the nickname The Professor years before playing NTN trivia. Wednesday nights were “beat The Professor nights” at my local Buffalo Wild Wings. If anyone in the restaurant could beat me at trivia, they’d get a $50 gift certificate. If I won all the games each week I got a C-note. In two years I only lost twice, but the stress and all the free wings took years off my life!)

The Netflix experience was most enjoyable when all of the community features were going strong. Being a competitive lunatic, I was a sucker for the reviewer ranking. Since I had already written many reviews before the system was implemented, I debuted with a fairly high number: #44. In the years that followed my ranking got better and better, reaching a high point of #11. Looks like I’ll go out at #26. Considering that the ranking algorithm skewed for members who made lists of new release titles and soft-core porn, I was sort of proud of my high number because I never did such things. (I believe that three of the top ten members and eight of the top 25 were folks who had never written a review.) However, the reviewer ranking system brought out the worst in a lot of people, and that’s one of the reasons that seeing all this go away will be a relief. Admitting my personal attachment to my rank was, and is, a little stupid and embarrassing, I never recruited a bunch of followers to “+1” all of my reviews in order to move up the list. Nor did I date my submissions so my cronies would know where they left off the previous week. I also never used the accounts feature to create four surrogate selves to “+5” my reviews either — but I sure know a lot of strange, lonely people who chose to do so. Some actually started web sites to coordinate their efforts! So if for no other reason I’m happy to see the reviews becoming completely anonymous so all of that nonsense will stop. The biggest problem with those folks was that they were mostly awful reviewers, and in many instances their reviews were the only ones visible for certain films. That was OK with me though, 27 Dresses never made it into my queue.

Here’s one thing I remember though: for me, and I’m sure for many of you, patronizing Netflix has been an enriching experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Netflix is without a doubt the single most valuable movie resource out there, and if it doesn’t make me appear too much like some capitalistic robot by showing gratitude to a profit-hungry corporation, I sure do offer Netflix my gratitude. And while they are removing the peripheral aspects of their web site that I enjoy using the most, I realize two things: Netflix is free to run their business how they see fit, and in the end it isn’t all about what I feel entitled to.