WHY GIRLS LEAVE HOME (1945)

 

8.5.5

“C’mon Diana, make with the tonsils.”

Believed to be a lost film for decades, 1945’s Why Girls Leave Home recently became findable for those who know where to look for such things. I’ve been after for it for 25 years. And guess what? It’s a bona fide film noir. It’s not in any of the film noir books or on any of the film noir lists—because nobody has seen it. Were it not for a pair of Oscar nominations (score and song) it likely never would have resurfaced. 

Make no mistake, this is Poverty Row stuff. But as far as PRC trash goes, it’s pretty good. Not Detour good, but good enough to hold me tight for better than an hour. I’m a fan of director William Berke—Cop Hater (1958) was one of the very first movies I wrote up here, all the way back in November of 2008. Berke did a bunch of diggable B crime pics: Pier 23 (1951), FBI Girl (1951), Waterfront at Midnight (1948), and Shoot to Kill (1947).

Lola Lane

Berke’s predominantly female cast is stellar: Lola Lane gets top billing and the juiciest part, though not the lead. Never as famous as her A-list sister Priscilla, Lola nevertheless appeared in more than forty movies (including a few big studio hits) before taking a powder in 1946. This was her next to last picture—she makes the most of it. The girl on that sexy one sheet is actually lead actress Pamela Blake, a steady presence throughout Tinsel Town’s double-bill era and probably best known as the kitten-hating cleaning lady who famously takes one in the kisser from Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire. Constance Worth is fine as the best friend and Claudia Drake is even better here than she was in Detour. (No, not her. Drake was the girl Tom Neal was trying to get to, not the one he was trying to get away from.

Pamela Blake

The men hold their own. Sheldon Leonard does his regular thing and so does Elisha Cook Jr.—except Cook does it and then some. His sleazy performance is the best piece of evidence that this movie has been buried deep since it last aired on small screens during Ike’s first term. If anyone had actually ever seen this, especially film noir folk, they’d still be talking about Cook’s work. Just as he’d done the year before in Phantom Lady, Cook plays a pasty white hepcat—except with a clarinet this time. Get a load of this boast: “Yeah, Benny Goodman’s pretty good, but I think I’m a little deeper in the groove.”  Pamela White must agree. She bounces up and down through a late night “jam session” just like a poor man’s Ella Raines. It’s not the musical numbers where Cook scores this time around though, it’s with the girls. He’s a straight-up predator, of the type seemingly unique to the City of Angels, where fresh-faced cheesecake with canary dreams arrive by the busload. He’s a scumbag worthy of Ellroy; the fake-tough innocence of Wilmer Cook is long gone.

Perhaps I should set the story? Diana Leslie (Blake) doesn’t like it at mother and daddy’s place. It’s too cooped up and the neighborhood stinks these days. She was tired of doing without during the Depression, now she’s tired of doing without during the war. She’s young, she’s bored, she can sing a little, and clothes look good on her—why shouldn’t she go out and make a few bucks if she can, and maybe even have a good time doing it? She wants money. She wants things. She wants…a career. 

Diana’s hipster boyfriend (Cook)‚ a 4F if ever there was one, thinks there might be something for her at the Kitten Club. Her family thinks she’s all wet: “Listen, you’re only my kid sister, but I don’t like you hanging out with those jive jumpers,” her older brother sneers, right before he slaps her face for having a mind of her own. That’s the last straw; Diana bolts. Next thing she knows she’s warbling at the Kitten Club. Between numbers she plays “hostess,” luring out of town squares into the back room where they get fleeced at the roulette tables. The club’s merely a front, illicit gambling and “dates” are where the real money is.

Diana has a knack for the job. She’s a tough dame now, with a Chesterfield in a thin black holder: “I know all the angles and I know how to protect myself in the clinches.” That is, until one of her marks loses his shirt at the tables and then feeds himself a bullet sandwich in the men’s room. When the guy’s buddy protests to the management he catches lead in the temple. Diana sees the whole thing and finally gets wise. Can she get out of it all in time? Here comes reporter Chris Williams (Leonard) to the rescue. Movie good guys back then were reporters.

