This op-ed was rejected by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
(Sometime in the future.)
Tell me about life before the coronavirus, Grandfather.
It was another life. Things were more sociable then, especially in the great cities. There was at least one café on every block and people thought nothing of approaching total strangers. It was safe to be friendlier then.
We all seemed to have plenty of money. There was more work. There was a job for everybody who wanted one. People worked in offices together, side by side. You didn’t just talk facing a screen. Your life wasn’t lived on a little screen. You knew how your coworkers smelled.
Part of this, I suppose, was that you thought you knew what people were thinking. Everybody didn’t always have to wear a mask, for starters, so their faces weren’t hidden. Masks turn us all into spies. Guarding our important secrets.
Back then, an extremely corrupt politician named Trump was in charge. It was easy to blame Trump for everything. But Trump wasn’t really in charge of anything.
Still, there seemed plenty to talk about. The latest books, for example. I can’t prove it, but I think people read more. They borrowed books from the libraries, which were full of people. Just as the streets were full of people.
Were any wearing masks, Grandfather? Did you trust them?
Nobody wore a mask before the pandemic. It would’ve seemed strange.
Unless you were in China or India, because of the smog.
But you didn’t necessarily trust your neighbors. You couldn’t. Just as in no time, you didn’t know which neighbors were out to kill you simply by breathing on you, you also couldn’t predict which neighbors might turn out to be maniacs with a babysitter caged in the basement.
You did trust your neighbor at the theater or the movie theater. It seemed there was always something to go to, it gave everybody something to talk about, and you had a convenient excuse for a date. You didn’t have to think up something.
There were plenty of restaurants, of course, full of people. This was true across the country. You didn’t have to sit six feet apart to survive. And there were bars, too, where people went to drink and talk with each other. The bars made a lot of money, like the musicians who played in them. People will pay for live music.
Were things better then between the races, Grandfather?
Things were awful. Things were always awful between the white people in charge and everybody else.
Part of the problem is our guilt. We’re proud of our guilt, beginning with all we did to the Native Americans. We certainly don’t want to give up our guilt, no matter what it costs.
You have to understand. Look, this country is like a big ship in the middle of the ocean. It takes an awfully long time to turn it around.
In those days there were statues everywhere, put up by the people in charge. Like most statues, they were designed to help people forget, not to make them remember. So the statues got taken down. It wasn’t enough, it was only a start. If you ask me, personally I think it can only ever be a start.
You told me once that you traveled all the time. Was that true?
We traveled everywhere. We took it for granted. The entire planet felt safe, and available. The rich thought nothing of flying to Paris or across the country for dinner and a romantic weekend. The rest of us took a train. It didn’t matter how crowded we were. That was part of the fun.
Did everybody think that the virus would end one day soon?
We hoped so. Nobody with any brains thought so. I knew it would always be with us. The scientists said that it would. So humanity had better be prepared. We had to make our changes permanent changes. We had to alter everything we did. And we were thinking we only had to worry about climate change! Now this. It made falling in love very different, I promise you.
Few people want to die, and like being reminded that they don’t matter much. During the third wave and fourth wave and fifth wave of the virus we thought back with great nostalgia on a time when we didn’t know what those terms meant. Then we lost count. I couldn’t possibly tell you which wave we’re on now.
How was falling in love different then, Grandfather?
You saw what you were getting, for starters. You didn’t just go by the eyes, like Muslims. And your voice wasn’t muffled. You could hear each other clearly.
You weren’t compelled to assume the other person was diseased. That helps.
It was easier to meet strangers, of course.
You make the past sound too good to be true, Grandfather.
I suppose it was. We didn’t realize how happy we were. It was another world.
A Regular Irregular Blog
Which I'll write frequently & which (hopefully) you will read frequently
Saturday, June 20, 2020
Sunday, February 3, 2019
The Actual Don Shirley (1927 - 2013)
Much abbreviated, the following brief memoir ran as an op-ed in the L.A. Times on February 3, 2019. I was remarkably prescient. Soon after, the actor who played "Don Shirley" in "Green Book" won Best Supporting Actor, and the film somehow won Best Picture of the Year. Briefly, Donald's music was again seemingly everywhere.
The African-American pianist Don Shirley wouldn’t be surprised that the country he loved was prepared to embrace a screen version of his prickly persona rather than grapple with the societal questions raised by his music.
Decades ago, before I moved overseas, for several years we were very good friends. I met Donald (“I’m not a Don. That’s a stage name.”) in 1980. I’d just graduated from Yale, and made my way to Manhattan to seek my fortune as an artist. I was a classical as well as a jazz guitarist; the combination was much rarer then. I’d been a music major at Yale and was still studying composition. In those days, the famous were more accessible than now. I looked up Shirley in the phone book—he was unlisted—then called the Musicians’ Union.
I’d discovered his music by accident, haunting a used-record shop near my college apartment. That solo 1955 LP was one of his best: his improvised sonata on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld. I was attracted to the formality of his approach as well as the kudos of the notoriously hard-to-please Igor Stravinsky (“His virtuosity is worthy of gods.”). The music, by turns dreamily lavish or austerely rational, thrilled me.
I was particularly taken by how this fellow Shirley suggested the Underworld from the very get-go, restating his opening theme in the parallel minor tonality, then using that idea throughout the sonata. This organic architecture appealed enormously.
Donald asked me to drop by for a chat. He lived in a “studio” above Carnegie Hall. (After nearly fifty years, he moved out just before his death.) The high-ceilinged place was vast, ornate, a silk-and-antique extravaganza, hung with billowy drapes and festooned with candles and bric-a-brac. It seemed a temple consecrated to the Steinway grand. Donald was big, shaven-headed, with a misleadingly sinister mustache. He spoke regally and softly, an erudite professor or high-pitched priest. He tolerated only believers, gesturing with agile fingers. Three doctorates, eight languages. He rarely stopped moving. He never stopped talking. It was exhausting.
He was then fifty-three. Difficult to imagine the younger and skinnier man of 1962, on tour in the Deep South with a tough Brooklyn chauffeur, as portrayed by the movie. Donald never spoke of this to me. He often spoke of the frustrations of being black. When I’d call him up and ask what he had to do, he’d invariably answer, “There are only two things I have to do. Stay black, and die.”
Race was never far from his mind. In 1961 Donald wrote, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story... Americans who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experiences, have therefore no way of assessing the experiences of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. Thus the idea of my music can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice.”
I am white, brought up in Georgia; that last clause broke my heart.
Shirley’s music has worn well. Though it can be precious or bombastic, most of the time it remains fresh and audacious. Donald was right: the tradition of American song is richer than one might suppose.
He grew up a prodigy, son of comfortable Jamaican parents in Pensacola, Florida (his father was an Episcopal minister; his mother, a teacher, died when he was nine; his three brothers became doctors), then attended Catholic University in D.C. He declared his presence at eighteen with the Tchaikowsky Concerto and the Boston Pops. Mid-century America wasn’t ready for a black concert pianist, even represented by Sol Hurok. He was told to go into jazz or pop.
At the height of his career, the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, he played three hundred concerts a year. When I knew him, he was down to a handful.
“Nightclubs are toilets,” he liked to say. He avoided them. Many of his versions of standards show a tendency to merge the classics, which Donald had grown up in, with more customary idioms. He called his versions “transcriptions,” but they’re more like sympathetic re-compositions. Thus his I Cover the Waterfront contains passages from Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l'Ocean,” and his I Understand is constructed upon a Schubert impromptu. Today this seems a party trick, an attempt to avoid handling this material as jazz. But it’s much, much deeper than that.
Donald had an uneasy relationship with jazz. He often did a comic imitation at the keyboard of the latest hotshot. He admired Art Tatum, and was pallbearer for both Billie Holiday and Bill Evans; we went one evening to hear the master pianist Ellis Larkins, who was flummoxed to see him. Donald’s trio consisted of piano, bass, and cello; each player’s part was written; there was no improvisation. (Indeed, Donald argued there was no true improvisation in jazz, since everybody agreed beforehand on the harmonies.) Though Donald felt the concert stage was too stuffy, he had a horror of the informality of the jazz club. “I don’t want someone to slap me on the back and say, ‘Hey, baby!’”
After a career as a jazz musician, I can say with confidence that he was partly wrong. Though it’s recognized more in practice than in theory, jazz does involve improvised variations on a theme. (See Gunther Schuller’s 1958 analysis of Sonny Rollins’ Blue Seven.) Donald often aptly decried jazz musicians’ lazy ignorance of classical music. He recounted with glee having played a recent Stravinsky prelude for Miles Davis, who committed the unpardonable sin of not recognizing it.
Donald had nothing against improvisation; “I improvise very well,” he’d say. And he did: I once brought him a fugue subject, and watched him improvise a four-voice fugue after subtly improving the original theme. (I wondered whether to ask him to explain what he’d done.) He was at heart an organist, with one foot in the Baroque; his Lullaby of Birdland treats the melody as a fugue. He conceived of the piano as a stringed instrument and of his trio as one enormous stringed instrument. He was writing chamber music. This is evident in his trio setting of I Can’t Get Started by Vernon Duke (real name: Vladimir Dukelsky), which sounds like missing pages from a Rachmaninoff piano trio.
I never found out the source of his prodigious bravura technique; he never discussed his teachers, though he’d done a long seminar with “Mr. Rachmaninoff.” Perhaps, like all virtuosi, he simply bought it from his body with hard work. He did recommend a wonderful, neglected book, Music At Your Fingertips, by the piano teacher Ruth Slenzynka. It’s full of solid advice for any instrumentalist.
Donald used to slip from his studio into the back seats of Carnegie Hall so he could listen with disdain. “Audiences must like watching bad pianists move their fingers.” One afternoon he showed me a knotty passage from a Beethoven sonata that he was practicing; most of his colleagues cheated on the passage. Gulda and Entremont were notable exceptions. He spoke with derision of AndrĂ© Watts, who enjoyed the career that Donald was denied thirty years earlier. A tragedy of his career is that so few classical recordings exist.
Beyond his talent for embodying the African-American experience in music (try his trio’s Water Boy), Donald’s genius lay in an ability to find the hidden personality of musical material. (Try his solo LP of spirituals.) He extended this sympathy to standards: his Blue Skies evokes the Russian heritage of its composer, Irving Berlin. He was especially insightful about the works of George Gershwin. When I knew him, Donald was working on a way to play both the piano part to Rhapsody In Blue—which he performed many times—along with a compressed version of the orchestral part. At the keyboard, he was afraid of nothing.
One overlooked treasure from his extensive discography is a 1962 LP with the forgotten soprano Martha Flowers—“the alternate, not the understudy, for Leontyne Price.” It’s a convincing foray of an opera singer into popular material. The disc also features the finest trio performance of the Porgy and Bess Medley.
Much can be gleaned from examining his two recordings of The Man I Love, done about a decade apart. In the latter, the melody is played, with arpeggio accompaniment, by left hand alone. (In performance he’d drop his right hand to his side.) I believe Donald was influenced by James Joyce, whom he admired greatly; the core of both versions seems to mimic the “Oxen of the Sun” passage from Ulysses, in which Joyce systematically exploits all the styles of English prose in chronological order. Donald does the same for his variations, from Baroque to classical to romantic to modern. It’s up to you to follow the stylistic shifts, since he makes it all sound logical and natural.
Donald taught me—and one lesson of “Green Book” is—we must constantly open ourselves to the diversity of expression offered by artists. There ought to be room in the society for everybody. We mustn’t congratulate ourselves that today a Shirley would be encouraged, even welcomed, upon the classical stage. Often the rarest butterflies go extinct. But had Donald been allowed to be a concert pianist, we would not have the world of unique music he left us. As the expression goes, “You can’t have it both ways. The butter, and the money for the butter.” This country is very hard on its originals.
The African-American pianist Don Shirley wouldn’t be surprised that the country he loved was prepared to embrace a screen version of his prickly persona rather than grapple with the societal questions raised by his music.
Decades ago, before I moved overseas, for several years we were very good friends. I met Donald (“I’m not a Don. That’s a stage name.”) in 1980. I’d just graduated from Yale, and made my way to Manhattan to seek my fortune as an artist. I was a classical as well as a jazz guitarist; the combination was much rarer then. I’d been a music major at Yale and was still studying composition. In those days, the famous were more accessible than now. I looked up Shirley in the phone book—he was unlisted—then called the Musicians’ Union.
I’d discovered his music by accident, haunting a used-record shop near my college apartment. That solo 1955 LP was one of his best: his improvised sonata on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld. I was attracted to the formality of his approach as well as the kudos of the notoriously hard-to-please Igor Stravinsky (“His virtuosity is worthy of gods.”). The music, by turns dreamily lavish or austerely rational, thrilled me.
I was particularly taken by how this fellow Shirley suggested the Underworld from the very get-go, restating his opening theme in the parallel minor tonality, then using that idea throughout the sonata. This organic architecture appealed enormously.
Donald asked me to drop by for a chat. He lived in a “studio” above Carnegie Hall. (After nearly fifty years, he moved out just before his death.) The high-ceilinged place was vast, ornate, a silk-and-antique extravaganza, hung with billowy drapes and festooned with candles and bric-a-brac. It seemed a temple consecrated to the Steinway grand. Donald was big, shaven-headed, with a misleadingly sinister mustache. He spoke regally and softly, an erudite professor or high-pitched priest. He tolerated only believers, gesturing with agile fingers. Three doctorates, eight languages. He rarely stopped moving. He never stopped talking. It was exhausting.
He was then fifty-three. Difficult to imagine the younger and skinnier man of 1962, on tour in the Deep South with a tough Brooklyn chauffeur, as portrayed by the movie. Donald never spoke of this to me. He often spoke of the frustrations of being black. When I’d call him up and ask what he had to do, he’d invariably answer, “There are only two things I have to do. Stay black, and die.”
Race was never far from his mind. In 1961 Donald wrote, “It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story... Americans who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experiences, have therefore no way of assessing the experiences of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. Thus the idea of my music can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice.”
I am white, brought up in Georgia; that last clause broke my heart.
Shirley’s music has worn well. Though it can be precious or bombastic, most of the time it remains fresh and audacious. Donald was right: the tradition of American song is richer than one might suppose.
He grew up a prodigy, son of comfortable Jamaican parents in Pensacola, Florida (his father was an Episcopal minister; his mother, a teacher, died when he was nine; his three brothers became doctors), then attended Catholic University in D.C. He declared his presence at eighteen with the Tchaikowsky Concerto and the Boston Pops. Mid-century America wasn’t ready for a black concert pianist, even represented by Sol Hurok. He was told to go into jazz or pop.
At the height of his career, the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, he played three hundred concerts a year. When I knew him, he was down to a handful.
“Nightclubs are toilets,” he liked to say. He avoided them. Many of his versions of standards show a tendency to merge the classics, which Donald had grown up in, with more customary idioms. He called his versions “transcriptions,” but they’re more like sympathetic re-compositions. Thus his I Cover the Waterfront contains passages from Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l'Ocean,” and his I Understand is constructed upon a Schubert impromptu. Today this seems a party trick, an attempt to avoid handling this material as jazz. But it’s much, much deeper than that.
Donald had an uneasy relationship with jazz. He often did a comic imitation at the keyboard of the latest hotshot. He admired Art Tatum, and was pallbearer for both Billie Holiday and Bill Evans; we went one evening to hear the master pianist Ellis Larkins, who was flummoxed to see him. Donald’s trio consisted of piano, bass, and cello; each player’s part was written; there was no improvisation. (Indeed, Donald argued there was no true improvisation in jazz, since everybody agreed beforehand on the harmonies.) Though Donald felt the concert stage was too stuffy, he had a horror of the informality of the jazz club. “I don’t want someone to slap me on the back and say, ‘Hey, baby!’”
After a career as a jazz musician, I can say with confidence that he was partly wrong. Though it’s recognized more in practice than in theory, jazz does involve improvised variations on a theme. (See Gunther Schuller’s 1958 analysis of Sonny Rollins’ Blue Seven.) Donald often aptly decried jazz musicians’ lazy ignorance of classical music. He recounted with glee having played a recent Stravinsky prelude for Miles Davis, who committed the unpardonable sin of not recognizing it.
Donald had nothing against improvisation; “I improvise very well,” he’d say. And he did: I once brought him a fugue subject, and watched him improvise a four-voice fugue after subtly improving the original theme. (I wondered whether to ask him to explain what he’d done.) He was at heart an organist, with one foot in the Baroque; his Lullaby of Birdland treats the melody as a fugue. He conceived of the piano as a stringed instrument and of his trio as one enormous stringed instrument. He was writing chamber music. This is evident in his trio setting of I Can’t Get Started by Vernon Duke (real name: Vladimir Dukelsky), which sounds like missing pages from a Rachmaninoff piano trio.
I never found out the source of his prodigious bravura technique; he never discussed his teachers, though he’d done a long seminar with “Mr. Rachmaninoff.” Perhaps, like all virtuosi, he simply bought it from his body with hard work. He did recommend a wonderful, neglected book, Music At Your Fingertips, by the piano teacher Ruth Slenzynka. It’s full of solid advice for any instrumentalist.
