FEDERAL AGENT AT LARGE (1950)

“To beat somebody with your fists doesn’t make you anybody. On the other hand, a shiv gives you real authority.”

What a great line that is—hardboiled and hopelessly nostalgic. The character that says it in Republic’s Federal Agent at Large is a nervous twitch called Jumpy. Nostalgic? Of course. What kind of hood totes a knife? One circa 2014 stop-and-frisk and you’re off to Rikers. Then again, maybe by 1950 the nostalgia was wearing thin. Late in the picture Jumpy learns the hard way not to bring a switchblade to a gunfight.

Silence of the Lambs! Note the one-sheet
hanging above the TV at Quantico.

Lots of people, even devoted crime and noir fans, consider Poverty Row stuff like this practically unwatchable, especially considering the atrocious prints that collectors have access to. Not me. This is my favorite end of the pool. The water here may be a little cloudy, but the temperature suits me just fine. Beside, who can’t fall in love with this kind of dialogue? Here’s another one. “Guys like you, they all come to the same end— in the pen or in a ditch.” That’s courtesy of the film’s big-shot heavy, “Mr. Upstairs.” He’s giving the title character, an undercover T-man trying to hustle some diamonds in exchange for a gambling stake, some free advice. 

You ready to watch this yet? I thought so.

Jumpy. Mr. Upstairs. The dame? Call her Solitaire. With character names as delicious as these, the plot practically becomes secondary. Here it is anyway. The Feds send Mark Reed (Kent Taylor) down Mexico way to get to the bottom of an elaborate gold smuggling ring. Seems like a gang of hoods, run by Mr. Upstairs, have blackmailed a university archaeology professor (Robert Rockwell) into sneaking the gold through customs hidden inside artifacts from his dig. Reed infiltrates the gang and things unfold about as you’d expect them to—until a whopper of a surprise at the end almost pushes the movie into film noir territory. (Not quite though.) There’s almost no chance you’ll track this down and see it, so I don’t mind spoiling: There’s no sunset to ride off into for agent Reed. Just when you think he’s about the turn the tables on Mr. Upstairs, the old man uncorks a revolver and ventilates him. Borrowed from T-Men? Maybe, but eyebrow-raising nonetheless. 

Star Kent Taylor acted in Hollywood for five decades, but he’s a forgettable hero. Likeable but bland, he reprised Chester Morris’s Boston Blackie character on television for three years in the early 1950s. Dorothy Patrick actually gets top billing as Solitaire, the is-she-or-ain’t-she-a-bad-girl nightclub owner. Patrick accounts for most of the film’s verve. She was coming off a strong showing in the 1949 Oscar heavyweight Come to the Stable, but her career never took off as it should have. Film noir fans will undoubtedly recognize her as the girl Friday in 1949’s Follow Me Quietly. Bag of potatoes Robert Rockwell is billed third. He and Eve Arden spun Our Miss Brooks’s into some small measure of immortality, but then the cast falls into obscurity. All the fourth billed star, Estelita Rodriguez, has to offer is a pair of songs.

This is a little movie, 59 minutes long and relegated to sound stages and the back lot. Just like Anthony Mann’s T-Men, it ends with a gun battle on a big ship tied up in Long Beach. Federal Agent at Large isn’t a knock-off though, the budget wouldn’t have allowed for it. Make no mistake, we are in bad movie territory here. But look past budget and production values and you’ll find something to like. Director George Blair (Lonely Heart Bandits, Destination Big House) didn’t have much to work with beyond a routine script peppered with a few great lines, but he managed several competent moving-camera shots and starkly lit nighttime interiors and exteriors. The brawls and gunfights are far from boring, and the way the film establishes its flashback structure and voiceover narration (minimal) is quite original. If you manage to watch this and can’t find anything to like, then at least get a load of the poster. If you don’t like that, something’s wrong with you.

Federal Agent at Large (1950)

Produced by Stephen Auer

Directed by George Blair

Written by Albert DeMond

Starring Dorothy Patrick, Kent Taylor, and Robert Rockwell

Cinematography by John MacBurnie

Released by Republic Pictures

Running time: 60 minutes

THE MEDIUM (1951)

“If there is nothing to be afraid of, then why am I afraid of this nothingness?”

Here’s a truly astonishing film. The experience was all the more powerful because at the outset I knew nothing whatsoever about it — not even the premise. I was immediately drawn in by the striking imagery of the opening — image my surprise a few minutes in when everyone started singing.