All of this we learn through flashbacks. The whole picture unfolds that way, another trademark of classic noir. There are more: an opening sequence that features a shadowy nighttime game of cat and mouse along the waterfront. A midnight car chase on the back end. Booze, smokes, broads. A succession of back rooms, gutters, and nightclubs, all dimly lit to hide the cheapjack cardboard PRC sets. There’s even a montage. The movie snaps along with sharp, rat-a-tat lines delivered by a game cast who know how to get plenty of chatter into a brief running time. Hard boiled? Only every once in a while, but plenty stylish.

More than mere style, however, Why Girls Leave Home carves out its noir street cred in how it treats its protagonist. (And, just as importantly, who it ultimately reveals as its villain. Wish I could say more on this, but forget it!). Diana Leslie makes the classic noir blunder: she wants. Our noir heroes get themselves into trouble when they want more than society has determined they ought to have. For Diana, it’s a career, new digs, a little money of her own. Why the hell not, we surely ask ourselves now. Plenty of reasons, 1945 audiences roar back at us. Ours, I guess, is not to judge.

Like I said a few hundred words ago, make no mistake, this is Poverty Row stuff. It’s not Detour, it’s not Phantom Lady, but it does have something all its own. A rotgut charm that was enough to keep a jaded customer like me fixed to the screen.

Why Girls Leave Home (1945)

Directed by William Berke

Cinematographer: Mack Stengler

Story and Screenplay: Fanya Foss (once Billy Bob Thornton’s mother-in-law)

Starring: Pamela Blake, Lola Lane, Sheldon Leonard, and Elisha Cook Jr.

Released by: Producers Releasing Corporation

Running time: 69 minutes

THE CLAY PIGEON (1949)

I tend to celebrate B movies here, and I’m seldom as critical as I could be. But even I have to take my shots at The Clay Pigeon. 

Jim Fletcher (Bill Williams) wakes up in a military hospital with a blind man clawing at his throat his throat. A nurse intervenes, but rather than offering comfort she calls Jim traitor. He soon learns that he’s accused of ratting his fellow POWs out to the Japanese, who then tortured and executed them. After Jim’s convalescence, he’ll face a treason charges. The only problem is that he can’t remember whether he did it or not — he has amnesia! Hoping to somehow recover his lost memories and clear his name, Jim (inexplicably unguarded) escapes the hospital and flees for San Diego — remembering that his best friend from the Navy, Mark Gregory, lives there with his wife Martha (Barbara Hale). Martha is charming as she ushers Jim inside, but when she excuses herself to make coffee Jim notices the headline on her newspaper: “James Fletcher, Seaman First Class, Wanted for Treason! Blamed for Torture Killing of Mark Gregory” Holy Smokes! Jim rushes into the kitchen to explain, and finds Martha frantically attempting to dial 1119. (See what I did there?) They fight! Martha scrapes and claws like a wildcat, but Jim subdues her. He then uses her phone to contact another buddy from the POW camp, Ted Niles, who agrees to help. Dragging a trussed-up Martha along for the ride, Jim takes her Plymouth and makes for the City of Angels. (Now folks, if the baby-faced Jim was actually guilty, this wouldn’t be called The Clay Pigeon, so once Ted gets involved it becomes pretty clear who the real culprit is. If nothing else, this is a movie that just can’t keep a secret.) At any rate, Jim drives; Martha stews. Then, in one of B filmdom’s most mind-boggling leaps in logic, somewhere along the road, and in spite of her being a kidnap victim, Martha accepts Jim’s protestations of innocence and decides, in light of any evidence in his favor, that he can’t be responsible for her husband’s death. For the rest of the hour (this is a short one), she makes like his girl Friday (Hale neatly anticipating her career-defining role as Perry Mason’s Della Street). And in no time at all, everything works out in their favor.

Really?

Richard Fleischer directed The Clay Pigeon for newly minted RKO chief Howard Hughes. Fleischer knew his business (three words: The Narrow Margin), so the direction is up to scratch. This moves quickly and with purpose, the pacing and staging are fine, the acting is competent, it has several stylish scenes (including a nice on location cat and mouse sequence through L.A.’s Chinatown) and more than enough tension in the final reel (especially impressive when the denouement is a no-brainer). The problems here have to do with the script, with the limitations of the running time, and most importantly, with the film’s failure to live up to the responsibility of its premise.