Donald used to slip from his studio into the back seats of Carnegie Hall so he could listen with disdain. “Audiences must like watching bad pianists move their fingers.” One afternoon he showed me a knotty passage from a Beethoven sonata that he was practicing; most of his colleagues cheated on the passage. Gulda and Entremont were notable exceptions. He spoke with derision of AndrĂ© Watts, who enjoyed the career that Donald was denied thirty years earlier. A tragedy of his career is that so few classical recordings exist.
Beyond his talent for embodying the African-American experience in music (try his trio’s Water Boy), Donald’s genius lay in an ability to find the hidden personality of musical material. (Try his solo LP of spirituals.) He extended this sympathy to standards: his Blue Skies evokes the Russian heritage of its composer, Irving Berlin. He was especially insightful about the works of George Gershwin. When I knew him, Donald was working on a way to play both the piano part to Rhapsody In Blue—which he performed many times—along with a compressed version of the orchestral part. At the keyboard, he was afraid of nothing.
One overlooked treasure from his extensive discography is a 1962 LP with the forgotten soprano Martha Flowers—“the alternate, not the understudy, for Leontyne Price.” It’s a convincing foray of an opera singer into popular material. The disc also features the finest trio performance of the Porgy and Bess Medley.
Much can be gleaned from examining his two recordings of The Man I Love, done about a decade apart. In the latter, the melody is played, with arpeggio accompaniment, by left hand alone. (In performance he’d drop his right hand to his side.) I believe Donald was influenced by James Joyce, whom he admired greatly; the core of both versions seems to mimic the “Oxen of the Sun” passage from Ulysses, in which Joyce systematically exploits all the styles of English prose in chronological order. Donald does the same for his variations, from Baroque to classical to romantic to modern. It’s up to you to follow the stylistic shifts, since he makes it all sound logical and natural.
Donald taught me—and one lesson of “Green Book” is—we must constantly open ourselves to the diversity of expression offered by artists. There ought to be room in the society for everybody. We mustn’t congratulate ourselves that today a Shirley would be encouraged, even welcomed, upon the classical stage. Often the rarest butterflies go extinct. But had Donald been allowed to be a concert pianist, we would not have the world of unique music he left us. As the expression goes, “You can’t have it both ways. The butter, and the money for the butter.” This country is very hard on its originals.
Monday, September 3, 2018
Peyton Houston (1910 - 1994)
It has taken me a long time, too long, to write about the American poet Peyton Houston. It’s now been almost twenty-five years since his death; when a great person dies, there is no shade. It is as if a storm wind has passed by; not only has all foliage been ripped from the trees, but nothing will grow again, seemingly, for years. Everybody stumbles around, numb.
The debt I owe Peyton is immense and lifelong. I was introduced to him at his grand Italianate villa in Greenwich, Connecticut, overlooking Long Island Sound, at the end of Christmas vacation my second year at Yale. This would’ve been early January, 1977. I’d never met a great poet. He was also a very successful corporate secretary, which explains the villa, the wall of books, the enormous view. It doesn’t explain the generosity. A few months later, when it was obvious what our friendship had become, I asked why he was being so generous. He said, simply, “Because you’ll be writing when I am not.” Now, at sixty-one, I understand.
His poetry is not superficially “pretty.” It is often difficult and not easily come to, nor easily forgotten. It quite contentedly goes its own way.
Thus, at age nineteen, mid-way through my sophomore year in college, I got taken under the capacious wing of a superb older poet, tallest of my personal saints, who lived only an hour from both Yale and New York City (where I lived for six years after graduation) and for nearly twenty years of correspondence gave me the kind of word-by-word, beat-by-beat tutelage a young poet can only dream about.
Peyton was white-haired and gangly—six-foot seven—firmly in the Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives tradition of American businessmen / artists. Because of his height, he carried himself gingerly, as if doorways might betray him. His voice was low and imposing, his hands immense. A Princeton graduate, he’d read everything, and absorbed it all. I’ve never met anybody with his breadth of deep knowledge and openness of spirit. He had no interest in froth or the superficial, the ambitious, or the fashionable. He had little time for novels, which drew me (he loved Melville and did not like Dickens), and he felt a gravitational pull toward the classics—ancient Greek and Latin. Homer was, I think, his favorite poet. He knew all the translations.
When I met him he was in his final years as a corporate secretary for a Fortune 100 company, Wheelabrator-Frye. He lived for part of every week with his Southern wife, Parrish, and a vast wall of poetry facing “the last quiet finger of the sea,” but he commuted weekly to Exeter, New Hampshire, to the corporate offices. There he’d taken a small apartment downtown.
Though I visited him often at his home in Connecticut, and house-sat for him and Parrish several blessed Julys while they went to Europe, most of our contact was by correspondence. His letters were very detailed in their criticism of my work. He was able to make specific suggestions that embodied the spirit of what I was after. He seemed to value sense over sound, which was at first not my way at all.
He believed in a life of daily discipline and in the long view. He wrote tinily every morning in an enormous red ledger: never was a calendar more fruitful. Many of his poems had come to patient completion only after years. He believed firmly that art wasn’t meant to be easy but a challenge for everybody, that your task as creator was “to say the unsayable in order to know the unknowable,” that you got somewhere by painting yourself into a corner, that all joy comes out of difficulty. He seemed able to restore a word’s intrinsic, original value merely by pronouncing it meticulously. He taught me, most of all, to listen and to read carefully, to examine what I was reading or hearing.
Though I had a good natural ear, it had never occurred to me to pick apart syllabically where the stresses and emphases and tensions fell within every line. I thought of myself as strict about gauging the quality of my poems, but I had no broad or deep knowledge of the difficult art’s historical and technical spectra on which to draw, just a series of intense stylistic crushes. Peyton generously gave me what I lacked, and instilled a sense of poetic rigor. My allegiance is known to close friends—all these years I have kept writing poetry. It may be my strongest work; the decades have reinforced my belief that poetry is the highest, most expressive state language can achieve. To practice it even clumsily is of immeasurable value for anybody who aspires to write well.
He settled for me, too, the complex question of the creative ego. How to face the problem of not feeling sufficient to the challenge? Such self-doubt might never have bothered Picasso, say, but from time to time it sure bothered me. The answer, I learned from Peyton, is not to make your ego as strong as it can be but rather as fine, so you slip through the difficulties, as he put it, like a needle through a wall of rock. Keep your focus not on you but always on the work at hand.
Peyton directed my work habits, and my thinking about art, incalculably. He impressed upon me an ability to severely cut what I’d done, to leave in only what was dynamic, alive, essential: an ideal work contains a minimum of words, the bare truthful minimum. He taught me not to be afraid of simplicity while seeking a pressure of ideas, and to be on guard against striking a pose or shouting for effect. And that the whole should have the appearance, after all the tireless rewriting, of being spontaneous, of inventing itself right before an audience’s eyes.
From him I got a strong conviction that art, no matter how it may surprise or shock us, must always be logical and never arbitrary in its willed architecture and development. From him I got a strong sense of how compelling a force structure can be in any work, and how organic that structure must be—that the tiniest detail, no matter how ornamental it might seem, must reflect the entirety, and give a sense of resonating and flowering across the total. That every word, every beat, must be gone over again and again, questioned and prodded and thrown back into the smelting furnace. That you must always be on guard against the banal, the tired, the ordinary, the routine, the convenient, the done-before.
Finally, he taught me how hard it is to get anywhere in the arts, for quality has little to do with “success” and this shouldn’t matter—that you created something beautiful was enough and must remain enough. We are measured by what we can perceive and what we do with those perceptions, not by the zeros on a contract.
And that you must know the tradition, the work of our predecessors—our former colleagues—very well, and not be afraid to use that tradition. And renew it radically in making something fresh and yours.
Where, then, should the newcomer start reading? The most accessible of his books are “Occasions in a World” (1969) and “Arguments of Idea” (1980). The most challenging is probably his exploration of the sonnet as an architectural form, “Sonnet Variations” (1962), his first book in thirty years. Indeed, Peyton felt that poets publish too much. He liked to take his time with a book and be sure that each poem belonged within the whole.
Lastly, the curious reader should try the three long and ambitious works that occupy a single volume of prosody—“The Changes / Orders / Becomings” (1990). These were his main concentration in the last quarter-century of his life.
I still hope to see into print a collection of his correspondence with me, a “Letters to a Young Poet” that would be both as inspiring as and more pragmatically useful than the famous Rilke volume. When I was wrestling with a sonnet sequence of my own in the late ’70s, Peyton made clear that he considered rhyme as primarily for structure, not for music. I believe that what he looked for in poetry, as in all art, was foremost the cross-play of tensions. This is aptly visible in a form he invented and called a “plural poem,” in which stanzas run down the left side of the page, and other stanzas run down the right side of the page, and each line reads across as well—thus, there are three ways to read a plural poem. Peyton wrote many hundreds, but published only two.
Peyton believed, most of all, in the power of the Imagination as the most powerful and exacting tool we have, more reliable than the intellect, for examining the this of experience and the world around us. He believed that the Imagination must be trusted, not avoided, and makes its own laws. “It is that which is not but will be understood.” Poetry, he felt, was constantly under-rated, treated as a mere cultural pleasure, not as our clearest lens.
When you’re a young writer—no matter what sort of writer—the hardest part is believing you can do it. The self-conviction might take ten years, or twenty. Sometimes others’ belief matters more than your own. I see now, four decades later, how much Peyton’s belief in me carried me through Yale, which I loathed. Right up until the end, which for him came suddenly, unexpectedly, and swiftly in Puerto Rico on vacation with his wife, he gave me the strength to go on.
The debt I owe Peyton is immense and lifelong. I was introduced to him at his grand Italianate villa in Greenwich, Connecticut, overlooking Long Island Sound, at the end of Christmas vacation my second year at Yale. This would’ve been early January, 1977. I’d never met a great poet. He was also a very successful corporate secretary, which explains the villa, the wall of books, the enormous view. It doesn’t explain the generosity. A few months later, when it was obvious what our friendship had become, I asked why he was being so generous. He said, simply, “Because you’ll be writing when I am not.” Now, at sixty-one, I understand.
His poetry is not superficially “pretty.” It is often difficult and not easily come to, nor easily forgotten. It quite contentedly goes its own way.
Thus, at age nineteen, mid-way through my sophomore year in college, I got taken under the capacious wing of a superb older poet, tallest of my personal saints, who lived only an hour from both Yale and New York City (where I lived for six years after graduation) and for nearly twenty years of correspondence gave me the kind of word-by-word, beat-by-beat tutelage a young poet can only dream about.
Peyton was white-haired and gangly—six-foot seven—firmly in the Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives tradition of American businessmen / artists. Because of his height, he carried himself gingerly, as if doorways might betray him. His voice was low and imposing, his hands immense. A Princeton graduate, he’d read everything, and absorbed it all. I’ve never met anybody with his breadth of deep knowledge and openness of spirit. He had no interest in froth or the superficial, the ambitious, or the fashionable. He had little time for novels, which drew me (he loved Melville and did not like Dickens), and he felt a gravitational pull toward the classics—ancient Greek and Latin. Homer was, I think, his favorite poet. He knew all the translations.
When I met him he was in his final years as a corporate secretary for a Fortune 100 company, Wheelabrator-Frye. He lived for part of every week with his Southern wife, Parrish, and a vast wall of poetry facing “the last quiet finger of the sea,” but he commuted weekly to Exeter, New Hampshire, to the corporate offices. There he’d taken a small apartment downtown.
Though I visited him often at his home in Connecticut, and house-sat for him and Parrish several blessed Julys while they went to Europe, most of our contact was by correspondence. His letters were very detailed in their criticism of my work. He was able to make specific suggestions that embodied the spirit of what I was after. He seemed to value sense over sound, which was at first not my way at all.
He believed in a life of daily discipline and in the long view. He wrote tinily every morning in an enormous red ledger: never was a calendar more fruitful. Many of his poems had come to patient completion only after years. He believed firmly that art wasn’t meant to be easy but a challenge for everybody, that your task as creator was “to say the unsayable in order to know the unknowable,” that you got somewhere by painting yourself into a corner, that all joy comes out of difficulty. He seemed able to restore a word’s intrinsic, original value merely by pronouncing it meticulously. He taught me, most of all, to listen and to read carefully, to examine what I was reading or hearing.
Though I had a good natural ear, it had never occurred to me to pick apart syllabically where the stresses and emphases and tensions fell within every line. I thought of myself as strict about gauging the quality of my poems, but I had no broad or deep knowledge of the difficult art’s historical and technical spectra on which to draw, just a series of intense stylistic crushes. Peyton generously gave me what I lacked, and instilled a sense of poetic rigor. My allegiance is known to close friends—all these years I have kept writing poetry. It may be my strongest work; the decades have reinforced my belief that poetry is the highest, most expressive state language can achieve. To practice it even clumsily is of immeasurable value for anybody who aspires to write well.
He settled for me, too, the complex question of the creative ego. How to face the problem of not feeling sufficient to the challenge? Such self-doubt might never have bothered Picasso, say, but from time to time it sure bothered me. The answer, I learned from Peyton, is not to make your ego as strong as it can be but rather as fine, so you slip through the difficulties, as he put it, like a needle through a wall of rock. Keep your focus not on you but always on the work at hand.
Peyton directed my work habits, and my thinking about art, incalculably. He impressed upon me an ability to severely cut what I’d done, to leave in only what was dynamic, alive, essential: an ideal work contains a minimum of words, the bare truthful minimum. He taught me not to be afraid of simplicity while seeking a pressure of ideas, and to be on guard against striking a pose or shouting for effect. And that the whole should have the appearance, after all the tireless rewriting, of being spontaneous, of inventing itself right before an audience’s eyes.
From him I got a strong conviction that art, no matter how it may surprise or shock us, must always be logical and never arbitrary in its willed architecture and development. From him I got a strong sense of how compelling a force structure can be in any work, and how organic that structure must be—that the tiniest detail, no matter how ornamental it might seem, must reflect the entirety, and give a sense of resonating and flowering across the total. That every word, every beat, must be gone over again and again, questioned and prodded and thrown back into the smelting furnace. That you must always be on guard against the banal, the tired, the ordinary, the routine, the convenient, the done-before.
Finally, he taught me how hard it is to get anywhere in the arts, for quality has little to do with “success” and this shouldn’t matter—that you created something beautiful was enough and must remain enough. We are measured by what we can perceive and what we do with those perceptions, not by the zeros on a contract.
And that you must know the tradition, the work of our predecessors—our former colleagues—very well, and not be afraid to use that tradition. And renew it radically in making something fresh and yours.
Where, then, should the newcomer start reading? The most accessible of his books are “Occasions in a World” (1969) and “Arguments of Idea” (1980). The most challenging is probably his exploration of the sonnet as an architectural form, “Sonnet Variations” (1962), his first book in thirty years. Indeed, Peyton felt that poets publish too much. He liked to take his time with a book and be sure that each poem belonged within the whole.
Lastly, the curious reader should try the three long and ambitious works that occupy a single volume of prosody—“The Changes / Orders / Becomings” (1990). These were his main concentration in the last quarter-century of his life.
I still hope to see into print a collection of his correspondence with me, a “Letters to a Young Poet” that would be both as inspiring as and more pragmatically useful than the famous Rilke volume. When I was wrestling with a sonnet sequence of my own in the late ’70s, Peyton made clear that he considered rhyme as primarily for structure, not for music. I believe that what he looked for in poetry, as in all art, was foremost the cross-play of tensions. This is aptly visible in a form he invented and called a “plural poem,” in which stanzas run down the left side of the page, and other stanzas run down the right side of the page, and each line reads across as well—thus, there are three ways to read a plural poem. Peyton wrote many hundreds, but published only two.
Peyton believed, most of all, in the power of the Imagination as the most powerful and exacting tool we have, more reliable than the intellect, for examining the this of experience and the world around us. He believed that the Imagination must be trusted, not avoided, and makes its own laws. “It is that which is not but will be understood.” Poetry, he felt, was constantly under-rated, treated as a mere cultural pleasure, not as our clearest lens.
When you’re a young writer—no matter what sort of writer—the hardest part is believing you can do it. The self-conviction might take ten years, or twenty. Sometimes others’ belief matters more than your own. I see now, four decades later, how much Peyton’s belief in me carried me through Yale, which I loathed. Right up until the end, which for him came suddenly, unexpectedly, and swiftly in Puerto Rico on vacation with his wife, he gave me the strength to go on.
Friday, February 24, 2017
Could orphan life be more miserable? Yes – with a disability. (by Emily Millikan)
Guest blog by Emily Millikan
Emily Millikan is a thoughtful and tremendously talented young writer from whom I expect great things: stories, essays, novels. This was originally posted on the LastBell Ministries blog. Last Bell serves and creates community for
orphanage graduates in Zhytomyr, Ukraine.
I recently spoke with staff members
Yulia Los and Lena Voznyuk via video call. I’d received an email
from Lena about our Educational Outreach team visiting a group of
orphans with disabilities who’d been transferred away from
Zhytomyr, and I was looking for context. I asked, “What’s it like
for orphans with disabilities in Ukraine?”
What I learned broke my heart.