A film noir opera? You got it.

Considering this site is dedicated to crime films, I probably have some explaining to do. The Medium, released in 1951, is an independently produced filmic opera with a decidedly noir-ish slant. Written, directed, and composed by Gian Carlo Menotti, it stars American actress-singer Marie Powers as Baba, a bunco artist who runs a low-rent fortune telling parlor as ‘Madame Flora.’ She’s assisted by her daughter Monica and adopted son Toby, a mute gypsy boy Baba condescends to as her “poor little half-wit.” The trio scratch out a meager living in one of the worst ways imaginable: by preying on parents who have lost a child. Their routine is incredibly polished, and despite the film’s expressionism and sung dialog, the early scenes are surprisingly documentary, sharing with audiences the behind-the-curtain methods employed to take advantage of the gullible.

Things go wrong when Madam Flora has an unexpectedly visceral experience during one of her séances: at the penultimate moment, she feels a man’s hands clutching at her throat. Following the departure of her guests, she blames Toby for what she believes a cruel joke. The youth gesticulates his innocence, but the unnerved Baba refuses to be placated. The narrative unfolds from this point along two tangents: We watch Baba come unglued — at first merely uncertain, then paranoid, and ultimately, insane, while the silent Toby struggles to maintain his innocence and survive in the household. Monica looks on helplessly, pitying her mother and secretly loving the boy.

The plot may be simple, but the movie is populated with one resplendent scene after another: In one expressionistic episode Baba crouches over Toby. Incensed that he won’t rouse from feigned sleep in order to look at her, she lights a candle and then drips the hot wax all over his chest and face. When his eyes burst open, she pours the wax on them, until they are sealed shut and a terrified Monica drags her from the room. Another finds Toby and Monica searching the town square for Baba. They stumble arm in arm through a crowded festival in the town square, at first forgetting about the missing woman — merely content to be young and away from their squalid flat. All is well until the two become separated. The smiles of the crowd become leers, and the gypsy Toby becomes persona non grata to the townspeople — without Monica, he cannot survive. This notion is maintained throughout the film, and is critical to The Medium’s tragic, if also predictable (it is opera, after all) denouement.

This is, at its heart, a typical film noir story: A low-life con artist scams one person too many, and fate finally intervenes to set things straight. Which brings me to a point of clarification: I’m not out to convince anyone that this is a film noir — what I’m doing instead is demonstrating the prevalence and versatility of the thematic elements and the visual language of noir, both of which The Medium employs authoritatively. This was filmed during the years in which the noir style was most often on the screen, and it’s quite apparent that Menotti wanted to couch his film in a style that was popular with and familiar to audiences — and perfectly suited to his subject matter. The extreme angles and shadows of film noir are everywhere, as are the obfuscated framing and handheld camera work we’ve come to identify with the style. In spite of an obviously meager budget, the art direction and set decoration are magnificent, taking full advantage of the dilapidated condition of post-war Rome.

This is a little movie at only 80 minutes or so; music people call it a one-act opera. Fewer than ten characters have lines, only five have more than one. The cast is excellent. Baba is played by contralto Marie Powers; this was her only feature film role. She sang the part on Broadway, and then a few years later during a live television performance. (Powers grew up a few towns over from me in Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania, a hard-knock place — think the first act of The Deer Hunter — where people scrape anthracite coal from the ground, live for high school football championships, and cheap beer at the fire company. The place seems to have forgotten her.) She enjoyed an on-and-off theatrical career, with her brightest moment coming when she was cast third behind Olivier and Quinn in the original production of Becket. She died in New York City in 1973. Anna Maria Alberghetti appears as Monica, while the lithe Leopoldo Savona (who looks a lot like Prince) is Toby. Savona has an uncredited bit in La Dolce Vita, but made his biggest impact directing spaghetti westerns in the sixties. Alberghetti, a dead ringer for Pier Angeli, made the most of her debut here, going on to co star in numerous A-level Hollywood features and then shining on Broadway for the better part of two decades. She won a Tony award as Best Actress in 1962 for Carousel. The rest of the cast of The Medium complete the visual look of the film: the characters are unglamorous, vividly real, and occasionally frightening.