But in terms of competent storytelling The Clay Pigeon is a misfire. Worse than that, it must have been terribly insulting to a large segment of its 1949 audience. Look no further than Martha’s change of heart. Here’s a woman who lost her husband to the war — and not even in combat. Mark was executed in a POW camp after being accused of stealing rations by a fellow American, his best friend. Now that bastard, a traitor on the front page of every paper, is at her front door — making a fool out of her and her husband’s memory. Martha’s fight with Jim is an eyebrow raiser: savage, believable, and utterly appropriate, but her inexplicable and abrupt change of heart mere moments later is the film’s great crime. It does a profound injustice to the postwar audience members who lost loved ones overseas and couldn’t move on quite so easily as Martha does. I don’t mean to suggest that there wasn’t a plausible way to get her on Jim’s side, but rather that the movie’s attempt is pathetic. Surely new testimony from a fellow prisoner who saw the newspaper, or even the early return of Jim’s lost memories might have convinced Martha of his innocence. Instead, she comes to believe in him even before he himself — don’t forget his amnesia — can recall exactly what happened. The next thing the audience knows, they’re shacked up in a beachfront cottage, swimming and cavorting a week away while Jim gets his head straight. It just doesn’t wash, and this is a movie — B or not — that owed an audience with fresh memories of cataclysm a little more respect.

There’s a oft-noted moment however, when it tries to make good, but I say it still comes up short. Earlier I mentioned the foot chase sequence through the (strangely deserted) streets of Chinatown (One of them, at least. Back then L.A. had three: Old Chinatown, New Chinatown, and China City). In the scene, Jim ducks into a building and shelters in the home of a Japanese American woman, who also happens to be a war widow. She covers for Jim when the hoods barge in, and we soon discover that her dead husband earned the DSC as a member of the legendary Japanese-American 442^nd Infantry Regiment. The script expects us to take for granted that she’s too simple to read the newspaper, because although she easily intuits that Jim’s pursuers aren’t the policemen that they claim to be, she’s inexplicably unaware that the man in her back room is the most wanted fugitive in the southland.

Certainly the scene pays homage to the Japanese Americans who fought for their country, an important balancing act given that one of the movie’s villains is the POW camp guard, Tokoyama (Richard Loo), who murdered Martha’s husband and is now hanging around chop suey joints in Chinatown. This all raises an important question: What in the world would a fugitive Japanese war criminal, or even a Japanese American widow, be doing in Chinatown? Weren’t the Japanese responsible for the murder of nearly 6,000,000 Chinese citizens throughout the course of the war?¹ Believe me folks, I dug into this as deeply as I could and all indications are that those of Japanese descent steered clear of Chinese neighborhoods in the months and years after the war. It’s unfathomable to me how The Clay Pigeon postulates that anyone and everyone of Asian descent would make themselves at home in Chinatown.

War is terrible, and some people do horrible things to get through it. In the end, the most troubling aspect of The Clay Pigeon is its failure to grapple with this — treason here is just another plot device, an excuse for Jim Fletcher to run. His amnesia only serves to keep us in the dark for a brief time while the movie builds some steam — until, just like Martha, we get to know him well enough to understand that such a nice, clean-cut boy couldn’t possibly have betrayed his pals. (Go ahead Martha, why not just forget about your dead husband and marry the guy?) Well, in Act of Violence, Van Heflin’s clean-cut Frank Enley doesn’t have the luxury of amnesia. Enley actually committed the crimes that Jim Fletcher is accused of, and he has to live with himself. Act of Violence dwells long and hard on Enley’s guilt — and builds forcefully towards his desperate final act of contrition. There’s a reason why it’s a minor classic and The Clay Pigeon is merely a cardboard exercise “in what happens next?” moviemaking.

What does happen next? They get married, of course.

The Clay Pigeon (1949)

RKO Radio Pictures

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Produced by Herman Schlom

Written by Carl Foreman

Cinematography by Robert De Grasse

Starring Bill Williams and Barbara Hale

Running Time: 63 minutes

¹ http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM

CRIME WAVE (1954)

Noir 101. The Essentials. Crime Wave.

Really?

If this little policier from Warner Bros. (filmed in 1952, released in ’54) isn’t part of your vocabulary then it needs to be; and considering it was finally released on DVD a few years ago, there’s no excuse not to see it. Crime Wave doesn’t stand out from a narrative point of view (despite a bucket of writers); the plot is routine, like a million other second features cranked out during the fifties. Although the story and characters are heavily steeped in noir tropes, it’s André De Toth’s sharp direction that sets it apart from other low budget crime pictures and demands that it be seen by any enthusiast. It can be argued that no other film noir is as influential as it is unknown.

