HER KIND OF MAN (1946)

Generalizations about the sexes are treacherous, but men and women alike agree that there’s a certain kind of girl who invariably finds herself attracted to the wrong type of guy. Such relationships have been film fodder since the birth of the medium, and1946’s Her Kind of Man is no different. It tells the familiar story of a lounge singer, who finds herself caught between two men, one a professional gambler and heel, the other a clean cut newspaper hack. At first glance Her Kind of Man appears to be nothing more than a routine Warner Bros gang programmer—not to mention one made in the days after such films had gone out of style. However it has the shadings of film noir, and features a cast and production team well-represented in the noir cycle. In the end though, it’s just one helluva strange movie.

Her Kind of Man is strictly a star vehicle. The good guy / bad guy love triangle plot was familiar even to 1946 audiences, leaving the picture to sink or swim on the charisma of its three leads. The inescapable fact that this has been unseen and unmissed for many decades provides some insight into the relative magnitude of the star power in play. And yet there’s something to be said for the rediscovery of forgotten performers—in this instance TV’s Janis Paige. She’s the pretty part of the three-way; the other two sides of the triangle are noir stalwarts Dane Clark and Zachary Scott. It practically goes without saying that Scott is the heavy (and the real star despite third billing), while Clark is uncomfortable and miscast as a gossip columnist. The stars are competent—it’s just that this project was probably intended for, and would have been more gratifying with, water dipped from the deeper end of the Warner Bros talent pool.

Janis Paige (still with us!) was a talented singer with a throaty voice and fleshy, yet angular Maureen O’Hara-like good looks. She and Hollywood never quite saw eye-to-eye during the studio years, so Paige left the west coast for Broadway in the fifties and made a splash in the initial theatrical productions of a few iconic musicals, particularly The Pajama Game. Doris Day got the nod for the Hollywood adaptation, but Janis returned to films and cemented her reputation as a firecracker alongside Astaire and Charisse in Silk Stockings, the screen role for which she is best remembered. She transitioned to television, and worked steadily on the tube until the late-1990s. When Her Kind of Man was made, the studio was trying Janis out in a variety of parts in low-rent pictures to see how audiences would take to her.

The film is a sort of hybrid of multiple forms: romance, gangster movie, film noir (just a little), and musical. Paige gets to do three numbers, but despite being a popular singer herself, the studio decided to dub her—and with at least two different vocalists. The music is worked into the story seamlessly—after all, Paige plays a lounge singer—with the highlight coming in a glamorous, if incomplete version of Body and Soul. Somehow the genre mashup works, though as the film becomes more and more noirish as it goes along, the early musical numbers feel out of place. But perhaps such diverse genre-based thematics at play in one B picture is what makes Her Kind of Man inordinately interesting.

Besides, I’m not even certain it’s fair to call this a legitimate gangster film. Zach Scott’s character is more a gambler and opportunist schooled during the Prohibition era than he is a professional criminal. And while it’s true that he eventually gains enough bankroll to open his own nightclub-cum-backroom-gambling-parlor the film depicts him more as a cad and a polished bumbler than a Robinson-esque big-timer. He mixes it up throughout the film: slapping his toady (Harry Lewis) around, talking tough at the dice table, shooting it out with a second-rate Moose Malloy, and finally with the cops; but we are constantly left with the impression that Scott is a lot more lucky than he is good—and in the end he isn’t even that lucky. His criminal ineptitude is most evident in a crucial scene at the end of the film where he finds himself wielding a shotgun from on high, tangling with the cops who have just busted in on his gambling operation. Scott fires a few shots to let them know he means business, but forgets to aim and accidentally blasts his sister in the gut. What a schmuck.

Clark is hardly better—frankly it’s difficult to believe that this is the same actor who made such a vivid impression in Moonrise. He plays second or third fiddle despite top billing—leering his way through the reels, his hair standing so tall that he brings to mind Seinfeld’s Kramer. In one eyebrow-raising scene Clark and Scott actually put on boxing gloves and climb into a ring to fight over Paige. The good guy wins, though ludicrously, as Clark KOs Scott with a twice-around-the-world haymaker of an uppercut that looks as if it were swiped from a Popeye cartoon. Hard to fathom considering rumors that before coming to the movies, Clark tried to make a go of it in the ring.