Considering that all the dialog is sung, the actors rely on rather Dreyer-esque pantomime in the intervening passages. Yet this never feels overly theatrical or the performers inauthentic. Of course the look and feel of film noir fails to resonate in every scene, and at times The Medium becomes reminiscent of a silent picture. The frame is vignetted — darkened in the corners — while continuous orchestration completes the feeling. It’s an odd, imperfect, intoxicating thing, this movie; yet despite a foreign setting it successfully communicates familiar elements of the best American film noir: it allows us to step down into and wallow in a world that isn’t all sunshine and roses. And while some have tried to paint this as a sort of specialized neo-realism rather than a film noir, it clearly owes more to the dark American crime film than it does The Bicycle Thief. The lighting and camerawork are too exaggerated, too unnatural for anyone to ever confuse this with neo-realism, and the doom that awaits Baba is entirely of her own design. In the end, The Medium reminds that there is always someone who has a tougher row to hoe, and that fate, like justice, is blind.

The Medium (1951)

Written, Directed, and composed by Gian Carlo Menotti
Cinematography by Enzo Serafin
Starring Marie Powers, Anna Maria Alberghetti, and Leopoldo Savona
Released by Lopert Pictures Corp.
Running time: 84 minutes.

BITTER RICE (Riso Amaro) 1949

Giuseppe De Santis’s 1949 film Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro) is powerful, exciting stuff. It’s a bewildering, multi-layered, and voyeuristic experience that borrows from so many different film styles, particularly American film noir, that it defies categorization. While it’s usually easy to red-flag films with multiple writers, this is a rare example where too many cooks did not spoil the broth: Bitter Rice credits a whopping eight different writers, and while this may account for the film’s slight case of schizophrenia, it nevertheless netted an Academy Award nomination for Best Story—and with or without accolades it’s still one hell of a movie. It also features a gloriously charismatic new actress who electrifies the film. There’s so much, on so many different levels, in Bitter Rice worth talking about that description becomes frustrating merely for the lack of a good starting place! One certainty is that this is a movie better seen than read about; so if it weren’t nearly impossible to find a copy I’d happily advise all to stop reading and just go watch.

On a water-cooler level Bitter Rice could be described as a romantic crime piece with undercurrents of Greek fatalism, and that if it has a flaw it’s an admirably pedestrian one: it tries too hard. Instead of the typical boy / girl story we get two of each, comprising a complex romantic quadrangle. Introductions are in order: Walter (Vittorio Gassman) is a thug and petty thief, as greasy as he is good-looking. His squeeze and sometimes-accomplice is Francesca (American actress Doris Dowling), a pretty but bitter thing who could be Ann Savage’s sister. Italian stud Raf Vallone is Marco, a cynical veteran about to drum out of the army after a decade’s service. Finally, there’s Silvana, Bitter Rice’s ball of fire. In the late forties former beauty queen Silvana Mangano made the easy transition to film; this is the picture that made her a minor international sensation. Walter Winchell offered the understatement of the decade when he said, “Silvana Mangano is sexier than both Mae West and Jane Russell.” Winchell didn’t climb very far out on a limb, but his point is well taken; even with her unshaven arms (critics, of course, described her as “earthy”), Mangano has a positively spectacular presence: it’s nearly impossible to take your eyes off her—she simply owns the screen. She keeps her real first name intact here: the character Silvana is an “earthy”(!) peasant girl, one fully aware of her own sexuality and the powerful affect she has on men and women alike.



The character types in Bitter Rice offer its most intentional parallel to film noir, though as we’ll see later the movie channels the style in additional ways. Each of the four represent a noir archetype, though filtered through the prism of a different culture, and more importantly, a culture not dead set on aping American movies. Walter is the stiletto-wielding thug, a schemer always looking out for his next big score. Francesca is an old-fashioned moll, smarter than she lets on but devoted to Walter simply because she has nowhere else to go. (Doris Dowling has a lot more cheek than Keechie, and Gassman is quite a few shades more nefarious than Bowie, but if this were an American product it’s very easy to imagine another Cathy O’Donnell and Farley Granger screen pairing.) Marco looks most familiar to us: the jaded, world-weary combat veteran — but unlike his counterparts from American movies he’s not the main character. In fact, of the four leads, Marco is the least important. This is unmistakably a women’s picture, and Silvana is the femme fatale. The universe of Bitter Rice has at its center this incredible eighteen-year-old — in two key scenes she simply dances what she calls the “boogie-woogie” while a crowd of onlookers cheer her every move; the filmmakers take pause as well, allowing viewers to simply bask in her. It’s the sort of raw moment that could never happen in a studio picture, unless somehow Margarita Cansino had magically been allowed to stand in for Rita Hayworth.