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

The cast here is special, and although Sterling Hayden isn’t (necessarily) the protagonist, he dominates the film. This is the sort of role the movie gods had in mind when they placed Hayden in front of a camera: LAPD Detective Lieutenant Sims, bigger and tougher than any of the hoods in the mug book. For my money this is the role of Hayden’s career — not the meatiest or the most well known, but the one in which he leaves the impression of having been the part, rather than merely having played it. (Put it this way: during the 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 Hayden has a distinct vibe as a cop that isn’t there when he’s playing a crook: you can cross to the other side of the street and dodge a hoodlum (and it isn’t like you won’t see Hayden coming a mile away) but you can’t avoid the police. With the force of the law behind him, the prospect of cop Hayden looking for you is scary as hell.

At a beefy six-and-a-half feet tall, Hayden towers over everyone else in the film. André De Toth and cameraman Burt Glennon keep the camera low, catching the big fellow from underneath but look down on all of the other actors, as if from Hayden’s point of view. He has to slouch, unkempt, a toothpick in his mouth, scruffy hat, tie perpetually twisted backwards — almost too big to be allowed. The film has numerous stellar sequences, but for Hayden one in particular stands out; it begins at around the eleven-minute mark and finds the cop in his homicide division office, interviewing an eyewitness about the Quentin breakout suspects. The scene opens with him at his desk, then it follows him around the bureau, hovering shark-like over a half-dozen routine interviews going on around the office. Ostensibly the purpose is pure semi-documentary storytelling, providing audiences with an up-close look into the inner workings of the LAPD: A middle-aged couple is extolling to one cop about how she and her guy (replete with bandages head) don’t really fight — she didn’t mean to conk him, they were just kidding around. At the next table, a hang dog B girl dripping with mascara and dime-store jewelry sobs about some chucklehead boyfriend from her past, while at yet another a career stool-pigeon chastises a junior man about bracing him in front of his neighbors. What makes the whole thing work is the extraordinary authenticity: pay attention to what is going on in the frame away from subject, almost as if the extras forgot for a moment the cameras were rolling. And this ain’t no soundstage — most of the scenes in Crime Wave, interiors and exteriors alike, are filmed in real Los Angeles locations. And if Hayden wasn’t so utterly believable as a LAPD homicide detective, circa 1952, none of it would work — he’s the glue that holds the entire movie together. If part of the allure of these old films is seeing things as they actually were way back when, this is a scene (and a film) that will keep you in goose bumps.

Then there’s Gene Nelson, of nimble feet and Oklahoma! fame, who plays Steve Lacey, ex-con. It’s on the plus side how Nelson underplays his part. His performance doesn’t offer much beyond matinee good looks and rolled up shirtsleeves. Like I said, this is Hayden’s movie, and Nelson 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 is a protagonist in the classic mold: trying to make good after doing some hard time: employed, married, and with a permanent address. Crane Wilbur’s story puts him in the classic fix: when his old cellmates come looking for help, he knows that refusing them puts everything he’s worked for at risk, while anything short of dropping the proverbial dime puts him squarely on the wrong side of the law. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: the rock and the hard place of classic film noir, with only fate to decide whether or not a man comes out clean on the other side.

The wife is model-turned-actress Phyllis Kirk. Kirk did most of her work on television, but if you remember her at all it’s probably as the damsel in distress in André De Toth’s most famous picture: House of Wax. Kirk and Nelson are well matched — and the mature depiction of their relationship is surprising for a film noir, and rather progressive when we consider typical gender depictions in similar crime films. Ellen Lacey wears the pants in the family; her assertiveness perfectly balances 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 the walls. He needs this strong woman to prop him up and constantly assure him that better days lie ahead. That he had been, of all things, a fighter pilot during the war especially heightens the unusual nature of their relationship. Gone is the recklessness and bravado typically found in screen characterizations of such men, while the wife is equally surprising — a strong, modern woman who is neither a femme fatale nor June Allyson clone. The film gives us an ideally matched couple, each possessed of what the other needs.