A little background: I’ve worked for
the last eight years in the disability community north of Boston. I
spent five years at a group home, where the younger women had studied
side-by-side with their peers in public schools, then attended
boarding schools to learn independent living skills. At 22, they
moved into our group home, staffed largely by caring people who
helped them keep learning, find jobs, pursue their interests and
hobbies, and invest in their community. They visited with their
families regularly; people around town knew and enjoyed friendships
with them.
In the U.S. we still have a lot of work
to do, but I see movement toward the full inclusion of all people in
our civic life, and lively, passionate conversation about the subject
(search online for “Nothing about us without us”!).
You can imagine my dismay upon learning
about Ukraine’s system, still heavy with post-Soviet prejudices and
apathy. The situation for orphans is dire, but it’s much worse for
orphans with disabilities.
Orphans with physical disabilities
apply for trade school as teenagers, after they graduate from the
orphanage. If they get in, they may or may not be able to study a
trade they can physically manage. After the first trade school,
they’re transferred to another one, in a different city… then
another… then another… until they’re 35. Then they’re given a
small government stipend, but not enough to live on without help; and
of course they’ve been isolated from daily social life for 35
years. Many simply go to a retirement home.
When their applications for trade
school are denied, they have no options at all. They spend the rest
of their lives in a retirement home.
Orphans in Ukraine who are categorized
as having intellectual disabilities – which in the U.S. would
include a range of diagnoses and identities, such as Autism, Down
Syndrome, or severe learning disabilities – simply live in an
orphanage their whole lives. (For an understanding of the conditions,
and what some Christians are doing to reach out, read this article
about our friends at Mission to Ukraine.)
It’s easy to see why orphans with
disabilities in Ukraine would believe their fellow citizens are
ashamed of them and want to keep them hidden. It’s so important for
loving adults to befriend these young people! Last Bell is helping
many young orphans with disabilities because of our connections to
Zhytomyr’s trade schools.
We’ve shared more than one story
about orphanage graduates with disabilities in Zhytomyr, both on our
blog, and on Facebook, in photos that include orphans from many
different trade schools around the city.
Our beloved group of orphans with
disabilities was recently uprooted from Zhytomyr, just as we were
getting to know them, and moved to Kharkiv, eight hours away. This is
the second or third trade school for some. In the end, they’ll have
studied multiple trades they can’t use.
Recently, Nastya and Lena set aside a
day and took a train to visit and support these precious young
people, who miss Last Bell very much and feel very alone. One young
lady was so distressed that she became suicidal, and had to go to the
hospital. Nastya and Lena were able to visit her there.
Then they went together on a
sight-seeing tour around the city and to visit the dorm rooms. Nastya
and Lena were treated to tea and introduced to the group’s new
classmates.
These young people were very attached
to our staff. Thankfully, through some friends, Lena and Nastya were
able to find Christians in Kharkiv who minister to orphans. While in
Kharkiv, they met and introduced them to our youth, so they won’t
be alone in a new city!
Of course, Lena and Nastya will stay in
touch through phone calls and the internet. Lena says, “My big wish
is for orphans never to feel abandoned and lonely!”
Sunday, February 7, 2016
My Favorite Travel Books
Lists are odious, but emotionally useful. They acknowledge the fact that our time on earth is limited; they apparently winnow out what is most useful; they allow us to believe our tastes are less arbitrary and more significant than they are; they allow us briefly to play God, which is always fun.
In the sunlit years when I made part of my living as a travel writer (not a great living, but a great life), I was always careful to read the work of former colleagues. Naturally, I had a few favorites. It would be fairer to list more.
The list that follows, in chronological order, came about because a friend asked for recommendations. Some are memoirs of daring journeys. Some are prosaic journeys that became poetic books. Some are profound meditations on Foreign Places. Some are great collections.
All, for me, are unforgettable.
The Innocents Abroad (Twain, 1869)
Travels With a Donkey (Stevenson, 1879)
In Darkest Africa (Stanley, 1890)
Sailing Alone Around the World (Slocum, 1899)
The Worst Journey in the World (Apsley-Gerrard, 1922)
The Book of Puka-Puka (Frisbie, 1929)
Journey Without Maps (Greene, 1936)
The Traveller's Tree (Fermor, 1950)
The Spanish Temper (Pritchett, 1954)
Arabian Sands (Thesiger, 1959)
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (Bowles, 1963)
An Area of Darkness (Naipaul, 1964)
The Great Railway Bazaar (Theroux, 1975)
Time Among the Maya (Wright, 1989)
In the sunlit years when I made part of my living as a travel writer (not a great living, but a great life), I was always careful to read the work of former colleagues. Naturally, I had a few favorites. It would be fairer to list more.
The list that follows, in chronological order, came about because a friend asked for recommendations. Some are memoirs of daring journeys. Some are prosaic journeys that became poetic books. Some are profound meditations on Foreign Places. Some are great collections.
All, for me, are unforgettable.
The Innocents Abroad (Twain, 1869)
Travels With a Donkey (Stevenson, 1879)
In Darkest Africa (Stanley, 1890)
Sailing Alone Around the World (Slocum, 1899)
The Worst Journey in the World (Apsley-Gerrard, 1922)
The Book of Puka-Puka (Frisbie, 1929)
Journey Without Maps (Greene, 1936)
The Traveller's Tree (Fermor, 1950)
The Spanish Temper (Pritchett, 1954)
Arabian Sands (Thesiger, 1959)
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (Bowles, 1963)
An Area of Darkness (Naipaul, 1964)
The Great Railway Bazaar (Theroux, 1975)
Time Among the Maya (Wright, 1989)
Friday, December 11, 2015
Guest Blog #8: NEW COUNTRY (Emily Millikan)
Emily Millikan is a thoughtful and tremendously talented young writer from whom I expect great things: stories, essays, novels. Here she is evoking bygone years in her native Indiana.
Emily Millikan works in private health care and nonprofit administration. Originally from Indiana, she now lives north of Boston. She finds her writing community in Image Journal's Glen Workshops.
Emily Millikan works in private health care and nonprofit administration. Originally from Indiana, she now lives north of Boston. She finds her writing community in Image Journal's Glen Workshops.
The sky is twice as big today for the
clouds, as big as two skies, too much sky to count. And the land is a
heavy festival of green. At Back Beach the ocean smells like a lake,
and at Front Beach what breezes come from the water are laden with
sunscreen before they reach the sidewalk. I see a woman dancing by
the water, her ears plugged and wires attached to a black box at her
waist. She dances slow and thoughtful, a pointed toe, an outstretched
arm along the line of sand, beckoning into some middle place between
land and sky. From a distance, with her soft green shirt and black
capris and the thick dark braid down her back, she looks like my
cousin Carmen who lives deep in the mountains of California.
It is damp and warm enough that not
long after I reach town I shed my jacket and then my hoodie and push
my sleeves up. Two Crystal Transport buses are parked at the triangle
intersection in downtown Rockport, filling up half the road from Ray
Moore’s Fish Shack nearly to the Village Silversmith. Older couples
hold hands and glance at me and smile and hi softly as we pass. The
footpath to the headlands, paved but lumpy, narrow as a boy’s hips,
is littered with tree-confetti, and the weeds that look like thin
green wheat bob their heads over into the path, brushing my knees.
When I step out onto the rocks the whole of the promontory is empty,
no teenagers’ chatter wafting up from the Teeth, only, a moment
later, the murmer of three quiet tourists in black with big quiet
black cameras. They come from behind me and I hear them before I see
them. We ignore each other. I stay on the side opposite Rockport,
looking out over the water and the few houses on the shoreline to the
south. For a few minutes my mind is drenched with what keeps me up at
night, and these things blind me from behind my eyeballs. Just before
I leave I remember to be present with the sky and the water, to see
them. Both remain when I walk away and pick over the rocks toward the
dark opening in the woods. Whenever I walk on the headlands I think
of no particular path, instead let my feet decide which small rocks
will form a path to and from the view, let my eyes decide when my
feet should stop moving and stand me to look.
On the way back the birds swoop low to
the rocks below me at Back Beach, mostly underwater now at high tide.
It still smells like lake, the musty scent of swan droppings and duck
droppings and rotting boards. It’s the smell of the lake next door
to my late grandparents' house in Indiana. Both the front lake and
the back lake there belong to their neighbors, Betty and the late
Jack (Back ‘n’ Jetty, my dad calls them). My mother swam in both
when she was young, but we only swam in the back.
I was with my ex-boyfriend the last
time I walked back to the lake. We were looking for someplace to be
alone: kissing was one of the few pleasures left, since every time we
talked we’d argue, or if we weren’t arguing we were talking with
a strained politeness that made conversation neither intimate nor
interesting. But it was a poor use for that property; if you were
looking for somewhere to sit in peace it offered little. The swans
were nesting that time of year and chased us away from every bench
before ten minutes had passed.
No, swimming was the proper use for
Back and Jetty’s lake-at-the-back. My sister and brother and cousin
and I would fly there from our grandparents' porch, cold in wet
bathing suits, through the gap in the pine trees like a wide green
door between our grandparents' land and theirs, pounding up the brick
path in bare feet, slowing down at the A-frame lake house with its
roof pointed like an arrowhead. We'd slow down rounding the house and
look out at the roofed lake-gazebo, then the big pipes that
surrounded the diving board, padding warily through the stubbly grass
because the swans, we all knew, could kill you. Then we’d follow a
waist-high brick wall until it gapped, step through to sand, and
tiptoe over the green swan-droppings to find a clean place on the
wall for our towels. The water was warm and murky, deep brown-green
with lake slime and seaweed and swan waste. Slippery on the bottom,
depending. You could pee in that lake a foot from shore and no one
would know the difference.
The swans eyed us from across the
water, sometimes swinging over in a loop for drive-by surveillance
just close enough to scare us onto the shore, but not close enough to
keep us there.
We’d get ourselves wet and then take
turns on the rope swing, which was the cosmic center and purpose of
the lake’s existence. The rope swing hung from a high wooden pole,
how high in feet I don’t know but high enough that the top seemed
immeasurably far, a skyscraper. We only ever touched as high as the
top knot. The bottom knot was tied just above the enormous frayed
end, and the knots continued up the rope, a forearm’s length
between each, up to the topmost knots which were spaced closer
together as the danger of using them increased.
For we did not swing on the rope from
shore, no sirree. The rope swing was partnered eternally with high
metal stairs climbing up to air, the first step anchored in the sand.
The great wooden pole looked like a
fishing line, rooted in the bushes at the side of the beach and
angling out over the water. The rope hung straight, just within reach
if one stood at the toes’ edge of the swan-dirtied sand and snagged
it with a little finger, pulled it up and back with a little slack in
the line to the first step… the second step… the third step…
I'd work my way up, swinging out first
from the fifth or sixth step so that jumping off into the water was
more a matter of wading. But finally I’d reach the top step and the
top knot, and then the very top platform of the stairs with just hot
Indiana wind behind me and the heavy rope tugging in front. I’d let
go of the rope on the way back to shore; I was never much of a
swimmer and didn’t like falling from such a height, out over the
water where it began to get deep. But I’d go to the top of the
steps. We called the steps “the ladder,” though it was supported
at the back; and the point of swinging from the top of the ladder,
anyway, was not jumping into the lake. Not for me. For me it was the
swing out through nothing, the view from on high.
When we were tired of swimming, our
hands raw and red, we’d dry off and then go jump on the big
trampoline in the clearing. My mother had told us more than once
about her cousin who had broken her arm jumping on that very same
trampoline: what limb I’ve forgotten, but a terrific and memorable
break. The apex of each jump where anything might go wrong was filled
with a kind of holy and delightful terror. Sometimes it overcame me,
and I stopped jumping to watch.
I was always more of an indoor-reader
in the summer than an outdoor-swimmer, and I put on my wet bathing
suit with reluctance. When I got older I stopped putting on my
bathing suit at all, and I’d walk with my mother and aunts to look
at Jack and Betty’s sculpted gardens. Their backyard was used for
weddings or receptions; couples took pictures in the gazebo or out at
the tiny waterfall behind the lake. Many of our family pictures were
taken there. As we walked we’d bend to smell each new bed or pot of
flowers, or the ones flourishing the brightest, or with the strongest
smells.
Here too I smell those same flowers:
petals white, I imagine, though both here and at Jack and Betty’s
the flowers were of all colors. But they smell white, a heavy white
as if magnolias were the sum of all blossom. All green moist things
make light in themselves under the woods, and the air is like a mild
green tea, soft.
*
After work tonight the hill outside my
house smells like the Smoky Mountains, or maybe all the woods I have
ever known. These places are transposed so easily. The place I live
becomes a foreign land bordered by the countries I remember, the
countries my senses understand, the landscapes where I am awake. This
is new country and I am often asleep in it, so that it remains
foreign yet a while.
Friday, September 25, 2015
GUEST BLOG #7: Zero at the Bone: The Cold Universe of Film Noir (Rex Baird)
A close friend of many years, Rex Baird is one of the most literary-minded people I know, and the most insightful and knowledgeable about film.
Rex Baird is a former bartender, English teacher, speechwriter and running shoe rep turned neuromuscular massage therapist and personal trainer. Although his job history has varied, his love of golf and movies has remained constant despite the humility of higher scores and the impossibility of finding a decent drive-in.
Rex Baird is a former bartender, English teacher, speechwriter and running shoe rep turned neuromuscular massage therapist and personal trainer. Although his job history has varied, his love of golf and movies has remained constant despite the humility of higher scores and the impossibility of finding a decent drive-in.
I have just
spent almost two months watching more than forty examples of film
noir. Some critics think noir is a time-bound cycle that began in
1941 with The Maltese Falcon and ended in 1958 with Touch
of Evil. Others claim it’s a visual style defined by deep
shadows, murky light and rain-slicked city streets. Genre advocates
point to defining types: the femme fatale, the private eye, the
impotent patsy of fate.
Trying to nail
down noir is futile, and further, kills all the fun. I can’t
precisely define noir, but I know it when I see it. Or to be more
precise, when I feel it. There are great noir films that fall outside
arbitrary time spans, that don’t conform to a gloomy visual style,
that present characters and settings that fail to fit neatly into the
confining genre box. But first-rate noir should leave you a little
unnerved by the nagging sense that the cold world is indifferent to
your hopes and unconcerned with your desires. If you don’t feel at
least a slight chill of anxiety or dread, what poet Emily Dickinson
caIled “a zero at the bone,” then the noir film you’ve watched
does not belong in the top rank. The truly great noir films leave you
feeling like John Cusack’s character in The Grifters:
slugged in the gut with a baseball bat.
After setting the stage, I will present my favorites in
chronological order and argue that some widely acknowledged noir
classics do not qualify for inclusion. Then I will list the near
misses, the also-rans and a sampling of the best French noir films
that give homage a good name. We must give the French their due
because they saw what was hiding in plain sight. Finally, I will
compare the two versions of Cape Fear to highlight the
difficulty of making an authentic noir film in today’s movie
marketplace.
THE FRENCH MAKE A DISCOVERY
When American
movies of the wartime period became available in France after the
German occupation was lifted, French critics found a darkness of
theme and style that matched their post-war malaise. They labeled
these movies—so different from the typical happy-ending Hollywood
product—“film noir.”
It’s
important to understand that the term “film noir” was attached
after the fact. “Hell,” said Robert Mitchum decades later, “we
didn’t know what film noir was in those days. Cary Grant and all
the big stars at RKO got all the lights. We lit our sets with
cigarette butts.”
But to claim
that noir was just a happy accident spawned by low budgets and low
lights would be an oversimplification. True, World War II created
financial constraints in Hollywood, but more importantly the rise of
Hitler drove German and Austrian directors—many of them Jewish—from
Europe to America. It’s an impressive list: Billy Wilder, Fritz
Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer account for
twenty-nine noir films listed in Alan Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s
Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style.
What these
directors brought to Hollywood was craft and a European sensibility
that rejected realism and embraced odd camera angles, deep shadows
and the inner turmoil of characters often driven to insanity. The
foundational expressionist films to see are Robert Wiene’s The
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927).
But the
Hollywood studio system was dedicated to making money, not to
producing art. The reading public was partial to pulp fiction and
hardboiled authors like Hemingway, Chandler, Hammett and Cain so the
studios courted these writers and their imitators. The result—movies
about corruption and deceit with a dark and menacing visual style—was
noir.
But remember:
no one was consciously trying to make “noir” films. The style may
have evolved from the collision of pulp fiction and expressionism,
but the term and its definitions came later. “I honestly cannot
point my finger,” said Billy Wilder, “at any small incident which
would reflect my background and where I came from.” Wilder is being
typically disingenuous. With the rise of the Nazis, he fled Berlin
for Paris. His mother, grandmother and stepfather all died in the
Holocaust. It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to match the
cynicism, fatalism and mordant humor of James M. Cain and Raymond
Chandler, his collaborators on Double Indemnity. The blackness
was in his bones.
THE HAYS CODE
The passage of
Cain’s novel to the screen took nine years because of the Hays
Code, enacted to protect the morals of the movie-going public. Joseph
Breen from the Hays Office found that “the general low tone and
sordid flavor” of Double Indemnity “makes it, in our
judgment, thoroughly unacceptable for screen presentation before
mixed audiences in a theater.” The result of the Code, according to
Henry Scott, was “a Jewish owned business selling Roman Catholic
theology to Protestant America.”