The story itself is novel, though it kicks off (and closes) by putting a fresh spin on the noir trope of voiceover narration. Opening to a black screen and a disembodied voice, in pure semi-documentary style, we are told that although few outsiders know it, rice is grown in the northern part of Italy. Each May trains shuttle women from the south to work in the rice fields. It’s strictly women’s work too — male hands are too large, too clumsy, of no use. The pay isn’t much, but in a country still recovering from war any work is welcomed, and these women are happy to have it; there are plenty of those who would give their right arm for a chance to work the paddies. In time, the disembodied voice coalesces into a face, and we realize that the man speaking is, in fact, a radio announcer at the Rome station, doing a story on the women boarding the train for a season of wet toil under the hot sun of the Po Valley.

Meanwhile, Walter and Francesca are fleeing the cops with a stolen diamond necklace in hand, when they wind up at the train station among the hubbub of the departing workers. Walter slips the jewelry to Francesca and shoves her towards the train: she’s to lay low up north until the heat dies down. She meets Silvana just after boarding, and the pair form an tense friendship after Silvana discovers the secret necklace. Instead of turning her in, Silvana is fascinated enough by the streetwise older girl to help her secure a job alongside the other women. As the film carries us from Rome to the unending wetness of the rice paddies it takes on an entirely different tone. The men are momentarily forgotten as we enter a world that seems pulled directly from the social-realist propaganda posters of the Soviet Union. The large group of women bond through the (positive) experience of toil — hunched under the sun in headscarves and large straw hats — the affectionate Americanism of the film’s opening giving way to something far more in line with Marxism, and the universality of the film’s romantic melodramatics give way to the immediacy of neorealismo, of a singular time and a place.

Throughout the second act the characters of Francesca and Silvana continue to develop while the powerhouse visuals actually get stronger, forsaking gritty social realism for something that at times approaches artfully rendered heroic realism. One scene in particular finds the women carrying on a dramatic conversation through song, the only form of communication permitted while they work. The effect is at once vividly operatic and quite moving. Another expressionistic scene shows the terrible consequences that occur when the women are forced to weed the paddies during a torrential rainstorm. Both scenes blend sound and image in a visceral way that brings to mind the work of Terence Malick.

As Francesca and Silvana get to know each other better the bonds of their tenuous friendship are repeatedly tested, broken, and formed anew. This nature of this friendship provides the film’s most engrossing strand of dramatic tension — particularly when it is threatened by the competing burdens of the necklace and the girls’ romantic entanglements. As the story unfolds Francesca’s and Silvana’s personalities have a transformative affect on each other, and both come to covet what the other has. In Francesca’s case, work and camaraderie with the other woman have helped her grow up. She begins to appreciate the value of a day’s labor, while Silvana becomes something altogether more dangerous — her eyes opened to the possibility of an easier, sexier life with Walter and the necklace, far away from the rice.

Bitter Rice’s final act returns to the roots of its first, as Walter journeys north to brace Francesca and recover the necklace — though he comes bearing an important piece of information that will have a profound affect on the film’s denouement. By its final moments, it becomes practically indistinguishable from American noir. The romantic entanglements are reinvigorated by Walter’s presence, and he tries to manipulate each of the girls to his own ends while keeping Marco safely at bay. Walter dreams up a new scheme, and with the allure of the necklace and promises of love and a life together he convinces Silvana to help him — by betraying the community of rice workers. Before the end titles roll we’ll witness fisticuffs, a failed heist, a gun battle, and a symbolically gruesome four-way showdown amidst hanging beef carcasses in a cold meat locker — events all tragically shepherded by fate’s relentless determination to see justice done. In the end there is tragedy and there are victims, but not necessarily unforgivable ones.

One of the many reasons we are drawn to foreign film in general, and neo-realism in particular, is that such movies can offer a rejuvenating breather from the redundancy of Hollywood studio products and their comfortably predictable stories. Yet Bitter Rice utilizes a surprisingly familiar structure; anyone well versed in the studio-era film noir will identify the plot threads, and how, in pure Hollywood fashion, they ultimately weave together — allowing no character to escape the crushing judgment of fate or the mistakes of their past. And through this conscientious fusion of American idiosyncrasy and Italian style — whether employed as criticism of American values or not — we are met with a film experience that is both viscerally exciting and strangely familiar.



Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro) (1949)
Directed by Giuseppe De Santis
Produced by Dino De Laurentiis
Written by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Franco Monicelli, Mario Monicelli, Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini. (Holy smokes!)
Cinematography by Otello Martelli
Starring Vittori0 Gassman, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano and Raf Vallone
Released by Lux Film
Running time: 108 minutes


8/17

HONG KONG CONFIDENTIAL (1958)

Gene Barry, who made his mark on television as the star of such popular programs as Bat Masterson and Burke’s Law, plays an undercover CIA man on the trail of a kidnapped Arabian prince in the ultra low-budget back-lot thriller Hong Kong Confidential.


With a title like that, how can you resist? From New York, L.A. and Chicago to High School, put the word confidential in your title and count me in. Hong Kong Confidential is the strangest bird in the nest, a 1958 cheapie that clocks in at barely over an hour. There’s not too much meat on these bones, so this review will be as spare as the film.


The set up is as contrived as it is confusing: the American and Soviet governments are both wooing Thamen, some speck of a fictional country in the Middle East, “at the mouth of the Suez canal,” as a spot for an ICBM site. To tip the scales in their favor the reds kidnap the son of the emir in an effort to force the king to ally his country with them (Interesting logic, huh?). Historically a friend of the U.S., the emir receives an “anonymous note” in the wake of the kidnapping demanding that he abandon talks with the Americans and instead embrace the Soviets. He responds with an ultimatum to the CIA: find the crown prince in two weeks or he’ll jump in bed with the commies.


The intelligence service discovers a lead in Hong Kong, and they put their main far eastern asset on the case: one Casey Reed (Gene Barry), lounge singer extraordinaire. Barry gets through this by chewing every piece of cardboard scenery on the back lot sets. He’s over the top the whole way through, but his hammy performance is part of the reason Hong Kong Confidential qualifies as a campy delight. His character manages to track down those involved with the kidnapping, though their guilt isn’t established until the final moments of the movie — all along agent Reed simply has them pegged as baddies and goes after them for no other reason.


The film features women from both sides of the tracks. Allison Hayes plays the mysterious Elena Martine, smuggler and chief bad girl. Hayes is sexy as can be — in an overtly trashy sort of way. She’s that rare actress who manages to look good in hot pants, even at her normal height — later in 1958 Hayes becomes an American pop culture when she immortalized Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. IMDb also tells us that Hayes, like me, is a West Virginian, though unlike me, she got her big break as a Miss America contestant. On the flipside is all-American blonde Beverly Tyler, who plays Barry’s partner in his lounge act: he croons, she’s parked behind the piano. Tyler has no idea that her guy leads a secret life, and she’s devastated when he breaks up the act and heads for Macao. Of course she follows, and in true B-script fashion ends up as a captive of the other woman and her crew of cronies.


Unlike most of the other Confidential films this one isn’t by any means a noir, though on paper it might be confused for one: cheap production values, moody lighting (in some scenes), a bad girl, a rogue hero, and voiceover narration are all present; though there’s none of the determined fatalism, cynicism, or pervasive sense of doom that defines the noir picture. Hayes’s character is certainly bad, but she never manages to pull the wool of Barry’s eyes and couldn’t possibly be described as a femme fatale. The narration here is fascinating — unlike most films that use the device to provide some set-up or let us in the hero’s thoughts, Hong Kong Confidential employs voiceover for purely economical reasons: the narrator fills in story gaps. His omniscient voice chimes in regularly to tie together scenes, and fill viewers in on aspects of the story that are not filmed as scenes — talk about cheap!


The sets are strictly from hunger, clearly trumped-up back-lot hand-me-downs. Nevertheless, cinematographer Ken Peach does a good job with them, and while the film doesn’t have a distinct visual style it does have a few excellent moments of darkness and light. Peach did not have a noteworthy career, though ironically he did film the more noir-ish Chicago Confidential, and well as the fine Ruth Roman / Sterling Hayden vehicle Five Steps to Danger. In another bit of odd coincidence, director Edward Cahn is himself credited with the 1935 film Confidential. Cahn’s filmography is extraordinary, check it out here. It might just be me, but I can’t read a list of titles such as his and not salivate to see each and every one of them. The biggest talent in the crew had to be art director Bill Glascow, who decorated some iconic film noirs — Kiss Me Deadly in particular, and would later earn an Oscar nomination for Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte.


Hong Kong Confidential is a small, fun, campy thing. It doesn’t take itself very seriously and doesn’t expect you to. One look at the poster and you’ll know you’re in for a fun ride — or at least that Gene Barry is a fan of the squatting position, and he holds his .38 like a steak knife. Possibly the best thing about it is its availability. And don’t forget to be careful — the guy beside you at the bar might be listening.