The crooks. Ted de Corsia: Eddie Muller says he looks like he was born in a boxing gym. James Ellroy: he “oozes Pomade.” Iconic in The Naked City, de Corsia shines reliably here as the brains behind the breakout. Crime Wave’s theatrical audience was familiar with him in heavy roles dating all the way back to The Lady from Shanghai. De Corsia’s screen persona was as hard-boiled as they come, think of him as an old-school Raymond Burr. His young partner is Charles Buchinsky, who also worked for De Toth in House of Wax. Of course Charles 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 him this young, his face somewhat lined, but nowhere near as weather-beaten as it would soon become. Crime Wave offered the young actor one of his best early roles: he actually gets to act a little here, and even has a few moments where his physicality is on display. The juxtaposition of a studio era character actor as old school as de Corsia with someone 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 Tim Carey, though on the strength of his appearance alone this one is worth the price 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 the frame — that Crime Wave would be notable if for no other reason.  

Enough about the cast, as good as they are, there are more worthwhile reasons to watch this, especially if you appreciate how a film looks, even more if you can feel a film. Usually when a noir essayist digs on cinematography, they’ll discuss the lighting and composition of individual shots — I’m not going to do that. From top to bottom, Crime Wave is a beautifully and thoughtfully staged movie, yet it’s not a one-trick-pony when it comes to visual style (dig, Witness to Murder). Instead, it’s a movie that employs a variety of techniques depending on what individual scenes call for. The sunlit exteriors are pure documentary naturalism: showing LA locales (Burbank, Glendale, downtown) in a blunt, “this is 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 a feel for the way the streets, the people, and the cars looked during those spectacular post-war years. At night, Glennon goes for drama, placing klieg lights in off kilter spots to create a chiaroscuro effect that seems as contrived as the day shots seem real, yet somehow it works, and the transitions barely register.

However the scenes are staged, the greatest thing about Crime Wave is where they are filmed: on location all the way through — and not just the exteriors. De Toth somehow swung access to city hall; the homicide bureau scenes are the real deal. Crime Wave is a superlative example of the way in which a low budget feature could be extraordinary: without money to build sets or dictate production values, De Toth was forced to find locations for the film, and it’s clear 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 almost any frame, and you’ll find something to linger on. De Toth successfully captured all of the content tropes and moviemaking techniques that had become germane to film noir in this tiny little film. It’s astonishing that he did it with only half 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 jittery handheld cameras, semi-professional actors, and the quagmire of the ceaseless urban landscape. This a mean, unglamorous movie — populated with Dudley Smith cops ready to shoot a suspect in the back, hard-boiled killers, damaged goods, floozies, stool pigeons, strongarms, and professional losers. The good, the bad — even the insane —  all trying to claw their way through a world that no longer gives a damn. It’s a cheap, but delicious buffet of everything noir buffs hunger for — and the final few frames make for one hell of a dessert. It should be on many of those ubiquitous top-ten lists, but the guy beside you probably still hasn’t seen 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

DRIVE (2011)

Safe reading, no spoilers!


New films are usually off-limits here, but it isn’t often that such a classicly rendered film noir hits the mainstream. Make no mistake about what Drive is and isn’t: it isn’t an L.A. Confidential-style period piece, nor is it a tribute like Walter Hill’s 1978 cult classic The Driver (though it certainly winks at that film in many obvious ways), and it isn’t a Quentin Tarantino-esque retread of drive-in pulp either. Drive is an exhilarating crime picture — one that marks the continued maturation of an important young director and one that will inevitably push Ryan Gosling’s star one step higher on Hollywood’s A-list. And although much of its appeal owes to the powerfully original filmmaking of director Nicholas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising, the Pusher trilogy), it’s not an unconventional film, nor is it one that ignores classic Hollywood.


Perhaps it’s best to invoke Quentin Tarantino once again, as the experience of watching Drive is reminiscent of seeing Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction for the first time. The subject matter may be familiar, but the technique is so exciting that while one part of you is wrapped up in the storytelling and performances, another is simply enthralled by the freshness of it all — the vivid colors and the deep deep focus, the lighting that subtly evokes shadows of a black and white past, the ultra long pauses and languid pacing, and the extraordinary soundtrack. And though the film isn’t perfect — few risky films are — it is positively captivating. It manages to situate the central character types of forties film noir in a contemporary Los Angeles setting, yet still evoke the peculiar austerity of the more contemporary crime films of William Friedkin and, yes, Michael Mann. All of this is bound up in a visually striking, and even more powerfully sounding movie, that in spite of its overt sleekness manages to avoid wallowing in postmodern hogwash. The thing has substance. 