Film noir? Forget it—though some familiar trappings are put to use: narration, flashback, and montage. And as mentioned above, Her Kind of Man gets much darker as it comes to a close. So dark that on the basis of the final sequence alone, it has been ascribe noir status by some. I disagree, but I’ll happily acknowledge that the final moments do much to redeem an otherwise absurd movie, and make the noir label forgivable. It’s an exciting scene: Scott, having shotgunned his sister (Faye Emerson, the Lady Gangster herself) is holed up looking to dodge the cops. The toady with Scott’s handprint on his left check drops a nickel on him, and the police, along with Clark, come roaring along hellbent for blood. They get it when Scott, the born loser, staggers out into the rainy night and a downpour of gunfire. The visual atmosphere and fatal determinism of the scene come on like a ton of bricks as Scott collapses face-first into the gutter—his blood and Paige’s tears mingling with the filthy rainwater as it rushes through an eddying whirlpool and into the sewer. The camera sweeps from the corpse along the gutter to the whirlpool, then upwards to rest on a one-way street sign before cutting abruptly to a long shot and the end card.

Note: for another write-up about Her Kind of Man, check out Laura’s review over at Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings.

Her Kind of Man (1946)
Directed by Frederick de Cordova
Produced by Alex Gottlieb (Macao, The Blue Gardenia)
Screenplay by Gordon Kahn and Leopold Atlas (Raw Deal)
Story by Charles Hoffman (The Blue Gardenia) and James V. Kern
Cinematography by Carl Guthrie (Caged, Hollywood Story)
Art Direction by Ted Smith (High Sierra, The Mask of Dimitrios)
Starring Zachary Scott, Janis Paige, Dane Clark, Faye Emerson, Harry Lewis.
Released by Warner Bros Studios
Running time: 78 minutes

9/17

MIAMI EXPOSÉ (1956)

Sun drenched.


By the mid 50s it seems that film noir had moved south in search of better weather. Despite the vacation locale, had Miami Exposé been shot just five years earlier, the result would have appeared darker, drearier, and smelled a little less like coconut oil. Times change and film styles change with them, so in lieu of the Kefauver senate investigation into organized crime and its growing hold on major American cities, as well as Hollywood’s new propensity to make the government happy, the subject matter of films that had previously been steeped in the noir tradition became brighter and more oriented to rooting out corruption on a large scale, as opposed to films that had theretofore more concerned with the struggles of the lone individual against an oppressive and fatalistic system.


If there was a strong holdover as film noir evolved into.......something else, it was the cynicism — at least as far as cops are concerned. In the 1940s film noir transposed the cynical detective of the pulp novel to the big screen, where he prospered, and has more or less been going strong ever since. In the late 50s noir went into hibernation for a decade and a half, more or less, and reemerged with new vitality in characters such as Popeye Doyle and Eddie Coyle. Though I tend to think of him as a poor man’s Robert Mitchum (with not an iota of disrespect to either man intended), Lee J. Cobb was perfectly suited for cop roles in the 50s. Tough, cynical, perpetually tired, yet still likable, (remember that Arthur Miller wrote Willie Loman for him) Cobb injected gravity into every part he played. His personal life caught up with his screen persona at the time — he was called to testify before HUAC in 1953, and like so many others he named names in order to save his career, though the scars of having done so were permanent. Just a few months prior to making Miami Exposé, Cobb had to be removed from the production of William Castle’s The Houston Story, when he was too exhausted to finish his scenes and had to be rushed to the hospital with symptoms of a heart attack. It would actually be a heart attack that killed Cobb in 1976 at the relatively young age of 64. He does for Miami Exposé what Dan Duryea does for World for Ransom — without him, it just wouldn’t be worth the time.