Hong Kong Confidential (1958)

Directed by Edward L. Cahn
Produced by Robert Kent
Written by Orville Hampton
Starring Gene Barry and Allison Hayes
Cinematography by Ken Peach
Art Direction by William Glascow
Released by United Artists
Running time: 67 minutes.

CORNERED (1945)

In 1945’s Cornered Dick Powell plays a man exhausted, angry, and with little hope for the future. Though almost fatally marred by its serpentine plot, Cornered is worth seeing — it’s even an important film noir. It offers an extraordinarily bleak worldview, precocious even for noir, and helped pave the way for the spate of neurotic, cynical, and dark movies that would define the post-war classic period.


Character and atmosphere trump story here, so let’s cram this into as small a nutshell as possible: Powell plays Laurence Gerard, recently of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who endured the last gasps of the war as a PoW. His young bride got the blindfold and the brick wall as part of La Résistance, sold out by some Vichy prick named Marcel Jarnac, believed by all but Gerard to be dead. His dreams of post-war bliss splintered, Gerard goes on a globe-hopping manhunt for Jarnac. The story shuttles him from England to France to Switzerland and finally lodges in Argentina — destination of choice for gold-laden absconders — Fascists fleeing the tribunals and terrified of the rope. Powell settles into Buenos Aires like a tornado settles into a trailer park; upending both those eluding justice and those striving for it. By the time this whirlwind of a story blows itself out, its twists, turns, and changes in direction will have left every viewer not holding a flowchart in the same state as its protagonist, who gets lied to, led astray, and pistol-whipped so often that he spends much of his screen time massaging his temples.


Cornered was brought to the screen by the same team that reinvented Dick Powell as tough gumshoe Philip Marlowe the previous year in Murder, My Sweet. Unlike the 1944 film however, Cornered reflects a less glib, less stylishly expressionistic; and far more irresolute world. Considering the current events of the time it’s easy to understand why the filmmakers would find such convoluted intrigue appropriate, but also situate it among such frightened, neurotic, and selfish people. Yet a filmic idea can be appropriate and damaging at the same time. The plot of Cornered is so overwrought, the vision so depressing, that even director Edward Dmytryk found the film unsatisfactory. Given the significance of the film in his life though, the sentiment is understandable. Dmytryk, producer Adrian Scott, and replacement writer John Paxton were loosely involved with the Communist party during the production of Cornered (Dmytryk paid dues for a mere two months, amounting to a total contribution of four dollars, along with a fifty-cent initiation fee), and the friends actually broke with the reds when party leaders, along with the original screenwriter, tried to turn Cornered into something of a socialist manifesto. Dmytryk and Scott, both imprisoned by HUAC in 1947 as members of the Hollywood Ten, would cite Cornered as the catalyst for their break: “This is the thing,” Dmytryk said, “which actually got me out of the party.” He would serve four months at an honor farm in my home state of West Virginia, only to become the lone member of the Ten to reappear before HUAC and name names. (That whole story is far too big for this essay, but Dmytryk himself wrote of his experiences with the blacklist in Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten.)

In order to peg what makes a difficult film like this worthwhile, it has to be placed within the macrocosm of film noir. The noir movement, genre, style — call it what you will — encompasses numerous generic and thematic types, as well as its share of –isms. The list is almost endless, and seems to become more inclusive with each new boxed-set, dissertation, or edition of the Film Noir Encyclopedia (The Day the Earth Stood Still, really?). What makes Cornered important within this grand scheme is its unprecedented view of the world. Certainly no Hollywood film to date had brought to the screen a milieu so desolate or a hero so pathologically dour. Coming so quickly on the heels of cataclysm, previous efforts couldn’t have imagined the world portrayed in Cornered, neither This Gun for Hire nor Journey into Fear come close — and no previous film featured a protagonist with so little hope. In terms of global change the Second World War is the defining moment of the twentieth century, and a singular one in the development of the noir style. Insofar as this is concerned, no entry is more emblematic of that change than Cornered; whether or not it’s a particularly good narrative film is secondary.