Drive is neither a heist movie nor a car-culture movie. Those elements are part of the allure, meant to ensure ticket sales in the same way as the casting of Mad Men’s curvy Christine Hendricks — who’s in and out of the picture so fast (albeit spectacularly, and violently so) that if you take a breath you’ll miss her. The focus of the film is Ryan Gosling; and while his casting in a hard-boiled tough guy role at first seems questionable, he makes it work. In the real world we’d raise an eyebrow at such prettiness in a man possessed of the skillset (not to mention the latent ferocity) of the movie stuntman, part-time getaway driver Gosling portrays here. Yet Drive slips this by us by simply avoiding the question of origin: the unnamed driver has no past — we simply aren’t told how he became the mysterious, dangerous, and ultimately sad soul we find in the movie. It’s unclear whether he grew up on the streets, did a jolt at Folsom, or spent some time in camouflage, but regardless we quickly learn that he means business and doesn’t fold under pressure. 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 after close-up, and although the Driver rarely speaks, Gosling is able to use his face to tell us everything we need to know. And despite being set in the half-light of the Los Angeles underbelly, Drive is also very much a romance, territory in which Gosling is an asset to any film.

More than anything else though, Drive is a film noir — one that proves the enduring power of character archetypes and narrative conventions established well over a half-century ago. Though unlike other modern films that have tried to capitalize on film noir, Drive does so quietly — it uses noir tropes, it isn’t about them. It proves that those well-worn conventions don’t have to be stale — that some of the things that made classic Hollywood crime films so great, if skillfully reimagined, are as valid now as they were then. And like the best vintage noir, it uses visuals to tell the story. (One scene in particular (the elevator scene) took my breath away.) Drive succeeds in this all-important visual storytelling where countless other attempts have fallen short; that’s one of the things is has in common with older movies: it’s look and narrative rely on one another. 


Particularly noteworthy is how Hussein Amini’s adaptation of James Sallis’s novel takes on numerous classic character types and successfully tackles them all. The film gives us a pair of urban gangsters much more rooted in vintage noir than those of Scorsese or Coppola — not icy corporate goons or ethic supermen, but insecure sociopaths more in the tradition of Richard Widmark than Al Pacino. Ron Perlman, playing a jewish hoodlum whose greatest wish is to be Italian, delivers everything you could ask for in a workhorse performance, but Albert Brooks is simply astonishing — it’s a shame that the AMPAS failed to recognize him with a nomination, in what is shaping up to be the biggest Oscar snub of the year. Brooks demonstrates that De Niro-like ability to vacillate between affable and terrifying while maintaining a glib, unruffled exterior. His initial impression is almost confusing (especially minus the eyebrows): we know the actor so well, but have no idea what he’ll do with 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 show how much he can do with a distasteful role. Gangsters are Kryptonite in most contemporary crime films — so cliché-ridden that they suck all of the life from a picture. But in avoiding the ubiquitous east coast immigrant mafioso and the west’s beautifully chic hoods, Drive delves into classic Hollywood noir to give us a pair of neurotic criminals who feel both refreshingly novel and altogether real.

Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Malcolm in the Middle) is Shannon, a throwback to one of noir’s most beloved character types: The Loser. He owns the garage where the Driver spends most of his days, serving as Gosling’s criminal pimp and ostensible father figure. He cheerfully limps in and out of scenes, always in a good mood but blind to what’s happening around him — a sad soul borrowed from the pages of Steinbeck. The pronounced hitch in his stride 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 even sports a horseshoe tattoo under one ear. If Drive has been made during the classic noir period, Cranston’s role certainly would have been played by Harry Morgan or Elisha Cook, Jr. His luck is that bad. 