But along with
the hypocrisy came an unexpected benefit. The themes of noir—sex,
death, perversion, lust, greed, obsession—could not be presented
explicitly because of the Code. So they were frequently pushed under
the surface or treated obliquely. The restrictions, as noir director
Edward Dmytryk observed, forced filmmakers to be more creative and
often produced a creepy subterranean power akin to a deeply repressed
desire. Emily Dickinson died in 1886, but her advice seems tailored
for a noir screenwriter. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,”
she wrote, “Success in circuit lies.”
As long as evil
deeds did not go unpunished, the Hays Office didn’t seem overly
concerned with mayhem despite its specific prohibition of depicting
“brutality and possible gruesomeness” or showing the “technique
of committing murder”. “In Kiss of Death, Richard
Widmark’s psychotic hood Tommy Udo pushes an old lady in a
wheelchair down a flight of stairs and cackles maniacally as she
falls to her death. What really troubled the watchdogs of
America’s morals was sex. Namely, “pointed profanity,”
“licentious or suggestive nudity,” “sex perversion,”
“miscegenation,” “sex hygiene,” “childbirth,” “children’s
sex organs,” “lustful kissing,” and “man and woman in bed
together.”
A famous
exchange from The Big Sleep illustrates how the Code’s
restrictions fostered creativity and produced scenes that look
charming and sophisticated to today’s viewers tired of the
obligatory hookup where we follow a trail of discarded undergarments
into the bedroom and watch the moonlight shimmer across a body
double’s rump. As Bogie and Bacall banter about their mutual
fondness for the horse track, it becomes obvious they’re really
talking about sex. As the conversation reaches its climax, Bogie
wonders, “I don’t know how far you can go.” Bacall replies, “A
lot depends on who’s in the saddle.”
“Man built
most nobly,” said Frank Lloyd Wright, “when limitations were at
their greatest.” The struggle against tight budgets, short shooting
schedules, and the Puritanism of the Code imposed an alluring
severity on cheaply made B-movies like Gun Crazy and Detour.
Even bigger budget films like Double Indemnity and The
Asphalt Jungle resisted the urge to beautify their look and stuck
with the dark shadows and side-of-the-mouth poetry typical of their
low-rent cousins.
GENRE, STYLE, AND CYCLE
Creative
circumvention of the Code, post-war disillusionment, the popularity
of hard-boiled fiction, and the influx of European directors could be
cited as the germinators of noir films. But ticking off causes is
much less interesting than watching the films themselves. Definitions
of noir are highly personal. Critic Raymond Durgnat argues that John
Huston’s greatest noir is neither of his acknowledged classics—The
Maltese Falcon or The Asphalt Jungle—but a western: The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Examining the genre, style, and
cycle labels will help to clarify my own idiosyncrasies.
The cycle
argument is overly restrictive. The most commonly cited cycle starts
with The Maltese Falcon in 1941 and ends with Touch of Evil
in 1958. I’m willing to accept this as the “classic” period but
unwilling to ignore great films that fall outside these arbitrary
time limits. Fritz Lang’s M (1931) is the bedrock of all
noir films. It’s ingredients are a veritable menu for the films
that follow: a serial killer, the use of mirrors and reflections,
exaggerated high and low camera angles, a dark and maze-like city,
plus cops and criminals who seem merely different sides of the same
coin.
You could point
out that M is a German production and should not be included
in a category usually limited to American films. I would argue that
the magnitude of M’s influence is so great that quibbling
over its country of origin is pointless. Furthermore, Lang later made
eleven American films included in Silver and Ward’s Encyclopedia,
so judging by his output, he’s more American than German.
Of course the
origins of noir go much further back that the twentieth century. “The
first detective thriller,” claims Raymond Durgnat, “is Oedipus
Rex, and it has the profoundest twist of all; detective, murderer and
executioner are one man.” Other noir elements abound in Oedipus.
He sleeps with the wrong woman. The harder he struggles to escape his
fate, the more it entraps him. In seeking knowledge, he hastens his
own destruction.
Like Oedipus,
Chinatown’s Jake Gittes finds that the pursuit of knowledge
can lead to darkness instead of enlightenment. “Sometimes,” he
warns a client, “you’re better off not knowing.” Sadly, he
ignores his own advice about the danger of digging too deeply. As do
a raft of other noir character whose search for the truth often
resembles the obsessive picking at a scab. Chinatown (1974)
was released fifteen years after the supposed end of the noir cycle,
but only the most rigid critic would dare to exclude it from the list
of great noir films. The Fates have been crushing men’s hopes since
the beginning of time. The noir “cycle” simply imposes an
arbitrary frame around a specific era (1941-1958) and a distinct form
of art (movies).
Purists are
often equally rigid about style requirements. True noir demands black
and white, so color films like Chinatown are excluded.
Authentic noir lives in the city, so Ace in the Hole, set in
the desert, can’t work. Oblique angles and visual disorientation
are a must, so documentary-style films like Call Northside 777
fail to pass muster. Without wet streets, dark alleys or blinking
neon the mise en scene (visual theme, set design) mandates are
flouted, so the noir label is denied.
Purists are
bound by too many rules. I’ll repeat my argument that the essential
quality of great noir is the “zero at the bone” you feel as the
final credits roll.
Genre is the
final category to consider. I like a morally compromised shamus and a
double-dealing dame as much as the next guy, but plenty of noir films
succeed without these stock characters or standard set-ups. If I’m
the bouncer at the Noir Nightclub, even some paragons of the genre
category fail to make it past my velvet rope. Bogart’s credits can
be instructive in this analysis.
BOGIE GETS BOUNCED
The Maltese
Falcon, almost universally regarded as the first, and one of the
best noir films, does not make my list. First, Bogie’s Sam Spade is
never in real danger. Yes, he’s drugged, shot at, assaulted and
lied to, but we never believe he’s truly vulnerable. He’s just
too self-confident, assured, and capable—James Bond in a 40s
fedora. He admits to a tinge of regret after sending his “precious”
Brigid O’Shaughnessey to jail, but the film offers no evidence of
legitimate love. When
Spade tells her,
“You’re good. You’re very good,” he’s not admiring her
looks or her character, he’s applauding her skillful lying.
An authentic
noir character, by my standards, must end up ruined, devastated or
dead. Bogart’s Dixon Steele, the alcoholic screenwriter with
monstrous anger management issues, is a true noir exemplar in Nick
Ray’s In a Lonely Place. He loses the woman he truly
loves—and his only shot at salvation—because of booze-fueled rage
and jealousy. He’s alive when his girlfriend walks out of his life,
but his soul is dead.
Despite some
great scenes and perhaps the snappiest dialogue in film history, The
Big Sleep also fails to qualify. Bogie’s Marlowe, like his
Spade, lacks even a scintilla of vulnerability. Before ending up with
Bacall, he fends off her sister, gets propositioned by a female cab
driver, cuddles up with a sexy bookstore clerk, and wins lustful
stares from hatcheck girls. A true noir protagonist doesn’t control
women, they control him.
A common
characteristic of noir, the convoluted plot, reaches its absurd apex
in The Big Sleep. Rumors abound that none of the actors,
screenwriters, or even Raymond Chandler, the author of the novel,
could explain whodunit. The skill of the actors, the masterful
staging of the scenes, and the brilliant dialogue make you forget the
confusion, but for me, an incomprehensible plot is a black mark in a
black film.
HAPPY ENDINGS NEED NOT APPLY
My biggest
gripe is an ending that feels artificially upbeat. The critic Jon
Tuska offers a helpful sorting tool. He cites three films released in
1944. He classifies Laura as melodrama because the detective
and his love interest appear poised to marry when the movie ends. The
Big Sleep is film gris (gray) because while Bogart and Bacall are
unmistakably together, their marriage is uncertain. In Double
Indemnity, the sap and the femme fatale are dead, having shot
each other. Noir at its purest.
By trying to
downplay moral debasement, the Code often artistically debased
otherwise unalloyed noir gold. In The Postman Always Rings Twice,
John Garfield, in jail for killing his lover’s husband, discusses
fate with a priest, and delivers a line completely at odds with the
tone of the movie.
“Sometimes,” he reflects with uncharacteristic
piety, “God knows more about these things than we do.” Despite
the Code’s tampering, the genuine noir universe is a Nietzschean
wasteland where God is not only dead, but also irrelevant. The
quintessential line comes from an adulterous wife in Billy Wilder’s
Ace in the Hole. Lorraine refuses to pray for her husband who
is trapped in a mineshaft. “I don’t go to church,” she says,
“it bags my nylons.”
To summarize: I
don’t care if a film falls outside arbitrary time limits. Or if
lacks sufficiently dark shadows, blinking neon or rain-slicked
streets. Or if some of the stock characters—a detective, a femme
fatale, a crooked casino owner—are missing. I do object to happy
endings, tortuous plots and invulnerable heroes. Most of all, I want
to feel “a zero at the bone.”
ELEVEN OF MY TOP TEN FAVORITES
Everything
starts with Fritz Lang’s M from 1931. It introduces a
number of motifs that would become noir staples. It focuses on a
serial killer, as does Night of the Hunter. It turns into a
police procedural similar to Panic in the Streets. Then a
caper or heist film like The Asphalt Jungle. It exposes
corruption among the criminals, the cops, the government and the
public at large. Few streets have ever been more dark and
claustrophobic, few shadows have ever been deeper, than those in
Fritz Lang’s Berlin.
Someone has
been killing children and the city is being torn apart. Parents are
frantic, the police are frustrated, and even the lawbreakers are
furious. With more cops patrolling the streets, the pickpockets and
petty criminals are afraid to ply their trade. We see groups of men,
crowded into dark and smoky rooms, hatching plans to catch the
killer. Sometimes it takes a few moments to decipher whether they are
the cops or the criminals. Maybe the two groups are not so different.
We are
introduced to the killer, Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) as he stares
into a mirror, as do so many noir characters to come. He hardly seems
threatening, but it soon becomes evident he is tortured by a
compulsion he’s powerless to resist. The police close in with the
modern tools of fingerprinting and handwriting analysis while the
criminals hire a network of beggars to canvas the city. The criminals
track him to an empty office building and drag him to a dark basement
where they stage a mock trial. His desperate speech in his own
defense could serve as a template for the twisted psychology of the
dozens of characters who follow in his wake.
“Don’t I
have this cursed thing inside me? This fire, this voice, this agony?
I have to roam the streets endlessly, always sensing that someone’s
following me. It’s me! I’m following myself. Silently, but I
still hear it. Yes, sometimes I feel like I’m tracking myself down.
I want to run—run away from myself. But I can’t! I can’t escape
from myself. I must take the path that is driving me down, and run
and run down endless streets. I want off! And with me run the
ghosts.”
The kangaroo
court debate over capital punishment and the insanity defense sound
alarmingly modern. The criminals are unmoved, though, and as they are
about to execute Beckert, the police arrive, saving his life at least
temporarily. At the real trial, just before we are to learn his fate,
a dead girl’s mother pleads for everyone to keep a closer watch on
the children. The screen goes black.
M is
nearly a century old, but it looks astonishingly modern. A camera
magically floats through a window with a seamlessness considered
groundbreaking ten years later in Citizen Kane. A spiraling
toy in a shop window looks eerily like Saul Bass’ dizzy visual
designs from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The staging of the
criminals’ break-in and search of the office building would put the
Ocean’s Eleven franchise to shame. Lang’s American-made
films are solid, especially The Big Heat and Scarlet
Street, but they are no match for M, which was co-written
with his wife, Thea von Harbou. She stayed in Germany when Lang fled
in 1934. Like Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, von Harbou may have
been an indispensible collaborator.
I Am a
Fugitive from a Chain Gang is another great film that
appeared roughly a decade before the commonly defined noir cycle
began. James Allen, played by Paul Muni, is a disillusioned veteran
returning from the First World War. He sets the pattern for
anxiety-ridden vets from World War II like Alan Ladd in The Blue
Dahlia. He has bad luck finding a job equal to his ambition, and
worse luck still when he’s unjustly implicated in a robbery staged
in one of noir’s most dangerous settings—a diner. (See The
Killers or Dark Passage). After spending years in a brutal
prison chain gang, he escapes, changes his identity, and starts a
successful new life. But his slatternly wife betrays him and he’s
sent back to the chain gang to pound rocks with the same futility
that Sisyphus, his classical counterpart, faced in rolling them
uphill. Once more he breaks out, and now, little more than a hunted
animal, visits Helen, the woman he truly loves, for a final goodbye.
“It’s been
almost a year since you escaped,” she says.
“But I
haven’t escaped. They’re still after me. They’ll always be
after me…No friends. No rest. No peace.”
As he retreats
into the darkness, she asks, “How do you live?”
Now completely
invisible, he answers, “I steal.”
James Allen is
one of the most admirable—even heroic—characters in noir. He
serves his country with honor, but discovers his medals are
worthless. He breaks free of his prison chains only to find himself
shackled to the wrong woman. He forges a successful career out of
sheer hard work and tenacity. His final desperate speech echoes
Beckert’s confession in M, and like Beckert, he’s on a
treadmill to nowhere. His pursuers seem more like the Furies than
prison officials. His fate is doubly tragic because it is so
undeserved.
Walter Neff
(Fred MacMurray) from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity
deserves everything he gets: dishonor, betrayal, and a bullet in the
guts. Like many noir protagonists who gamble with their money or
their lives, Neff’s downfall is driven by his belief that he’s
clever enough to beat the system. The small-scale system Neff wants
to beat is the insurance industry he works in. The large-scale system
he foolishly challenges is, of course, fate itself.
In the first
scene of the film we see Neff’s car careen through a nighttime Los
Angeles street and speed through a red light. Within seconds we
understand this is a man who doesn’t know when to stop. We see him
stagger into his office, turn on a Dictaphone, and begin the
voice-over confession that bookends the story. Double Indemnity
is a tale told by a dead man. Wilder used the same tactic in Sunset
Boulevard and other films—D.O.A., Out of the Past,
and The Postman Always Rings Twice—followed suit. In line
with the deterministic world of noir, we know the ending before the
story has even begun. “I killed him for money and a woman,” Neff
says, “and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.”
The woman in
question is Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the wife of one
of Neff’s insurance clients. The husband isn’t home when Neff
comes to update a policy so he waits for Phyllis. She appears above
him on a stairway wearing just a towel and a gold anklet that
transfixes Neff like a shiny bauble enchants a crow. The camera
angle, with Phyllis looming above, establishes her dominance. Neff’s
fixation on the anklet confirms that he’s bewitched. They haven’t
locked lips and he’s a goner already.
Neff, who’s
inordinately proud of his practiced salesman’s repartee, begins an
aggressive flirtation that Phyllis parries with even greater skill.
The banter evolves into a sado-masochistic scenario where she becomes
a motorcycle cop forced to rap the knuckles of Neff’s speeding
offender.
“Suppose I
bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder,” Neff asks.
“Suppose you
try putting it on my husband’s shoulder,” she replies.
“That tears
it,” Neff concedes.
Neff is a sap,
but he’s no dummy. Phyllis’s questions about her husband’s
insurance make it obvious she wants him dead so she can collect on
his policy. Neff retreats at first, but soon realizes “the hook was
too strong.” What also attracts Neff is the chance to test his
cleverness. First, he wants to outwit the insurance company by
finding loopholes in its policies. Second, he wants to escape the
faultless bullshit detector of his mentor and father figure, Barton
Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) the company’s brilliant analyst.
Greed, lust and
pride engage their gears but Neff soon realizes he’s no longer in
control. “The machinery had started to move and there was nothing
we could do to stop it.” The murder plot is successful, but more
doubts assail him. “I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. It was the
walk of a dead man.”
Pressured by
Keyes’s suspicions and shaken by revelations of Phyllis’s
murderous past, Neff shoots Phyllis dead but only after she wounds
him first. We see him back in his office where the movie began,
clutching the Dictaphone and confessing to Keyes who soon appears in
person.
Trying to
muster a vestige of pride in his chicanery, Neff asks, “Know why
you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes? ‘Cause the guy you were
looking for was too close. Right across the desk from you.”
“Closer than
that, Walter,” Keyes replies. We understand that Keyes may have
figured things out long before his protégé and surrogate son
realized.
“I love you,
too,” Neff says, just before collapsing at Keyes’s feet.
Double
Indemnity is the prototypical noir film. Released in 1944, it
fits neatly into the cycle. Full of dark interiors and darker
motives, it has style to spare. And it crystallized many of the genre
elements that later films aped: the murderous femme fatale, the sharp
operator too clever for his own good, the dogged investigator, the
voice-over narration of a doomed protagonist, the flashback
structure, and the themes of lust, greed and duplicity.
Keyes’s
speech to Neff revealing his profile of the murderers could serve as
a template for the twisted psychology of future noir couples: Out
of the Past, Gilda, Gun Crazy, Criss Cross, The Postman Always
Rings Twice, The Grifters. With wonderful irony, the visibly
shaken Neff is listening to an accurate description of his own
character and a chilling prediction of his own fate.
“Whether it’s
love or hate, it doesn’t matter. They can’t keep away from each
other. They’re stuck with each other all the way to the end of the
line and it’s a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery.”