Much of Cornered’s originality comes from Powell’s interpretation of Laurence Gerard. He’s ill tempered, irate, and intent on bowling over anything in his way. Frustrated after spending the better part of the war interned, he needs to get in his share of the licks, and who gives a damn if the hostilities are over. Yet along with this, there’s something in Powell’s performance that goes beyond the clichéd term world-weary — Gerard isn’t just tired, he’s dead tired. This is a man on fumes. He simply wants to find Jarnac and execute him, and he’s incapable of thinking about what happens after. He lives only in the now; having learned that thinking about tomorrow gets your heart broken and your teeth kicked in. It has been said that Cornered might have suited Humphrey Bogart better, an actor for whom tiredness was natural. Yet while Bogart could do angry, his rage seemed to have a leering quality — and while Gerard is reckless he’s no head case. Powell was surely no Bogart, but he nails Gerard.


Cornered is also stark in its brutality, even if its most heinous acts are committed just off-screen. In the film’s climactic scene an important character is shot not once, but seven times. The camera lingers on the gun as the shooter pumps round after round into the victim — not passionately, but in a cold effort to render the corpse’s face unrecognizable to the police. Later in the scene one character, using bare knuckles, beats another to death; the camera moving in and out of focus with each blow. The beating is administered with so little passion that it barely registers on the perpetrator. Violent acts, especially the up-close, dirty, wet ones, have become frighteningly impersonal in Cornered, as the survivors are now numb to the moral absolutes of pre-war society. It’s in this notion of lashing out, of poker-faced violence, that Cornered also anticipates film noir’s shell-shocked man apart, plagued by some unknown neurosis or gnawing guilt.


Like most good noir, the brooding thematic elements of Cornered are supported by the mise en scene, which pushes the dark frame to extremes. Dmytryk, art director Carroll Clark, and cinematographer Harry Wild give us the expected interplay of shadow and light (though the quality of the shots vary), as well as numerous offbeat camera angles. In fact the only conventional shots seem to involve one of the film’s two female characters, which is a subtle clue to her true nature. Wild often shoots from behind a pillar, around a corner, or from on high to obfuscate our sense of environment. Filming Powell in tight close-up, making him difficult to place and reinforcing the idea that he doesn’t belong further heightens this confusion. The effect is claustrophobic, disorienting, and perfectly in keeping with the film’s tone. Cornered gets progressively darker and darker as it approaches its climax, eventually to place Gerard in utter darkness, groping and bumbling through a deserted warehouse.


With the end of the war came a gradual return to normal life in the United States. Cornered was a bitter reminder for a people still celebrating victory that not all was well in the world, yet it did well with critics and audiences. It may be a shallow reason, but the film’s box office owes itself directly to the casting of Dick Powell. Preview audiences were ecstatic to see him again in what they described as a “he-man” role, with hardly any comments recommending a return to musical comedy. Even New York Times grouch Bosley Crowther lauded the film: “Cornered is a drama of smoldering vengeance and political scheming which builds purposefully and with graduating tension to a violent climax, a committing of murder that is as thrilling and brutal as any you are likely to encounter in a month of movie-going.” Yet while Don Craig of the Washington Daily News also recommended the film, he referred to the “new” Dick Powell as “ a bit self conscious” and the character Gerard as “plain stupid.” The focus on Powell aside for a moment, Cornered provides a time-capsule vision of a world gone to hell, and it does it early enough in the noir cycle to set the bar for the films of the subsequent ten years.

Cornered (1945)

Directed by Edward Dmytryk

Produced by Adrian Scott

Cinematography by Harry Wild
Screenplay by John Paxton, John Wexley, and Ben Hecht (uncredited)

Starring Dick Powell, Walter Slezak, Micheline Cheirel, Luther Adler, and Nina Vale

Released by RKO Pictures

Running time: 102 minutes

HELL’S ISLAND (1955)

One of the rewarding aspects of studying film noir is discovering the inventive ways in which filmmakers created exciting and stylish movies in spite of obstacles such as low budgets, less than perfect casting, and cut-rate set design. Of course there are a few iconic noirs that got the A-list studio treatment, but those have never been of as much interest to me — or the focus of these essays. I dig the B-stuff: the ones that show verve, made by people who seem a bit manic, as if they desperately have something to prove and not enough time to do it. One of the best of these is 99 River Street, which I’ve written about here and at Noir of the Week. Directed by Phil Karlson and starring John Payne, that picture about a gritty brawler who gets a second chance is truly one of the most visceral and exciting of all the B-noirs. Therefore I approached the pair’s third and final film together, Hell’s Island, anticipating something special. Yet unlike 99 River Street or Kansas City Confidential, this one does not deliver the goods.