The big problem with Miami Exposé is that it shoots off like a rocket, fizzles, and plummets back to earth. The film is introduced by, of all people, the mayor of Miami, Randy Christmas. He speaks to the audience from behind his desk (adorned with brass placard reading “Mayor Christmas”), with an air that I’m certain he hoped was presidential, or at least gubernatorial, about the creeping terror of organized crime, no longer confined to just New York and Chicago. The film then cuts to aerial footage of Florida cities, while a narrator describes the current economic climate and population boom in the Sunshine State. He speaks directly to the viewer, and rattles off statistics about interstate highways and vacation dollars as the scene vacillates between sandy beaches, pleasure boats, and the recurring shot of a commuter plane winging its way to South Beach. His closing remarks are a harsh reprimand: “Yes, you should have thought about these statistics, they might have saved your life!” As the passenger plane suddenly explodes into a million pieces, leaving viewers quite startled just as the titles finally appear on the screen. An auspicious start full of sensationalism that the film fails to maintain longer than the opening titles.


We learn later that the plane was blown up by the mob, at the cost of all 41 passengers and crew, in order to eliminate a single man who stood in the way of a plan to legalize gambling in the state. This sort of overkill, especially the kind that involved the murder of civilians, was a popular story device in films such as this one. Whether an airline crash, an apartment fire, gas explosion, or smallpox outbreak, filmmakers were always certain to show that the actions of the racketeers were deadly where the general population was concerned. The strangest aspect of the film is the casting choice of Alan Napier for the leader of the mob. He’s the man behind the plan to manipulate the ballot provision that would legalize gambling, and then gain control of those rackets, making Miami the Las Vegas of the east, and him the boss. Most people will remember Napier as Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred from the campy Batman television series, but that aside, it strains credibility to think that the head of the criminal organization in the film, of which all the hoods are typical filmdom Mafioso, is a genteel bespectacled Englishman. The excuse given is that he learned that rackets through decades as a scum bag defense attorney, but it just doesn’t play given all we know about how the real Sicilian mobs actually operated.


Cobb’s part of story is more laden with cop clichés than Swiss cheese is with holes: He’s set to retire from the force, but his partner is killed, which sucks him in deeper than ever before. It turns out someone saw the killing, and it’s a she. She’s the ex-showgirl moll of a gangster, and she’s scared to death that her name is now on the hit list. Cobb has to protect her, but the two can’t seem to get along. He hides her in a shack in the Everglades, but the pinstripe suits find out where and swoop in via a commandeered fan-boat. Cobb shows up in the nick of time, Tommy gun blasting, and saves the day. All of the derivative pieces of the story would add up to something unwatchable were it not for the surprisingly good technical filmmaking. The film positively glitters with daylight — and on location shooting in Miami, even a few scenes in Havana, provides an interesting respite from Hollywood back lots and dreary Manhattan streets. Car lovers will find much to enjoy here — there aren’t really any chases in the film, though there are unlimited shots of Cobb and other characters driving from place to place in shiny Buick and Cadillac convertibles.


Patricia Medina, who was married to Joseph Cotten for more than thirty years, plays the girl. It’s surprising to learn she was British, considering she did American so well in this film. Medina is a real bright spot, it’s a shame she wasn’t better known, though she did have a long and active career in Hollywood. In looks and style she evokes Jane Russell. Also notable is the presence of Edward Arnold in his final film appearance. As others have noted, it’s unfortunate that this film was his last, as his part isn’t a good one — he’s a political stooge and a sap — and he looks totally spent in the film. A job’s a job, but it’s only out of respect for his great career that the word pathetic isn’t used. Score one for Eddie though, in spite of his sad part in the film, he obviously still had the star power to rate the lion’s share of the movie poster — his huge face leers down at Medina’s swimsuited cleavage.


Miami Exposé is a cookie cutter film from a cookie cutter period in filmmaking. However it does provide a glimpse into the heavy handed way Hollywood responded the political happenings of the Eisenhower era, and the painful diminishment of the film noir style.

TCM Clip One

TCM Clip Two

TCM Clip Three

Miami Exposé (1956)

Director: Fred F. Sears
Cinematographer: Ben Kline
Screenplay: Robert E. Kent
Starring: Lee J. Cobb, Patricia Medina, Edward Arnold, and Alan Napier.
Released by: Columbia Pictures
Running time: 73 minutes