As with most
Wilder films, the casting is inspired. Stanwyck usually played a
heroine, but Wilder may have seen a winning combination in her
conniving slut from Baby Face (1933) and her charming con
artist in The Lady Eve (1941). MacMurray, typically cast in
light comedy, had done no prior films to indicate he could bring the
necessary depth to Walter Neff. But Wilder’s instincts were sharp
and he later cast MacMurray as another fast-talking heel in The
Apartment (1960).
Edward G. Robinson,
the moral center of the movie, could believably play anything from a
viscous gangster (Little Caesar, Key Largo) to an
apron-wearing patsy (Scarlet Street).
The writing was
an alchemy of three unique talents. James M. Cain (Mildred Pierce,
The Postman Always Rings Twice) provided strong source material
and was humble enough to admit, “Wilder’s ending was much better
than my ending.” Wilder and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep,
Farewell, My Lovely, The Long Goodbye) fine tuned the plot and
crafted crackling dialogue. Their partnership was contentious. “I
drove him back into drinking,” Wilder admitted. But the result was
seven Academy Award nominations and well-deserved cult status.
At first
glance, Cain’s Mildred Pierce (1945) seems
less like noir and more like a weeper. The protagonist is not a
detective, a tough guy or a sap, but a recently separated
middle-class woman (Joan Crawford in an Oscar-winning performance).
Mildred struggles to build a career and to find love while providing
for her two daughters. The novel and the almost entirely faithful
2011 HBO adaptation with Kate Winslet in the title role are almost
pure melodrama. They both adhere to a third-person perspective and a
chronological unfolding. The Crawford version makes changes to Cain’s
novel which lift it from sudsy to sizzling. Credit a list of nine
writers (including William Faulkner) and criminally underappreciated
director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca). A murder, a flashback
structure, and voice-over narration make all the difference. Winslet
is a much better actress than Crawford, but not a bigger star.
Winslet’s performance seems a little flat because the role demands
exactly the kind of histrionics Crawford was famous for.
Perhaps
inspired by Double Indemnity, the 1945 version bookends the
story with Mildred’s interrogation in a police station. She
recounts her story in voice-over flashbacks. The most significant
change is the murder of Mildred’s lounge lizard second husband,
Monty Beragon. The mystery surrounding his death gives the story a
narrative drive the other versions lack.
What lends the
story spice is the sexually charged relationship among the characters
and the considerable skill of the actors. As Mildred climbs from
waitress to the owner of a successful chain of restaurants, she
devotes all her love, attention and much of her money to her
daughter. Veda (Ann Blyth, bitchy beyond belief) behaves like a
spoiled princess wrenched from her fairy-tale castle and plunked down
in the midst of commoners. Rather than appreciating her mother’s
sacrifice, she calls her “a common frump” and longs to escape
from “everything that smells of grease.” Just for fun, she
extorts $10,000 from a rich boyfriend by faking a pregnancy. As a
final flourish, she sleeps with Monty, her mother’s husband.
Wally is
superbly played by Jack Carson who projects his unique brand of
sleazy appeal. He was the real estate partner of Mildred’s first
husband and he guides her career while hitting on her with his crude
line of patter. “There’s something about the sound of my own
voice,” he crows, “that fascinates me.” Wally sounds a bit like
Neff, and proves to be almost as larcenous. He helps Veda with her
pregnancy scam and pulls Mildred’s empire out from under her, but
always with a friendly smile on his moon-shaped face.
Monty Beragon
comes from old money, but the cash flow has dried up. Zachary Scott
imbues Monty with oleaginous charm. Unlike the much less
sophisticated but ambitious Wally, Monte is perfectly content to live
off Mildred’s earnings. “I wish I could get interested in work,”
he sighs. Mildred’s acid-tongued second in command, Ida, responds,
“You were probably frightened by a callus at an early age.”
Since the
filmmakers were clever enough to show Monty being shot and killed at
the film’s beginning, we’re always wondering who pulled the
trigger. Wally was in the house when the police arrived. Mildred had
motive to spare: Monty took her money and slept with her daughter.
But the culprit turns out to be Veda who convinced Ida early on that
“alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.”
Critic
Jeremiah Kipp called Mildred Pierce “melodramatic
trash…directed by studio favorite Michael Curtiz in German
Expressionistic mode, which doesn’t go quite with the California
beaches and sunlight but sets the bleak tone of domestic film noir.”
Mildred Pierce is trashy, perhaps, but it’s the kind of
trash I love: gleeful over-the-top acting, bitchy characters and a
plot kept cooking at a high boil. And for good measure, a hint of
incest to taunt the censors. But is it melodrama: a sensational story
with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to
the emotions? This standard definition would cover most of the movies
ever made. For Kipp, melodrama seems to be a code word for “woman’s
picture.”
Jon Tuska
argues that melodrama is defined by the promise of marriage at the
movie’s end. As Mildred leaves the police station, it appears
she’ll get back together with Bert, her first husband. But she’s
lost her first daughter to a freak illness, and Veda, who functions
as the femme fatale, is headed to the slammer. Wally has betrayed
her, and her money is gone. Plus, Bert is unbearably dull. What
appears at first glance to be a happy ending finds Mildred sadder and
a bit wiser, but right back where she was at the beginning. That’s
ruination enough for me.
The truly
successful marriage in Mildred Pierce is the wedding of
domestic melodrama and classic noir style. The official at this
wedding is the director, Michael Curtiz. In addition to Casablanca,
he also directed a boy’s adventure, Robin Hood; a musical,
Yankee Doodle Dandy; a holiday classic, White Christmas;
and a long list of war movies and westerns. There was no style he
couldn’t master so he was the ideal choice to bring a hard noir
edge to what might have been just three-hankie histrionics in lesser
hands.
Unlike the
infinitely versatile Curtiz, Jacques Tourneur is principally
remembered for directing three psychological horror movies for
producer Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The
Leopard Man) and Out of the Past, widely regarded as one
of the greatest noir films. The dark, shadowy photography from the
earlier Lewton pictures transfers perfectly to Out of the Past
(1947); the fog is replaced by even thicker cigarette smoke.
For purists,
Out of the Past fits neatly into the midpoint of the
cycle. The style, with a look lit by cigarette butts, voice-over
narration and a flashback structure, is unmistakably noir. And with a
detective, a femme fatale, a manipulative gangster, lively nightclubs
and dark dives, it satisfies all the genre requirements. But what
lifts it from workmanlike to wonderful is the raw power of its star,
Robert Mitchum and his deadpan delivery of some of the most flawless
hardboiled dialogue ever written, courtesy of Daniel Mainwaring (The
Big Steal, The Hitch Hiker, The Phoenix City Story, The Invasion of
the Body Snatchers) and an uncredited James M. Cain.
Out of the
Past’s protagonist, Jeff Bailey, is the perfect showcase for
Mitchum’s unique skill: the ability to project brawny toughness and
an almost feminine vulnerability at the same time. In isolation, the
toughness can be terrifying (Night of the Hunter, Cape Fear),
but when mixed with his submerged sensitivity (El Dorado, Heaven
Knows Mr. Allison), the results can be truly moving.
The tough and
tender duality is explored in Jeff’s relationship with Kathie
Moffat, the glamorous girlfriend of mobster and horse fancier Whit
Sterling (Kirk Douglas). The first part of the story plays out via
flashback as Jeff, a gas station owner amid the rural mountains,
explains his former life to Ann, his plain, small-town girlfriend,
while they drive to Sterling’s Lake Tahoe estate. Jeff has been
summoned because Sterling claims they have unfinished business.
Jeff explains
to Ann that he used to be a detective and that Sterling once hired
him to find his girlfriend Kathie who flew the coop with $40,000 of
Sterling’s less than legitimate fortune. We see Jeff find Kathie in
Acapulco and watch him fall in love almost instantly. Kathie seems
smitten, too, but if we trust our noir instincts, listen carefully
and keep alert to visual clues, we soon understand she’s a femme
fatale from the classic mold. Even though he was bedazzled, Jeff
recalls, “I thought what a sucker I was.”
When they meet
on the beach at night, he sees her barefoot for the first time and
says she’s shorter than he realized. “I’m taller than
Napoleon,” she replies. But no less ambitious or treacherous. They
embrace against a backdrop of fishing nets that alert us to the
spidery trap she is weaving. “I never saw her in the daytime,”
Jeff remembers. “We lived by night.” Later, when Kathie asks if
he’s missed her, he says, “No more than I would my eyes.”
Mitchum comes
across as the most streetwise of actors, and Jeff can sense a scam or
a frame from a mile away. Although Katie often dresses in white, she
lives in the shadows, and Jeff has been blinded by darkness
masquerading as innocence. They narrowly escape the justifiably
suspicious Sterling who comes to Acapulco to “see a man about a
horse” and to check up on the investigation. They flee to San
Francisco where they enjoy a honeymoon of sorts until spotted at the
racetrack by Fisher, Jeff’s old partner in the detective agency.
Jeff’s gamble that he can escape goes bust, and Fisher demands a
cut of Sterling’s $40,000 when he trails them to a small cabin in
the woods. While they struggle, Kathie shoots Fisher dead and escapes
by car. Jeff discovers her checkbook with the $40,000 she claimed she
never stole, and realizes he has been not only sucker, but a patsy.
Toward the end
of the drive to Tahoe, Ann—who has been tortured by Jeff’s
description of his infatuation with Kathie—says, “She can’t be
all bad. No one is.” Jeff shrugs and says, “She comes the
closest.” Ann drops Jeff off and now the second half of the story
unfolds in real time. Jeff’s job is to retrieve documents that
could incriminate Sterling who has been less than forthcoming with
the Internal Revenue Service. The bad news for Out of the Past
is that part two slips into Chandleresque over complexity. The good
news is that Jeff, wised up but still in Kathie’s web, unleashes
his best one-liners.
Kathie has
returned to Whit and slinks into Jeff’s room at Tahoe proclaiming
her love. “Just get out, will you,” he says. “I have to sleep
in this room.”
After betraying
him yet again, Kathie says, “Oh, Jeff, you ought to have killed me
for what I did a moment ago.” “There’s time,” he replies.
As the plot
heats up, she cries, “Oh, Jeff! I don’t want to die!” “Neither
do I, baby,” he says, “but if I have to I’m gonna die last.”
He doesn’t.
Eventually
Kathie kills both Whit and Jeff before being fatally shot by the
police as she tries to escape.
There are many
small but elegant touches in Out of the Past too numerous to
discuss at length. The contrast between the bright, pristine mountain
environment of Jeff’s gas station and the sordid shadows of the
corrupt city. The fascinating, if undeveloped, character of Jeff’s
deaf mute assistant at the station. The theme of fishing (for men’s
souls?) and the symbolism of the hook which the deaf mute wields with
his fishing rod to save Jeff’s life. And in ironic contrast, the
deadly hook set in place by Kathie. Already a dead man like Walter
Neff as he narrates his tale, Jeff knows, as Neff did,
that “the hook was too strong,” but accepts that he was powerless
to wrench it out. His epitaph, spoken in defiance of his fate, is
“Build my gallows high, baby.”
Ten years after
Out of the Past, Mitchum made Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
(1957) with director John Huston. His Marine corporal is at least
as macho as Jeff Bailey, and he again falls for the wrong woman. But
this time she’s not a femme fatale, but a nun stranded on a
Japanese-held island in the Pacific. Except for quick glimpses of
Japanese soldiers, Allison is a two-character romance.
Huston’s The
Asphalt Jungle (1950), on the other hand, is a heist movie
with a brilliant ensemble cast. Compared to the émigré directors
who dominated noir, Huston seems distinctly American. Except for
Bogie’s Fred C. Dobbs in Sierra Madre, few of his
protagonists are afflicted with the neurosis and self-contempt that
plague so many noir patsies. His men may be losers, but they lose on
their own terms and without the hint of a whine. Probably because he
studied art in Paris from 1932 to 1937, the European influence creeps
into Huston’s visual style.
When Sam
Jaffe’s recently-released con, Doc Riedenschneider, steps out of a
cab looking like a sixty-year-old banker, the plot is set in motion.
There is no heart in heartland: this unnamed Midwest city is as dark
and penumbral as The Maltese Falcon’s Frisco or Fritz
Lang’s Berlin.
Doc has landed
at the hangout of a very sweaty bookie, Cobby (Marc Lawrence), who he
hopes can hook him up with a crew and a backer for the jewelry heist
he has meticulously planned. Within minutes, we understand the
essence of Doc’s nature. Cobby treats him with fawning deference,
so we know Doc is a criminal mastermind. Doc’s command of facts and
figures, his obvious glee when he calculates the big payoff, and his
elegant clothes mark him as a man who appreciates the finer things
in
life. His ogling of a girlie calendar suggests he may have a weakness
for the dames.
Just before
Doc’s arrival, we meet Sterling Hayden’s Dix who has a weakness
for the ponies. He’s a hulking low-level thug in perpetual debt to
Cobby who books his bets. His true obsession is not the gambling
itself, but the horses. He grew up on his family’s Kentucky horse
farm and dreams of reclaiming it. “One day I’m going to make a
killing,” he brags to Doll (Jean Hagen), his steadfast girlfriend.
Doc is looking
for a “hooligan,” or muscle for his crew and Dix is a natural
fit. The “box man,” or safecracker is Louie Ciavelli (Anthony
Caruso), a devoted family man who always seems eager to get back home
to his wife and kids. The wheelman is hunchbacked diner owner Gus
Minissi (James Whitmore) whose hair trigger can be set off at any
moment by reference to his deformity or by his hatred of the cops.
With admirable
economy, Huston convinces us these men are professionals while
suggesting they have inherent weaknesses that could undermine the
success of their operation.
The money man
recommended by Cobby is high-living lawyer Alonzo Emmerich (Louis
Calhern). He agrees to front the seed money and offers to fence the
jewels after the heist. Calhern’s performance is one of the most
underappreciated in film history. There’s a hint of desperation
beneath his suave confidence, a bit too much of the eager salesman’s
patter in his pitch. He’s saddled with a bedridden wife who drubs
him when they play cards. He’s a gambler, but not a very skilled
one, we suspect. He rationalizes his greed by saying, “Crime is
only a left-handed form of human endeavor.”
The heist
goes smoothly until Louie’s explosives set off an alarm. Outside,
Dix struggles with a security guard whose gun goes off and wounds
Louie. Gus drives Louie back to his family while Dix and Doc take the
jewels to Emmerich. Now Doc’s airtight plan starts to leak.
Emmerich is broke and his stooge, Brannon, pulls a gun on Doc and
Dix. Dix kills Brannon, but not before taking a slug in the gut.
Emmerich tries
to cover his tracks, but the police under Commissioner Hardy (John
McIntire) are closing in fast. Emmerich convinces his mistress Angela
(a breathy Marilyn Monroe in her first big part) to provide an alibi,
but he knows he’s doomed. While Angela babbles about escaping to
someplace warm and sunny, Emmerich smokes quietly and waits for the
inevitable knock at the door. Soon after the police arrive, Emmerich
commits suicide with a pistol. The scenes with Angela after Emmerich
has accepted his fate are sublime. I suspect the French film critics
loved these moments: Calhern projects more ennui than an entire left
bank café full of existentialists. At the end, as he turns passive,
he reminds us of Burt Lancaster’s Swede in The Killers,
lying on his flophouse bed, waiting for the gunmen to bust through
his door and fill him with lead. Fate doesn’t care if you’re a
fancy lawyer or a washed-up boxer.
Louie has died,
but at home amid his family. Gus is in jail, his fuse burning close
to the end. Doc and Dix separate. Will either one evade the cops?
Doc leaves town
in a cab, the same way he came. Pausing for rest in a roadhouse, the
calendar girl he stared at in Cobby’s bookie joint comes to life as
a teenaged girl dancing in front of a jukebox. Mesmerized, he tarries
too long and is spotted by sharp-eyed cops before he can flee in the
cab. Unlike the raging Gus, he accepts his fate calmly even though
he’s in his sixties and will probably die in jail. “One way or
another,” he said earlier, “we all work for our vice.”
Dix and Doll
are trying to drive to the Kentucky horse farm before Dix bleeds to
death. Like Louie, he just wants to make it home, to leave the
pestilent city for the purity of the country. The journey through the
dark night turns light as they approach the farm. Dix staggers from
the car, and stumbles to the ground in a pen of his beloved horses.
They nuzzle him affectionately as he dies. This is my favorite ending
of any movie.
The Asphalt
Jungle is almost faultless. The look is pure noir. The characters
are an appealing gallery of rogues. The plot never stalls, never gets
bogged down in unnecessary complications. Hayden’s forte is
strength, not subtlety, so he’s perfectly cast. Jaffe and Calhern
are magnificent. Too much time is spent with Commissioner Hardy, but
probably as a concession to the Code, which balked at movies that
could be seen as how-to manuals for crime.
Hardy’s
speech midway through the movie might have been written by the Code’s
chief enforcer. “Suppose we had no police force,” he says, “good
or bad. Suppose we had just silence. Nobody to listen, nobody to
answer. The battle’s finished. The jungle wins. The predatory
beasts take over.”