Hell’s Island is a bona fide film noir, but not a good one. Made towards the end of the cycle in 1955, it’s as if the film is self-aware enough that it is trying to be a film noir. Yet its attempt is wholly unoriginal, and the elements that comprise the narrative are nothing but a pastiche of shallow character types, plot devices, and generic clichés lifted from other films — demonstrating nothing except that by this point in time film noir was wheezing. There’s even a deadly pit of alligators and, a la The Lineup and Kiss of Death, a wheelchair plummet! The story is of a drunken ex-district attorney who gets drawn into island intrigue when he is offered five large to head for Santo Rosario in search of a stolen ruby. Payne is Mike Cormack, the man hired by enigmatic foreigner Mr. Barzland, played by Francis L. Sullivan (doing his best impersonation of a diabolical Sydney Greenstreet). Barzland chooses Cormack because of the former lawyer’s relationship to Janet Martin, the woman believed to be in possession of the stone. Cormack and Martin had been shacking back in Los Angeles, and Cormack drank himself out of his job when Martin gave him the heave-ho for some slick Latin-type with a fatter wallet. He takes Barzland up on his offer in hoping to see the woman again and exact some revenge. As the story unfolds we realize that no one involved is telling Cormack the truth, particularly Janet Martin, and that by the time Mike manages to work it all out he gets shot, beat up, and harassed by everyone from Barzland’s alligator-raising cronies to the local police. As a matter of fact, and in true noir-checklist fashion, the story is related via flashback and with the help of first-person narration — the action related entirely while Cormack lies bleeding to death on a hospital gurney. By the time the thing wraps up most viewers will be bored — having figured it all out reels and reels ago.

It’s almost a worthwhile exercise to watch Hell’s Island for the sake of naming all of the movies from which it lifts elements. The movie is so hackneyed and derivative that its lack of originality becomes its defining characteristic. Don’t for get that even the film’s title is uninspired: Hell’s Half-Acre, a not dissimilar effort, had been released less than a year before. The movie’s biggest claim to noir-status comes in the form of Mary Murphy, who plays femme fatale Janet Martin. Murphy was fine as the sweet little teeny in The Wild One, but she drowns in this more grown-up role. She tries her best to channel Jane Greer, but all Murphy really has to offer is a pretty face and a nice pair of hands — she does most of her scenes smothered in Payne’s arms, trying awfully hard to look sultry while giving the big fella a back rub. The script pegs her as a black widow from the start and Murphy just doesn’t have the chops to make us feel remotely sorry for Janet, or even aroused by her. In the end we just don’t feel anything, which is as damning a criticism of her Murphy as can be given. A femme fatale isn’t a femme fatale if there isn’t a male character that falls for her, and Cormack fits the description. Even he gets wise after a while though, it just takes him a bit longer than the rest of us.

Although a whopping five writers are credited, the screenplay for Hell’s Island is primarily the work of Maxwell Shane, a noir writer-director with a great name but limited reputation. Shane developed the script from a story by Martin Goldsmith (Detour). It would be easy enough to lay the blame for the movie at the typewriter of either man; but in Phil Karlson we have the man who not only directed 99 River Street, but Scandal Sheet, The Brothers Rico, and the highly underrated Tight Spot. Cameraman Lionel Lindon, who would win the cinematography Oscar the following year for Around the World in Eighty Days, is simply awful here. Filmed in Technicolor, Lindon disregarded the power of light and shadow, especially when illuminating dingy back lot sets. There are even a few moments in the film when a shadow obscures the face of the character delivering lines, and the results are embarrassing — and carelessly accidental. We can define film noir as a marriage of visual style and themes, but the choices made by cinematographers, lighting technicians, and set designers must serve the narrative. Lindon and Karlson use straightforward setups and middle-distance shots more indicative of television than a feature film. Missing are the offbeat angles, the claustrophobic close-ups, and the moving cameras that are emblematic of thoughtful film noir.

Hell’s Island is a rare film (only 40 IMDB votes), though for once this isn’t a film that anyone but a noir completist should endeavor to track down. It’s uninspired, poorly made, and would have looked a great deal better in black and white. Actions scenes that end with a guy falling into a pit of alligators normally make a film worth watching, on Hell’s Island it’s only good for a laugh.

Hell’s Island (1955)

Directed by Phil Karlson

Produced by William H. Pine and William C. Thomas for Pine-Thomas Productions

Cinematography by Lionel Lindon

Screenplay by Maxwell Shane

Story by Martin Goldsmith

Starring John Payne and Mary Murphy

Released by Paramount Pictures

Running time: 84 minutes