And then there’s the girl, the one spot where Drive turns convention on its ear. Noir always gives us two kinds of women: the femme fatale or the angel. Drive combines both into one. The actress is Carey Mulligan (An Education), whose form is all sweetheart, but who functions as a femme fatale. Mulligan’s Irene isn’t duplicitous — she’s so 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 are typically machinated by the femme fatale. Nevertheless, what the Driver sacrifices — everything — for a down-on-her-luck diner waitress and her child draws a direct connection with the films of the past and, at the same time, puts a less misogynistic spin on old Hollywood gender roles. Comparisons between Drive and the 1994 Besson film Léon, at least in terms of redemption and innocence, are to be expected, though the latter film, as much-loved 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 rigid code that seems to govern every aspect of his life. When he assures his potential “clients” that as long as they do their dirty work within a five-minute window he’ll stick with them “no matter what,” we are absolutely certain of his sincerity. For him such things are simply a matter of honor. We also know that like other film noir protagonists (and as the title of the film suggests) that the Driver is moving determinedly towards some final, inescapable destiny. All of the wayward ends of his Spartan, empty life are fated to coalesce in some way that we can see coming, but he can’t. The precise control he exerts over his existence, metaphorically expressed in the expert way he handles an automobile, is merely an illusion. We also can’t forget that the Driver is a criminal just like those he serves, and in this film noir, just as in those from long ago, his crimes must be answered for.  

See Drive. It’s a film that in it’s brief shelf life has proven to be quite polarizing (it is violent), but it is also original and special. And that’s something Hollywood doesn’t give us much of anymore. 




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

BUNCO SQUAD (1950)

Bunco, n.: The use of dishonest methods to acquire something of value; a swindle.

They oughtta teach Bunco Squad in film school, it’s that good. A 1950 product of the famed RKO B unit, it’s a first-rate example of narrative economy and efficient picture-making. Now I’m no knucklehead, Bunco Squad isn’t The Narrow Margin. I’m not out to compare those two pictures, because beyond their B status and shared studio they have little in common. The Narrow Margin is an exemplary noir thriller with an iconic tough-guy actor in his greatest part. Bunco Squad doesn’t rate as a film noir and has a far less prestigious or able cast than Margin — the actors in Bunco Squad even mispronounce words, tough ones like occult and Los Angeles. Still, this is a little movie that crackles. It’s contrived, heavy on coincidence, and might even be a bit campy, but in spite of all this it still begs to be watched and doesn’t disappoint those who do. It’s a gem of a mid-century crime picture, and although it’s not a film noir, it’s one that certainly rates a few days in the spotlight on this blog.

I included the definition above because “bunco” is hardly a household word. It never registered with me until I read James Ellroy—even though Jack Webb devoted a section of his cop manifesto The Badge to the LAPD bunco squad way back in 1958. That same unit is the subject of our movie, which beyond a rare television airing was nigh on impossible to see until it recently became available through the Warner Archive. The picture opens fast, at only 67 minutes it has to, with star Robert Sterling lecturing a citizens’ group about all the ways that flimflam crews get over on the squares. He’s even got a home-movie screen with 8mm visual aids. Movies such as Southside 1-1000, Code Two, Appointment with Danger and The Street with No Name (to name a very few) sport openings with a narrator speaking over some montage of stock footage, telling us about how the treasury boys, the motorbike unit, the postal cops, or even the g-men are putting their asses on the line for the sake of law, order, and Wonder Bread.

Bunco Squad does the same thing: we get the footage, we get the narrator, we get the same results. But in this case the speaker happens to be our star, and by introducing him in this way it trims some fat from the running time. And by making the montage sequence a movie-within-the-movie, it allows us to watch how the on-screen audience reacts. When Sterling’s Detective Steve Johnson mentions how the palm readers and tarot card shams contribute to the $200 million per year bunco haul, a old man in the crowd looks down his nose at his wife, who turns away, red in the face. Yet when Johnson adds the wheel of fortune and roulette to the list, it’s the wife who gets to glower. As Johnson wraps up his speech his partner rushes in—the captain needs them downtown—a hot tip on a new racket. The scene runs just over two minutes, but it’s one of the many frugal but effective moments that sets Bunco Squad apart. It packs a wallop of important information: we meet our star and his partner; get a fix on the bad guys, what they do, how they do it, and who they do it to.