Sounds like the
perfect recipe for an uncompromising noir film to me.
In a
self-contempt contest, Emmerich and the Swede might have to take a
back seat to Joe Gillis (William Holden), the failed screenwriter in
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Holden
excelled at playing the handsome heartthrob whose whole is far less
than the sum of his parts (Picnic, Sabrina). In The Bridge
Over the River Kwai, he finds a measure of courage and achieves a
semblance of redemption. In Sunset Boulevard, the love he
finds comes too late to save him. His life preserver, Betty Schaefer
(Nancy Olson), a script girl at the studio asks him, “Do you
sometimes hate yourself?” “Constantly,” he says.
Joe is
drowning, so it’s appropriate that the movie starts in the gutter
and ends in a swimming pool. As the opening credits roll, we see
Sunset Boulevard from a rat’s-eye view at the curb, then before
long, there’s Joe, lying face down in a pool, narrating his
bookended story in flashback as only a dead noir protagonist can. We
see him floating from below at first, then from above we notice the
throng of cops and photographers swarming around the death scene.
“Then they got a couple of pruning hooks from the garden,” Joe
tells us, “and fished me out.”
Like Walter
Neff and Jeff Bailey, Joe is symbolically hooked by a woman. But what
keeps him squirming on the line is not love or lust, but the life of
ease provided by his half-mad benefactress. In the end, the price he
pays—the loss of the last shreds of his self-respect—proves too
great.
Joe’s story
arc in a nutshell: His desperation leads to a lucky break that turns
out to be the worst thing that ever happened to him. The studio
couldn’t care less about the paint-by-the-numbers baseball movie
he’s pitching. He’s late with his car payments and the repo men
spot him on Sunset and give chase. Joe blows through a red light just
like Neff and, when a tire blows (a sound that will be echoed later),
he pulls into the driveway of a retro mansion. He’s escaped the
creditors who want his cash, only to find an apparent savior who
showers him with expensive gifts but demands his soul.
The mansion is
owned by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson, bravely parodying herself) a
50-ish silent film star who is planning a comeback as Salome. When
she discovers Joe is a screenwriter, she puts him to work on her
batty project. He notices there’s no dialogue and she shrieks, “We
didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” Joe, sensing an opportunity
of sorts, lies about the marketability of her script and the hook is
set.
In fast order
Joe is installed in a room over the garage by the butler Max who it
turns out was once a famous director and the first of Norma’s three
husbands. Joe has a view of the empty pool now patrolled by rats
instead of silent film stars. Max cleans out Joe’s apartment and
brings back his meager belongings. No matter, with Max chauffeuring a
$28,000 Isotta-Fraschini town car from 1929, Norma drags Joe to a
fancy haberdasher where she insists the camel hair coat he’s chosen
is too cheap. The salesman reads the situation and sidles up to Joe.
“As long as the lady is paying,” he whispers, “why not take the
Vicuna?” Joe can’t pretend he’s a screenwriter any more. He’s
a gigolo.
Joe’s own car
has been discovered and towed away by the repo men. He has graduated
from the garage to a room next to Norma’s. His entertainment is
watching Norma’s silent films and listening to her deluded
commentary. When he discovers he’s the only guest as Norma’s New
Year’s Eve party, he balks. She promises to fill the pool and buy
him more gifts. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he says, “that I
may have a life of my own?” She slaps him and retreats to her room.
He bolts through the gate and hitchhikes to a party at his friend
Artie’s house where he connects with Betty the script girl who gave
a thumbs-down review to his baseball movie.
After reading a
few of Joe’s old screenplays, Betty has found a hint of originality
underneath the hokum and soon they are planning to collaborate. Joe
seems to be falling for Betty who is Artie’s girlfriend. Or is Joe
just vulnerable to Betty’s flattery? Is Betty simply in thrall to
the square-jawed man in the fancy Vicuna coat?
Betty resembles
Ann in Out of the Past or Midge (the great Barbara Bel Geddes)
in Vertigo: the somewhat plain and sensible girl who would be
a perfect match for the noir man if he weren’t abnormally attached
to the femme fatale. Joe thinks he is going to sever his attachment
to Norma when he calls Max to say he’s leaving the mansion. But he
learns that Norma has attempted suicide so he’s pulled back to the
“peculiar prison” he thought he’d escaped.
Norma guilt
trips Joe with consummate skill. The pool is filled and at night
glows with an eerie light. Norma glows with the radiance of a woman
who has won her man. Joe, it seems, has submitted to the last step in
his degradation: sleeping with a woman old enough to be his mother.
Oedipus, at least, was unaware of his transgression.
Norma’s manic
phase escalates when she believes her old director, Cecil B. DeMille
has summoned her. We learn later that the studio was only interested
in the Isotta-Fraschini for a period film, but Norma is sure Salome
has been greenlighted. With Joe on her arm and Max behind the wheel,
she descends on the studio like a queen reclaiming her throne.
DeMille tiptoes the thin line between respecting his former meal
ticket and leaving her demented fantasy intact.
Norma goes into
her version of training for Salome. We see her wearing a
series of masks designed to make her complexion more youthful. Joe
escapes at night in the big car to work with Betty on their script.
After the mustiness of Norma’s crypt, Joe is enchanted by Betty’s
smell, “like freshly laundered handkerchiefs, like a brand-new
automobile.” Love has turned Joe a little corny, but it’s a
pleasant change from his cynicism.
Joe’s
cynicism and self-loathing come roaring back, however, after Norma
spills the beans to Betty who rushes to the mansion in desperation.
Joe rejects both women and claims he’s leaving Hollywood and
heading back home to Dayton, Ohio. When he finally walks away, Norma
shoots him in the back and he falls into the pool where we saw him at
the beginning. Norma’s earlier words bubble to the surface: “No
one ever leaves a star.” With the gunshot, we hear the distant echo
of the blown tire that determined Joe’s fate. No one in noir ever
makes it back home alive.
The pool is one
of the many glowing objects in noir: Phyllis’ anklet in Double
Indemnity, the radioactive “whatsit” from Kiss Me Deadly
and its cousin, the luminescent briefcase from Pulp Fiction.
The antecedent may be the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock
that represents Gatsby’s doomed hopes. Whether it’s forbidden
knowledge, an alluring fetish, love, lust, or the unattainable
fantasy, the noir hero must always be careful what he wishes for.
“The poor dope,” Joe confides, “he always wanted a pool. Well,
in the end, he got himself a pool.”
Norma gets what
she wants, too: a dramatic entrance and a phalanx of popping
flashbulbs to record it. Dressed as Salome, she descends the stairs
of her mansion thinking she’s at the studio. “All right, Mr.
DeMille,” she says, “I’m ready for my close-up.” The cameras,
of course, belong to the crime reporters drawn by Joe’s murder.
“The dream she clung to so desperately,” Joe tells us from the
beyond, “had enfolded her.” And Max, too, who directs the cameras
from the foot of the stairs. Wilder’s final irony: in 1929, von
Stroheim had directed Swanson in a real Hollywood production, Queen
Kelly, the same movie we see Norma screening for Joe.
There are two
famous “lost” masterpieces butchered by the studio. The first is
von Stroheim’s Greed, originally a four-and-a-half hour
epic, but cut to two hours. The studio destroyed the unused reels.
Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) suffered the
same fate. Welles’ extravagant, baroque noir, Touch of Evil
(1958), was also hacked up by the studio, but according to most
film scholars a 1998 restoration closely resembles Welles’ original
film. That any version made it into theaters is a minor miracle.
Touch of Evil is one of the strangest movies ever made and
gleefully violates nearly every commandment of the Hays Code.
A short history
will explain why Touch of Evil is often cited as the end of
the classic noir cycle. By 1958, Welles had moved from enfant
terrible (The War of the Worlds radio program), to boy wonder
(Citizen Kane), to cash-strapped ex-genius (Macbeth,
Othello). He had been foundering in Europe for a decade when the
offer to play Sheriff Hank Quinlan reached him. According to some
sources, Charlton Heston, considered for the lead, suggested he’d
be more inclined to accept the role if Welles were brought on board
to direct.
After a
successful stage career and two years before Kane, Welles was
working on his first movie, an unproduced version of Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness. “This is the biggest electric train set,” he
crowed, “a boy ever had.” This childlike glee mixed with his love
of magic and illusion infuses all of his movies. With Touch of
Evil he seems to be boasting, “Let me see you top this!” Deep
shadows and canted camera angles like Caligari. Huge close-ups
of distorted faces like those from Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan
of Arc. Flamboyant tracking shots that outdo Kane.
Detectives. Crooked cops. Alcoholism. Drugs. Gypsy prostitutes. Sexy
blondes. Rape. Butch lesbians in leather. Miscegenation. Rampant
corruption. Gruesome strangulation.
The numbers
seem to support Touch of Evil (1958) as a noir watershed.
Silver and Ward’s Encyclopedia lists an average of fifteen
noir films per year from 1950-1958. From 1959 onward, only one or two
entries each year are recorded. But the numbers over the 50s were
declining. Thirty-four noir films were released in 1950, and the
numbers steadily fall to ten films in 1957. Touch of Evil was
one of only three noir movies in 1958. It looks like filmmakers gave
up on noir after Welles placed the bar out of reach. But you could
also argue that noir had simply run its course. Whatever the reason,
Touch of Evil serves as a convenient bookmark.
Welles’ film
begins with a Hitchcock-style MacGuffin: a device that sets the plot
in motion but is ultimately of little consequence. At the beginning
of the famous three-and-a-half minute tracking shot, we see a bomb
planted in a car on the Mexican side of the border. A man and a woman
enter the car, drive to the U.S. side, and the bomb explodes. Who are
the victims? We don’t care. Why were they killed? Not really
important. The struggle between Vargas, Heston’s handsome Mexican
drug agent and Quinlan, Welles’ hideously bloated American cop is
what grabs our interest.
Quinlan is
determined to pin the crime on Sanchez, a young Mexican and claims to
have found dynamite in his apartment. Vargas is convinced Quinlan
planted the evidence and suspects this is not the first time Quinlan
has skirted the law to win a conviction. By the end of the film, we
know that Vargas’ hunch was correct. Quinlan is corrupt to the
core. We could tell that just by looking at him. And he did plant the
evidence. But Vargas’ impulse to protect a poor innocent Mexican
boy is misplaced. Sanchez is guilty. Quinlan is best described by
those who know him well: “A good detective and a lousy cop.”
The main thread
of the movie is the depiction of Quinlan’s disintegration. For
years, his colleagues have excused his extralegal methods because
they produced results. But Vargas is a by-the-book straight arrow. He
becomes obsessed with exposing every frame-up in Quinlan’s past.
This pressure drives Quinlan to drink after twelve years of sobriety.
Drinking turns the cagey cop sloppy. And nostalgic.
When he visits
his old friend Tanya (Marlene Dietrich in a black wig), a Gypsy
madam, she doesn’t recognize him.
“You should
lay off the candy bars,” she warns.
“I wish it
was your chili I was getting fat on,” he says.
“Better be
careful,” Tanya replies. “It might be too hot for you.”
Deeper into his
bender and becoming increasingly careless, Quinlan leaves his cane in
a hotel room where he has just strangled Joe Grandy (Akim Tamiroff) a
sartorially challenged mobster. Quinlan is trying to pin Grandy’s
death on Vargas’ American wife Susan (Janet Leigh) who is lying
unconscious on a bed in the same room. She’s been drugged after
possibly being raped at a motel by a group of creepy hoodlums
including young punks from Grandy’s family and leather-clad
lesbians.
The
strangulation scene is filmed with crazy angles and bizarre lighting
that would make the most outré example of German Expressionism look
tame by comparison. Grandy’s eyes almost pop out of his head in
flagrant violation of the Code’s prohibition against “brutality
and possible gruesomeness.” A swinging light bulb might remind you
of the basement discovery of Mrs. Bates’ body in Psycho
which came two years later.
Also
reminiscent of Psycho is the caretaker (Dennis Weaver) at the
motel where Susan is brutalized. He’s Norman Bates on speed:
twitchy, terrified, and powerless to stop the kinky hoods from
running amok. Hitchcock was a highly original director, but it’s
hard to watch Touch of Evil without thinking Hitch may have
borrowed some touches from Welles.
The honky-tonk
piano which functions as Tanya’s theme reappears—almost
unchanged—two years later in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano
Player. The final scene in Touch of Evil finds Quinlan’s
right-hand man Pete (Joseph Calleia) wearing a wire to incriminate
his boss. Vargas trails at a safe distance listening for evidence
just like professional eavesdropper Harry Caul in The Conversation
(1974).
Quinlan dies,
of course, shot by Pete who once worshiped him. His demise comes as
no surprise. In an earlier scene, he visits Tanya and asks her to
tell his fortune. She raises as eyebrow as only Dietrich could and
says, “Your future’s all used up.”
Quinlan is in
the classic mold of noir villains that are far more interesting than
the nominal heroes they play against. Robert Walker’s Bruno, the
charming psychopath from Strangers on a Train, steals the
movie from Farley Granger’s Guy, the bland tennis star. In Laura,
the acid tongue and dripping contempt of Clifton Webb’s Waldo
Lydecker is far more compelling than the stolid professionalism of
Dana Andrews’ dogged detective.
The Manchurian
Candidate (1962) showcases one of the greatest villains in
movie history. Angela Lansbury plays the mother of Korean War hero
Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and the wife of Senator John Iselin
(James Gregory), a Joseph McCarthy clone who is Shaw’s stepfather.
Lansbury’s performance is so powerful, so authoritative, you’d
never guess she was only three years older than Harvey. The stark
contrast between her sweet grandmotherly facade and the bitter, stony
monster underneath is especially chilling.
This gap
between appearance and reality is the film’s central theme. The
Iselins, who rail against Communism, are really Communist operatives.
Shaw is not really a hero. The men who served with him have been
programmed to intone robotically, “Raymond Shaw is the kindest,
bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my
life.” Deep down, below the level of consciousness, they hate him.
They are all tortured by half-remembered dreams where a women’s
horticulture society morphs into a brainwashing session populated by
an auditorium full of diabolical faces.
Army
Intelligence officer Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra) struggles to find
the meaning beneath his misery, but his superiors think the bad
dreams he’s obsessed with are the result of stress. When he learns
another member of his company is having the same nightmares, he
convinces the higher-ups to test him. Out of a random selection of
photographs, he picks out the faces from his dream. They correspond
perfectly to known Communist kingpins.
Soon we
understand the dream. Marco, Shaw, and the rest of their platoon were
led into a trap in Korea during the war. They were brainwashed by Dr.
Yen Lo (Khigh Dheigh) to believe they were listening to elderly women
drone on about rhododendrons when they were really being exhibited as
guinea pigs to an audience of Communist bigwigs. To demonstrate the
power of his brainwashing, Dr. Lo commands Shaw to kill two of his
comrades. He obeys without a hint of emotion or hesitation.
In present
time, Marco is beginning to realize that Shaw is a human time bomb.
He knows Dr. Lo created this puppet assassin, but he doesn’t
realize the person directly pulling the strings is Shaw’s mother.
She also controls her husband, the dimwitted senator angling for a
shot at the vice presidency. “I keep telling you not to think,”
she tells him. “You’re very, very good at a great many things,
but thinking just simply isn’t one of them.”
If he’s good
at anything, it’s braying vague allegations of Communist
involvement in the government whenever there’s a microphone or
camera nearby. He begs his wife to settle on a definite number of
targets for his accusations. After a meal featuring a Heinz Catsup
bottle emblazoned with its iconic numerals, he bellows with new
confidence, “There are exactly fifty-seven card-carrying members of
the Communist Party in the Department of Defense at this time.”
This is
only one of the many odd jokes that give The Manchurian Candidate
a mordant tone that would make Billy Wilder proud. During his
demonstration in front of his colleagues, Dr. Lo suggests that the
soldiers are smoking “bizarre tobacco substitutes” and says,
“they taste good, like a cigarette should.” This is a reference
to a famous jingle, launched in 1954, to promote Winston cigarettes.
Since the Korean War ended in 1953, the allusion is clearly
anachronistic. Also out of time is Senator Iselin’s dancing the
Limbo at a party scene. The Limbo gained popularity in the United
States after Chubby Checker sang Limbo Rock in 1962. At the same
party, Shaw comes dressed as a gaucho and quips, with
uncharacteristic humor, that he is Gaucho Marx. The joke works on two
levels: we think of both Groucho and Karl Marx. This juxtaposition of
the absurd and the deadly serious, mixed with a fractured sense of
time give the movie its unsettling power.
Marco is so
unsettled he’s been put on leave. He meets Rose Chaney (Janet
Leigh) on a train. She sees him sweating and shaking and tries to
comfort him. They have a conversation filled with odd puns and
non-sequiturs that would have left even the great Groucho’s head
spinning. But I believe there is more to this silliness than meets
the eye. At one point, Rose says, “I was one of the original
Chinese workmen who laid the track on this straight.”
Is this a
subtle hint that Rose is working for the other side? She seems to
fall in love with Marco almost instantly and tells him within days
she’s dumped her fiancĂ©.