The cops here are one-dimensional, pure cardboard; their moral certainty is absolute. At 67 minutes, time can’t be wasted agonizing over ethical ambiguities or on character development — in fact there’s no character development at all, which is the most damning evidence against Bunco Squad as a film noir; it has none of the alienation, obsession, and desperate choices that make a noir a noir. We have to take for granted why the police are compelled to uphold order and why the crooks would choose to do ill. Fate never takes a hand and irony must have been busy elsewhere. These points aren’t offered to disparage Bunco Squad, but to differentiate it from the film noir and show that such a picture can nevertheless succeed by other means. What Bunco Squad does well is show us, exposé style, how the con artists organize and carry out their scams. The notion makes sense: audiences generally have a sense of how cops do business, but in a movie that deals with crooks who use brains instead of bullets, there’s big upside in showing how they pull the rabbit out of the hat — particularly when it’s a spooky séance scam.

Here are the details: con man Tony Weldon (Ricardo Cortez, Bunco’s lone name star) rolls into L.A. on the heels of Mrs. Royce’s secretary, knowing that if he can get close enough to the old bird he might pry loose her 2.5 million dollar nest egg. When Weldon learns that Mrs. Royce’s boy was killed at Normandy he knows exactly how to work her. He builds a crew of professional swindlers, including ex-con crystal ball gazer Princess Liane (Bernadene Hayes, not bad in a role tailor-made for Marie Windsor), professional shill Mrs. Cobb (Vivien Oakland), restaurant swami Drake (Bob Bice), and the smooth-talking Fred Reed (John Kellogg). They develop an elaborate shell game in order to convince Mrs. Royce to bequeath her money to the “Rama Society.” There’s a fine sequence that depicts each of them uncovering seemingly banal pieces of information about the dead son’s schoolboy days, that when sewn together and dressed up in an otherworldly séance, take on the look and feel true mysticism. The plan works, and Mrs. Royce amends her will. When the secretary gets suspicious of Weldon her car plummets into a canyon—no brakes! (Weldon cuts so many brake lines in the movie that if were a mob picture they’d call him “Snips.”)

Meanwhile, the cops are pounding the pavement trying to make a case—they know who’s involved, but can’t prove a crime has been committed. In a spectacular B-movie coincidence, Steve shows up at Rama society headquarters just in time to see Mrs. Royce. When the cops brace her she scoffs and tells them to buzz off—which Detective Johnson does, and how: straight over a cliff with cut brake lines! He lives, barely, and enjoys one moviedom’s briefest convalescent periods. Finally, the cops contrive to beat Weldon at his own game, with the assistance of famous magician Dante (playing himself) and Johnson’s actress girlfriend, posing as a rival medium. When their scheme gains traction with Mrs. Royce, Weldon resorts to violence, setting the stage for Bunco’s finale—and another brakeless car careening through the hills above Malibu.

The fixation on murder by cutting brake lines jeopardizes the movie’s credibility, but it’s also another one of those expeditious touches that allow a whole lot of story to be crammed into a few reels. The first time it happens we get plenty of detailed information: the killer approaches and climbs under the car; we hear him cut the lines; we see him resurface and stow the cutters. This takes a modest thirty seconds; the final time it takes just six. The cinematic value of this method of attempted murder is significant. Bullets are difficult to dodge, but the brake line technique generates suspense—and a special sort of suspense at that, considering that the amount of time between the cutting of the lines and the car ride itself can be shortened or lengthened to suit the plot. 

Most B pictures rely on contrivances stacked on top of one another and outrageous coincidences too. Bunco Squad is no different, yet it’s all done so smoothly you’ll hardly notice and surely won’t care. It borrows one of the quintessential devices of the caper picture to great effect: that of the criminal who builds a crew and executes a clever plan; except in this case it’s not a heist but a swindle the crooks have in mind. There’s nothing spectacular about the story or the cast, and its noir credentials are tepid. But Bunco Squad is a crackerjack crime movie anyway. It’s polished, well constructed, features a ton of on-location L.A. exteriors and surprising special effects. It goes a long way towards reminding us that not all mid-century crimes movies were filmed in the noir style, and that such films shouldn’t be dismissed—or forgotten.

Bunco Squad (1950)
Directed by Herbert Leeds
Produced by Louis Rachmil
Cinematography by Henry Freulich
Screenplay by George Callahan, based on a novel by Reginald Taviner
Starring Robert Sterling, Joan Dixon, and Ricardo Cortez
Released by RKO Studios
Running time: 67 minutes