Even within the
conventions of movie romance their immediate attachment seems
preposterous. If the movie had developed this possible plot line, a
truly paranoid, hall of mirrors vision of communist puppet masters
could have been suggested. Perhaps the filmmakers shied away from
this possibility because it would seem to justify the lunatic
ramblings of Senator Iselin, and by extension, give credence to
Joseph McCarthy’s ill-fated crusade.
By the time
Marco has discovered the trigger for Shaw’s programming is the
queen of diamonds face card, Shaw has already killed a journalist
opposed to the Iselin’s ambitions. Still smitten by a boyhood
crush, and determined to alienate his parents, Shaw elopes with
Jocelyn, the daughter of Senator Jordan, the Iselin’s archenemy.
The programming is still intact, however, and Shaw kills both Jordan
and Jocelyn, remembering nothing. Marco, suspecting the worst, tries
to deprogram Shaw. The viewer is left to wonder if he’s succeeded.
Shaw’s
supreme task is to take place at the political convention where
Senator Iselin will be nominated as vice president. Lansbury is
especially powerful as Mrs. Iselin explains to her son that he must
shoot the presidential nominee so her husband can rise and give a
stirring speech—crafted over many years—that will vault him into
the presidency. “And then when I take power,” she says, “they
will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you.
And what they did in so contemptuously underestimating me.” She
kisses her son on the lips, looking as if she would like more.
Shaw evades
Marco who wonders if his deprogramming has failed. He scans the
convention for something out of place and spots a tiny light coming
from a distant projection booth. He sprints up flights of stairs and
bursts into a tiny room where Shaw has just swiveled the rifle from
the presidential nominee and shot his mother and stepfather who lie
dead on the platform. “Oh damn it, Ben,” he says, and turns the
rifle on himself.
The
Manchurian Candidate has three fathers. Richard Condon, who wrote
the source material, said, “Every novel I’ve ever written has
been about the abuse of power.” The director, John Frankenheimer,
was a good craftsman who made two other solid entrants in the
thriller genre: Seconds and Black Sunday. Screenwriter George
Axelrod (Bus Stop, The Seven Year Itch, Breakfast at Tiffany’s),
had an ear attuned to the droll.
These diverse
talents came together in what famed critic David Thompson calls “wild
injection of screwball menace into an electoral comedy.” The more
times you see The Manchurian Candidate, the more the comic
elements seem to dominate. Unless you fall under the sway of Angela
Lansbury’s harpy who may disturb your dreams for a long time to
come.
The abuse of
power is also the central theme of Chinatown (1974).
Sweet-faced Mrs. Iselin was the power broker in The Manchurian
Candidate and avuncular Noah Cross (John Huston) is her
counterpart in Chinatown. She wants to run the world. He’ll
settle for owning greater Los Angeles. Mrs. Iselin claims to regret
using her son to further her grand scheme. Noah Cross uses his
daughter in a far more despicable way without a hint of remorse. Both
films show the interaction of the personal and the political and
suggest that personal betrayal is the most reprehensible offense of
all.
Robert Towne’s
screenplay is justifiably famous. Set in 1939, it excavates the
history of Los Angeles while also burrowing into the inner lives of
its doomed characters. It is complex without being confusing, and
filled with dialogue that honors hardboiled traditions while giving
them a modern flair. Although Chinatown is in color, the
contrast between bright landscapes and dark deeds creates an
authentic noir texture.
Towne’s
original ending was hopeful if not exactly happy. The director, Roman
Polanski (Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary’s
Baby), objected. His natural impulse to embrace the darkness was
undoubtedly given greater force when his wife, Sharon Tate, was
murdered by Charles Manson’s acolytes in 1969. Like Barton Keyes in
Double Indemnity, he understood that in tragedy “the last
stop is the cemetery.”
Private
detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is approached by a woman who
says she suspects her husband of infidelity. Jake advises her to “let
sleeping dogs lie” but pursues the case at her insistence. She
claims she’s the wife of water commissioner Hollis Mulwray. On the
surface, Mulwray seems to be having an affair with a much younger
woman. Soon Gittes discovers that the woman who came to his office is
an impersonator and much later—too late—he learns Mulwray’s
apparent mistress was in fact his stepdaughter.
By the time
Gittes finally wises up, he’s uncovered a plot to control L.A.’s
water supply, had his nose sliced open, and fallen in love with the
real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) who is now a widow. Her father is
Noah Cross, once Hollis’ partner.
“Can you
believe it?” a minor character asks. “We’re in the middle of a
drought and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”
Gittes is
tough—he wears the unsightly bandage on his nose as a badge of
honor. But as the hoodlum (director Roman Polanski, very scary) who
disfigures him suggests, he’s a “very nosy fellow.” Like most
true noir detectives, the knowledge he seeks has the potential to
destroy him and the people he cares for.
We catch hints
of Jake’s vulnerability, most of which lead back to Chinatown where
he once failed to save someone who depended on him.
Evelyn Mulwray
asks, “What were you doing there?”
“Working for
the District Attorney.”
“Doing what?”
“As little as
possible.”
When Gittes
learns Cross is almost singlehandedly responsible for controlling the
area’s water supply, Cross warns him off.
“You many
think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you
don’t.”
After Jake
grins, Cross asks, “Why is that funny?”
“That’s
what the District Attorney used to tell me in Chinatown.”
Jake learns
Cross has more millions than he can count and asks, “What could you
buy that you can’t already afford?”
“The future,
Mr. Gittes. The future.”
Apparently
Jake, like many other noir men, is repeating old patterns. Cross’
warning is not an idle threat. The politics of controlling the water
is far more byzantine than Jake suspects and the personal cost of the
knowledge he seeks will draw him back to Chinatown with catastrophic
results. Some characters, much more sympathetic that Sheriff Quinlan
from Touch of Evil, also have futures that are “all used
up.”
Jake’s first
shock comes when he traces Katherine, the young woman he thought was
Hollis Mulwray’s mistress, to a house rented by Evelyn. We discover
the widow Mulwray is not the femme fatale she appeared to be when
Jake grills her.
Evelyn,
severely shaken, says, “She’s my sister.”
Jake slaps her
and screams, “I said I want the truth!”
He gets it.
“She’s my sister and my daughter.”
Then, “My
father and I…understand? Or is it too tough for you?”
Gittes arranges
a place in Chinatown for Evelyn and Katherine to hide before their
planned escape from Noah Cross. But Cross and the cops he owns are
tipped off and try to stop her. As Evelyn drives away with Katherine,
a cop aims at one of the car’s tires, but the bullet goes astray
and pierces Evelyn’s eye. One victim of Cross’ incestuous evil is
dead, but another—Katherine—is next in line. For the first time,
Gittes is dumbstruck. An associate drags him away from the carnage.
“Forget it
Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
Fat chance.
Gittes had survived his stint in Chinatown by doing “as little as
possible” and by accepting that he didn’t know what he was
dealing with. After leaving the police, he became a “nosy guy”
who failed to heed his own advice to “let sleeping dogs lie.” In
noir, the search for the truth can sometimes open your eyes, but more
often than not, seeing the truth up close can make you want to close
them.
John Huston’s
daughter Angelica stars in The Grifters (1990), one of the
nastiest noir movies ever made. Jim Thompson, described as the
“Dimestore Dostoyevsky,” published the novel in 1963. His
screenwriting credits include Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and
Paths of Glory. After Dark, My Sweet, The Getaway,
and The Killier Inside Me are noir movies adapted from
his books. Veteran noir craftsman Donald Westlake wrote the
screenplay.
In 1988,
British director Stephen Frears scored a solid hit with Dangerous
Liaisons, set in 18th century France. Oddly enough,
this period piece was perfect preparation for Frears’ next
assignment, The Grifters, where liaisons have never
been more dangerous or more twisted. Hardboiled fiction filtered
through a European sensibility: the perfect formula for first-rate
noir.
Roy (John
Cusack) is a short-con grifter based in Los Angeles. One of his
tricks is ordering a drink by flashing a twenty-dollar bill. When the
drink arrives, he palms the twenty and hands over a ten. If he’s
lucky, he gets change for the twenty. We see an unlucky episode. The
bartender is wise to the scam and whacks Roy in the stomach with a
baseball bat. He’s suffered real internal injuries, but the intense
queasiness that afflicts him may have a spiritual correlative in
Sartre’s Nausea. Roy has existential angst to spare.
The source of
this malaise is Roy’s Oedipal attachment to his mother, Lilly
(Angelica Huston). She works a bigger con, placing strategic bets at
the racetrack to improve the odds for Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle), her
bookmaker boss. But she also skims a little off the top for herself,
stashing stacks of bills in a hidden compartment beneath the trunk of
her car.
Roy’s
girlfriend Myra (Annette Benning) is a grifter, too. Her specialty is
using sex to get what she wants. We see her gleefully seduce a
jeweler, her landlord, and in flashback, a high-rolling sucker in an
oil investing scam. She recognizes Roy’s potential and tries to
convince him to team up with her for bigger scores. “I’ve kissed
a lot of fucking frogs,” she says, “and you’re my prince.”
The tension in
this classic triangle starts to hum when Lilly visits Roy in L.A. for
the first time in eight years. She notices him wincing in pain from
the effects of the baseball bat and advises, “Get off the grift,
Roy. You haven’t got the stomach for it.” Lilly wants him to
quit. Myra wants him to think bigger. What’s a young grifter to do?
Lilly uses her
underworld connections to summon a doctor. When he suggests Roy might
be too far gone to be helped, she tells him, “My son is going to be
all right. If not, I’ll have you killed.”
Roy survives
his internal hemorrhaging, but the hostility between Lilly and Myra
stokes a new churning in his gut. When they meet in the hospital,
Myra at first expresses surprise that Lilly could be Roy’s mother.
“Of course now that I see you in the light,” she says, “you’re
plenty old enough to be Roy’s mother.”
Lilly has
bigger problems than competition with a younger woman. By taking care
of Roy, she’s missed a critical race. She tries lying to Bobo, but
he stops her. “Do you want to stick to that story, or do you want
to keep your teeth?” He punches her in the stomach, threatens a
severe beating with a towel full of oranges, then settles for burning
her hand with a lit cigar. She’s in pain, but she thinks she’s
off the hook.
Not so. Myra
follows Lilly to the racetrack and sees her trunk full of cash. She
reveals the con to Roy and tries to convince him to join her in a
scam she’s plotted. He’s distrustful. “Sooner or later the
lightning hits, and I’m not gonna be around when it hits you.”
Myra has
stronger cards to play. “You and your mother? Ugh! You like to go
back to where you’ve been, huh?” Roy slaps her and we suspect his
anger is less about being insulted than about being discovered.
Myra is not
done yet. She tells Bobo about Lilly’s double dealing. Lilly’s
friend on the inside warns her to watch her step, so she hides out at
a motel in Arizona. Myra trails her, sneaks into her room, and
attacks her in bed. When Roy is called to identify the body, he
testifies it’s his mother’s corpse even though he knows it’s
Myra under the sheet. Myra was younger, but Lilly is tougher.
Back in L.A.,
Roy finds Lilly ransacking his apartment. She’s found his hidden
bankroll and claims she needs it to fund her new life. When Roy
refuses, Lilly turns temptress. “What can I do to get it? Is there
nothing I can do?” When Roy rejects her, Lilly swings the
money-filled suitcase at him, driving the glass he’s drinking from
into his throat. She screams as he bleeds out, but she’s not so
grief stricken that she can’t collect the money and drive off
leaving his dead body on the bloodstained floor. It’s no accident
that lilies are the flower most associated with funerals.
Stephen Frears,
the director, described The Grifters as “Pulp fiction meets
Greek tragedy,” an apt summation of many noir films. We’ve seen
how the hardboiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Thompson and
their imitators provided the raw material for many noir films. Greek
tragedy offers the Medusa, Medea, Circe, the sirens and other models
for the femme fatale. Especially in neo-noir, there is no shortage
of Oedipal themes. Oedipus, himself, as Raymond Durgnat pointed out,
was the first detective. And also a murderer. And
guilty—unknowingly—of sleeping with the wrong woman. The saga of
The House of Atreus could be cited as an archetype for the doomed
families of noir.
There is no
God in noir. But in many noir films, there is a strong sense that
lower-case, Greek-style gods are toying with the pathetic humans who
foolishly believe they can control their fate. As Gloucester observed
in Shakespeare’s King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are
we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.”
You may have
noticed that list of top ten films really numbers eleven. I’d like
to recap them now and to place each film into an admittedly
subjective category.
M (1931)
Foundational noir
I Am a
Fugitive from the Chain Gang (1932) Prison noir
Double
Indemnity (1944) Classic noir
Mildred
Pierce (1945) Domestic noir
Out of the
Past (1947) Detective noir
The Asphalt
Jungle (1950) Caper noir
Sunset
Boulevard (1950) Gothic noir
Touch of
Evil (1958) Baroque noir
The
Manchurian Candidate (1962) Cold war noir
Chinatown
(1974) Neo noir
The Grifters
(1990) Nasty noir
It pained me to
exclude many excellent films. Some had a fatal flaw. Others didn’t
quite qualify under my admittedly subjective rules. A few were just
too cheesy. But all the films I’m going to list now are worth a
look.
THE SECOND TEAM
Gun Crazy
(1949). A low-budget classic with the best meet cute ever. Bart loves
guns. Annie is a curvy carnival sharpshooter. Sex and sixguns in one
package! Bart falls hard and a doomed life of crime ensues. This film
influenced Bonnie and Clyde right down to the iconic beret.
Detour
(1945). Made for $30,000 and it shows. This is noir at its most raw
and primal. Al hitchhikes across the country and runs into a string
of bad luck. Misfortune turns to catastrophe when he meets Vera who
says, “People eat themselves up trying to buck fate.” Al agrees.
“That’s life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to
trip you.”
In a
Lonely Place (1950). Leaving this one off the list twisted my
guts. Bogie at his most vulnerable, and an over-the-top tagline of
pure perfection. “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she
left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” It’s a crime
the murder mystery at the movie’s core falls flat.
Gilda
(1949). The astonishingly beautiful Rita Hayworth torn between Glenn
Ford’s low-rent gambler and the classy casino owner who hires him.
Sado-masochism galore. Glenn denies Rita on their wedding night. Is
he more attracted to his boss who wields a supremely phallic cane
with a concealed dagger?
The
Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). A James M. Cain plot that
parallels Double Indemnity. John Garfield is potent as a
handsome drifter, but Lana Turner strains credulity as a hash house
waitress. Cecil Kellaway, the jolly Brit who plays her husband, is
fatally miscast. Look for Hume Cronyn as a slippery lawyer.
The
Killers (1949). Inspired by a Hemingway story. Structured
like Citizen Kane. Anchored by Burt Lancaster’s stoic loser.
But ruined by Ava Gardner whose beauty is exceeded only by her
inability to act.
Criss
Cross (1949). Lancaster as another helpless big lug with
Yvonne De Carlo faring slightly better than Gardner. “It was in the
cards and there was no way of stopping it.” Excellent atmospherics
by director Robert Siodmak.
The
Killing (1956). The quintessential big lug, Sterling Hayden,
engineers a racetrack heist that—I’m shocked—goes wrong. Elisha
Cook, Jr. gets henpecked by the best in the business: budget noir
queen Marie Windsor. Director Stanley Kubrick starts to hit his
stride.
Night and
the City (1950). Panic in the Streets finds Richard
Widmark in New Orleans trying to prevent the plague from spreading.
In Night, he is the plague, infecting everyone he
touches in London with his supremely bad karma. Also catch his
gleeful psychopath Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death.
The Sweet
Smell of Success (1957). Lancaster again, but this time
totally in charge as a gossip columnist in the Walter Winchell mode.
Tony Curtis is magnificent as Lancaster’s oily gofer. Superb New
York City poetry from dialogue masters Clifford Odets and Ernest
Lehman. Marred only by the boring love story between Lancaster’s
sister Susan Harrison and white-bread jazz musician Martin Milner.
Kiss Me
Deadly (1955). Where the glowing briefcase was born. If you
like your noir bare-knuckled and your dames slapped, this Mike Hammer
adaptation is up your dark and damp alley. Famous for portraying fate
at its cruelest with nuclear apocalypse as the denouement.
Laura
(1944). Considered a classic, but tarnished by a happy ending. Dana
Andrews’ detective falls for the portrait of a dead beauty who
turns up alive. Clifton Webb steals the movie without ruffling a hair
of his natty moustache. Even though his Waldo Lydecker may be the
gayest man in movie history, we are supposed to believe he’s in
love with Gene Tierney’s Laura. Maybe she’s just another work of
art for his tasteful collection.
Leave Her
to Heaven (1945). Gene Tierney, still beautiful, but evil
beyond belief. She watches her husband’s brother drown without
lifting a finger. Purposely falls down a flight of stairs to abort
her unwanted child. A great femme fatale in one of the few noir films
where the color is so vibrant it overwhelms the dark themes.
Crossfire
(1947). Robert Ryan, one of the most overlooked performers in movie
history, plays a vicious, anti-Semitic soldier returning from the
war. Ryan was so good at playing villains, he may have undermined his
chances to be cast as a hero. Given a chance to star as a noble boxer
in The Setup (1949), he finds a stoic nobility that would have
eluded a lesser actor.
Ace in
the Hole (1951). It’s hard to keep Billy Wilder at bay.
Kirk Douglas’ egocentric reporter cares more about a Pulitzer than
saving a man’s life. This movie is chillingly prescient about the
media circus rolling into the 21st century and sharply
satiric about the cult of celebrity that now suffocates the news.
Night of
the Hunter (1955). Not exactly noir, but so great I have to
list it. Robert Mitchum is terrifying as a bogus preacher stalking
young children in search of their dead father’s stolen money. The
only movie Charles Laughton directed. What a pity.
The
Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. Excluded from
the top eleven on a technicality, I know. But Bogie controls his own
fate, escapes the clutches of predatory females, and emerges
unscathed after the dust has settled. Watch In a Lonely Place
if you want to see Bogart ruined in proper noir style.
Strangers
on a Train (1951), Psycho (1960), and Vertigo
(1958). Many of Hitchcock’s films overlap noir, but The Master is
in a class and a category by himself. Robert Walker Jr. is
sensational as baby-faced Bruno, the charming psychopath in
Strangers. Double-bill Psycho and Touch of Evil
and pick your least trustworthy motel operator. Watch Vertigo
to see Hitch’s own psychology played out via Jimmy Stewart’s
obsession with making over one woman in another’s image.
Body Heat
(1981). A respectable neo-noir in the James M. Cain tradition.
William Hurt’s Ned Racine is an updated version of the classic noir
loser who is not quite as clever as he thinks. A lawyer colleague
tells him, “You’ve started using your incompetence as a weapon.”
Kathleen Turner’s femme fatale quips, “You’re not too smart. I
like that in a man.” Marvel at Mickey Rourke as a wily arsonist and
bemoan an unfulfilled career.
The Last
Seduction (1994). A darkly comic neo-noir. Linda Fiorentino’s
femme fatale could teach a PhD program in betrayal. Listen for her
retort in a Buffalo tavern when the bartender ignores her drink
order. Watch her whip her lazy sales team into shape: “Come on, you
eunuchs!” She is the supreme castrator, and proud of it.
Dead Men
Don’t Wear Plaid (1982). Steve Martin, hilarious as hapless
detective Rigby Reardon, interacts with a parade of noir stars
arranged in classic clips seamlessly edited into Rigby’s narrative
by director Carl Reiner. Start here to whet your appetite, or serve
Dead Men as the perfect dessert after a noir retrospective.
GIVING THE FRENCH THEIR DUE
Here are some
French films well worth exploring. The French gave noir its name,
after all.
Rififi
(1955). A caper film directed by blacklisted American Jules Dassin
(Brute Force, The Naked City, Night and the City) who found
work in France. Good on a double bill with The Asphalt Jungle.
Diabolique
(1955). Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring French icon
Simone Signoret. Plenty of twists and a bathtub scene that makes
Fatal Attraction look tame. Avoid at all costs the Sharon
Stone remake.
Elevator to
the Gallows (1958). Directed by Louis Malle and starring the
second icon of the era, Jeanne Moreau. The classic Double
Indemnity setup: a man plots to bump off his lover’s husband.
Shoot the
Piano Player (1960). Directed by Francois Truffaut and starring
actor/singer Charles Aznavour, “the French Frank Sinatra.” Its
odd mixture of funny, sad, and tragic inspired Newman and Benton’s
script for Bonnie and Clyde. The piano score will remind you
of Tanya’s place in Touch of Evil. From a novel by American
David Goodis (Dark Passage).
Purple Noon
(1960). Directed by Rene Clement from American Patricia Highsmith’s
novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Starring the icily elegant
Alain Delon. The Matt Damon film from 1999 is excellent, but Delon is
a better Ripley.
Le Samourai
(1967). Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville (Army of Shadows, Bob
le Flambeur). Delon, beyond suave again as a hitman forced to
scramble when his alibi falls apart. Compare to Tom Cruise’s
Collateral at your peril.
THE BATTLE OF CAPE FEAR
We can stretch
our imagination back to Sophocles in search of noir’s past. But
does noir have a future? Yes, we can see noir’s legacy in modern
dark films like Se7en and Memento, but capturing the
authentic feel of films from noir’s midcentury heyday is becoming
increasingly difficult. It’s been almost seventy years since the
post-war peak of noir films, so naturally much has changed. Even
though the time span between the two versions of Cape Fear is
only twenty-nine years, comparing these two films can shed light on
why much of what passes for neo-noir is so unsatisfying.
The first
problem is budgets and the burdens they bring. Many noir movies from
the forties were cheaply made afterthoughts on the lower half of a
double bill. Part of their power was their raw simplicity. The 1962
version of Cape Fear, starring Gregory Peck and Robert
Mitchum, has the stripped-down feel of older films from the classic
period. The director, J. Lee Thompson, was an Englishman fond of the
subtlety Hitchcock brought to his thrillers. Figures for the budget
are unavailable on Internet Movie Database, but even adjusting for
inflation, Thompson’s film was made for a tiny fraction of the 35
million Martin Scorcese spent on the remake. Few would call it
subtle.
The
storyline—based on John D. MacDonald’s novel, The
Executioners—is simple. Max Cady is a recently released convict
determined to destroy the life of Sam Bowden, the lawyer he believes
responsible for his incarceration on a sexual assault charge. Cady is
a brute, but also clever enough to threaten Bowden and his family
without breaking any laws. The central irony of the film, and the
source of its tension, is that Cady’s threats eventually force
Bowden to abandon the moral principles his profession and his life
are built on. When he realizes Cady plans to rape his wife and
daughter, Bowden lets a private detective talk him into hiring thugs
to beat Cady and persuade him to leave town. Cady takes a few lumps,
but he gets the best of his assailants and hires a lawyer to bring
disbarment charges against Bowden.
Big budgets
demand big effects. We can’t fault Scorcese for filming in color
because most modern audiences demand it. But he uses showy visual
effects—twice turning Cady into a black and white negative
image—that make us aware we are watching a filmmaker instead of a
film. Thomson’s use of black-and-white and his no frills visual
style are far more effective. Color doesn’t jinx a modern noir—as
Chinatown proved—but black-and-white, with its deeper
shadows and more dreamlike quality, is almost always a better choice.
Scorcese built a ninety-foot water tank on a soundstage and spent
four weeks filming the story’s climax aboard a houseboat. Although
technically impressive, the special effects used in showing the boat
destroyed by a storm seem more appropriate for a disaster film. In
noir, simple is usually better.
Big budgets
demand longer running times. Scorcese’s film wheezes in at two
hours and eight minutes; Thompson’s wraps up in an economical one
hour and forty-five minutes. Those extra twenty-three minutes may not
sound like much, but many of Scorcese’s scenes drag on too long and
lose their tension.
Big budgets
demand all-star casts. Actors carry the expectations generated by
their previous roles. With his gallery of violent characters from
Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Unctouchables and
Goodfellas, Robert DeNiro was a good choice for Max Cady.
Harrison Ford was offered the part of Bowden and his stolid presence
and quiet intelligence would have been the perfect counterweight for
DeNiro’s feral intensity. But the role went to Nick Nolte, a
hulking six-foot tall actor identified with tough, physical
characters in movies like, The Deep, North Dallas Forty
and 48 Hours. Nolte lost weight and donned wire-rimmed glasses
to make his character seem more vulnerable and intellectual.
Five-foot-nine DeNiro whipped himself into Jake Lamotta shape and
covered himself with tattoos that would make a hardcore biker blush.
But the difference in physical size between the two actors doesn’t
quite work. The movie might have been more interesting if the roles
had been reversed.
Although the
stars of Thompson’s version are hardly unknowns, the casting is
more balanced. Few actors have radiated the moral rectitude of
Gregory Peck. To me, his Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird (released
just thirteen months after Cape Fear) is ample proof that
audiences often mistook the stiffness of his acting for the
uprightness of his characters. But in Cape Fear, his rigidity
is the perfect counterpoint for Mitchum’s languid cool. Peck is two
inches taller than Mitchum but looks frail next to his co-star’s
barrel-chested physique. My reverence for Mitchum is by now no
secret. In its survey of greatest villains, The American Film
Institute lists Mitchum’s Harry Powell from Night of the Hunter
at number twenty-nine and Max Cady at twenty-eight. Each should be
much higher.
The smaller
parts in Thomson’s film are close to perfect; in Scorcese’s
version they are problematic. Polly Bergen, known best for her
television work, plays Peck’s wife. It’s a thankless role, but
she seems to understand her job is to act frightened and stay out of
the way. Martin Balsam as the police chief, Telly Savalas as a
detective, and Jack Kruschen as Cady’s attorney add just the right
amount of flavor without upstaging the stars. Only Lori Martin as
Peck’s daughter seems out of her depth.
For some
reason, Scorcese thought stunt casting would be fun. He was wrong.
Mitchum appears as a cop, Balsam as a judge, and Peck as Cady’s
attorney. Viewers familiar with the original movie will chuckle when
the old-timers show up. But these cameos undermine the somber tone of
the movie.
Jessica Lange
plays Nolte’s wife. With Frances, Tootsie and the
Music Box on her resume, there was no way Lange could be asked
to stay in the background like Polly Bergen. Scorcese and
screenwriter Wesley Strick inject domestic strife into a marriage
that was the epitome of upper middle class tranquility in the earlier
version. Nolte has a roving eye and Lange is bitter. I can’t
criticize Scorcese’s instinct to add depth to a bare bones plot,
but nothing cripples the momentum of an action movie faster than too
many scenes with a bickering couple.
Juliette Lewis,
in her first major role, is a pleasant surprise as Nolte’s
daughter, Danielle. Lori Martin was merely a fourteen-year old with a
cute figure. Lewis is four years older with an off-kilter sexuality
that animates the best (but overlong) scene in the film, a creepy
confrontation in empty auditorium with DeNiro pretending to be
Danielle’s high school acting teacher. The two characters seem
almost twisted soul mates. On the other hand, Mitchum’s lust for a
fourteen-year-old child is creepier still.
The delicate
mood of noir is undermined in modern movies like Scorcese’s Cape
Fear when budgets are too big, effects are too showy and the
celebrity of the actors overwhelms their roles. Also ill-suited for
noir films, in my opinion, is the Method style of acting which, in
its search for the “truth,” trains performers to tap into the
psyches of their characters by excavating their own personal emotions
and experiences. DeNiro’s over-the-top Method acting ruins his
portrayal of Max Cady. Mitchum’s lack of Method—his naturalism,
if you will—makes his Max Cady more terrifying despite its greater
subtlety and simplicity.
Like many of
his contemporaries, Mitchum lived through the Depression and World
War II. He was expelled from school numerous times, traveled the
country on railroad cars, boxed professionally, was arrested for
vagrancy, served on a chain gang, hung out with jazz musicians and
was busted for pot possession. He didn’t need to act tough—he was
tough.
DeNiro grew up
in Greenwich Village with arty parents and started acting at sixteen.
I’m not suggesting a hardscrabble background is mandatory for
playing noir characters. Bogart’s father was a society doctor and
his mother was a famous illustrator. But the actors who dominated the
classic noir era and radiated a ruggedness few contemporary
performers can match. Looking for a common thread leads us to World
War II. The stress of war and the disorientation that followed gave
noir its raison d’ĂŞtre. Military experience may have
hardened the actors who served. They include: Humphrey Bogart, Robert
Ryan, Glenn Ford, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston,
Kirk Douglas, Jimmy Stewart, Telly Savalas, Sterling Hayden, Pat
Hingle, Spencer Tracy, James Gregory, Victor Mature, Dennis Weaver,
and Tony Curtis.
The Actor’s
Studio, a Mecca of the Method, set up shop after the war in 1947, so
most of the actors just mentioned escaped its influence. But Marlon
Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift were part of a wave that
later swept up Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, among
others. What Method tics weaken DeNiro’s portrayal of Max Cady?
The Internet
Movie Database (an invaluable resource) reports that before playing
redneck Max Cady, DeNiro paid a dentist $5,000 to make his teeth look
bad. After filming, it cost him $20,000 to have them fixed. Sean
Penn, another Method actor, wanted to have his teeth filed down to
play a reform school inmate in Bad Boys, but his mother
dissuaded him. If the Method’s focus is to plumb the deep internal
life of a character, why do some of its most famous adherents depend
on external gimmicks like altered teeth?
Sanford
Meisner, a Method pioneer, described acting as “living truthfully
under imaginary circumstances.” By trying to be true to his
character, DeNiro directs our attention to Cady’s shell and away
from his core.
Cady is a
southerner so DeNiro attempts a backwoods accent so thick it should
have received screen credit of its own. After researching the habits
of sexual predators, DeNiro decided that Cady should bite a chunk of
skin from the face of one of his rape victims. The scene may be
“true,” but it’s nauseating. The tattoos covering Cady’s
torso are meant to emphasize his menace, but, like the accent, they
are exaggerated to a fault. When Mitchum’s Cady tells Bowden in a
flat voice almost devoid of emotion, “I got something planned for
your wife and kid they ain’t never gonna forget,” the result is
far more frightening than anything DeNiro can muster with all his
Method tricks. For acting in general, and noir acting in particular,
less is often more.
Before
collaborating on Cape Fear, Scorcese and DeNiro worked
together on six films: Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver
(1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980),
The King of Comedy (1982), and Goodfellas
(1990). All these films are anchored in the city. Scorcese, who grew
up in New York, seems out of his natural element in the North
Carolina setting of Cape Fear. Taxi Driver—focusing
on the corruption of the city and the people who inhabit its
shadows—is a far superior noir-type film because it plays to
Scorcese’s strengths. DeNiro’s Oscar-nominated performance is a
model of subtlety compared to the histrionics of his Cady portrayal.
I’ve argued
that there is no God in noir. Scorcese is a distinctly American
director, but he is also burdened or blessed, depending on your
viewpoint, with an onerous, Old World Catholic guilt. DeNiro’s
torso is covered with a huge cross and other parts of his body are
decorated with scripture. His character frequently quotes the Bible,
or at least his twisted version of it. As he sinks into the river at
the end of the film, he speaks in tongues like a man possessed. When
Nolte’s Bowden, after struggling to the death with his nemesis,
washes the blood off his hands, Scorcese is signaling, with a rather
heavy hand, that Bowden has been absolved of his sins against his
moral code and his professional ethics. In Scorcese’s world, God
may be mysterious, or unknowable, or vengeful, but He is decidedly
not dead.
Perhaps
Scorcese and other American directors who grew up in the United
States and learned their craft in film schools are not the ideal
candidates to helm a noir film. They may be too close to their native
country to fully understand it. Many historians would concede the
best explication of the American character is Democracy in
America, written in 1840 by Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. Many
film historians would likewise argue the best noir films were made by
European émigrés like Polanski, Wilder, and Curtiz.
Scorcese’s
attempt to take the rudimentary plot and characters of the original
Cape Fear and create layers of complexity was an honorable
impulse. But instead of adding depth, he ornamented with distracting
curlicues. To paraphrase Lord Acton: Big budgets tend to corrupt;
huge budgets corrupt absolutely. Watch The Last
Seduction—recommended earlier—to see how to make an excellent
modern noir on a tiny budget of 2.5 million. That’s seven percent
of the 35 million Scorcese spent. Big budget successes like Chinatown
come along once in a while, but they are rare, indeed.
Another
restriction that fueled the early years of noir was the Hays Code,
which was enforced from 1930 to 1968. Earlier, I argued that the Code
impelled filmmakers to be more creative, and that implied themes were
often more powerful than overt ones. J. Lee Thompson’s ability to
show on-screen violence was limited, so he suggested it instead.
Mitchum doesn’t need to bite his victim to be scary; he simply
puffs out his enormous chest and leers. When he spots Bowden’s
daughter for the first time, a simple line of dialogue creates the
desired effect. “Say,” Mitchum drawls, “she’s getting to be
almost as juicy as your wife, ain’t she?”
Perhaps the
most crucial casualty of big budgets, superstar actors, and unlimited
license is respect for the viewer’s imagination. Watching classic
noir, the mind’s eye longs to picture what evil might be lurking in
those dark shadows, and to puzzle over the twisted thoughts that must
be fevering the brains of the doomed protagonist. In many modern
films, we are shown everything, so our imagination, like an unused
muscle, atrophies. Glutted on sensation, we eventually turn
apathetic. Battered with violent images, we ultimately lose the
ability to feel.
In a recent New
Yorker article on the importance of pruning one’s writing, John
McPhee gives this advice to authors: “Back off. Let the reader do
the creating.” Take note, modern filmmakers. If you give your
audience’s imagination the proper respect, your movies will
prosper.
I’ll hold
onto the slim hope that a great new noir film will get produced, but
while I wait I’ll comfort myself with the knowledge that the films
I’ve mentioned will repay repeated viewing with unalloyed joy.
You must have
noticed my response to noir films is subjective. Your reaction will
be subjective, too. A supposed masterpiece may leave you as cold as
Phyllis Dietrichson’s heart. A cheaply made B-movie might gleam for
you like her anklet. Whether it’s high art or low budget that draws
you in, I hope you feel that telltale zero at the bone that hooked me
on noir back when giants like Bogart and Mitchum could still hear the
sound of their own footsteps.
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