WILLIAM HOPSON – A Gunman Rode North. Pyramid #225, paperback, 1956. First published in hardcover by Avalon Books, 1954.

   A while ago back I read William Hopson’s DESPERADO, and was taken by the book’s portrait of a man slowly becoming an outcast in his own community. A GUNMAN RODE NORTH isn’t nearly as compelling, but it does have its points of interest — mainly plot devices lifted from old Burt Lancaster movies.

   The story starts with Lew Kerrigan in Yuma territorial prison, whence he has gone for the sake of a beautiful girl named Kitty, who is now a gangster’s moll, or rather the mistress of Colonel Harrow, a scheming gold baron, but basically the same figure as Ava Gardner in THE KILLERS (1946).

   We quickly learn (maybe too quickly; there’s a lot of exposition in the early chapters) that Harrow was Kerrigan’s erstwhile partner in a gold strike, but Kerrigan’s stake in all this has vanished in a swirl of corporate chicanery (shades of I WALK ALONE, 1948) and Kerrigan is about to be released into the custody of the man who sent him there, a plot device from ROAD HOUSE (1948) which was not a Burt Lancaster movie, but might as well have been.

   From this point we segue into a bit of BRUTE FORCE (1947) with sadistic prison guards and desperate convicts bent on escape, until Kerrigan is finally released and confronts Harrow, who is flanked by his hired goons — excuse, me, hired guns — and learns that he is now a pawn in another of Harrow’s nasty plans (see CRISS CROSS, 1949) while Harrow has spurned Kitty for a more socially acceptable marital prospect (back to I WALK ALONE.)

   Out on the street/riding the range once more, Kerrigan moves across a landscape peopled with noir figures: bent cops/deputies, a corrupt judge, a too-helpful stranger (back to CRISS CROSS) an old friend who happens to be an honest-cop/deputy and boring as the range is wide (back to THE KILLERS) plus hired killers (ibid) stalking him across the prairie as he pursues his lonely vengeance against all odds. Hopson also throws in a few rampaging Apaches (ULZANA’S RAID, but that came later), who add to the noir feel of a hostile universe.

   Okay so there’s nothing too original here, and the ending’s entirely too pat, but Hopson keeps the plot moving nicely, and he has a sure hand for the action scenes. And A GUNMAN RODE NORTH is fast-reading enough that it’s fired and back in the holster before you have time to say, “Who was that masked man?”

VIOLENT SATURDAY. 20th Century Fox, 1955. Victor Mature, Richard Egan, Stephen McNally, Virginia Leith, Tommy Noonan, Lee Marvin, Margaret Hayes, J. Carrol Naish, Sylvia Sidney, Ernest Borgnine. Based on the novel by William L. Heath. Director: Richard Fleischer.

   It took me a long time to catch up with Violent Saturday, which I saw on local TV in the 60s, pretty badly cut up. At the time I thought it a compact little gem of a film, but seeing it again recently at last, I find it’s the kind of film that needs to be badly cut up.

   There’s a fine little Heist Movie at the heart of it, and when three exemplary Heavies like Stephen McNally, J. Carroll Naish and Lee Marvin finally square off against Victor Mature, the film snaps, crackles and pops with excitement. Unfortunately, it takes about eighty minutes of Nothing Very Much to get around to it.

   I recommend the book, by the way, a nifty little novel by W. L. Heath (Harper, 1955; reprinted by Black Lizard, 1985) that brings life to small-town characters reduced to Soap Opera status in the film.

JAMES CURTIS – They Drive by Night. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1938. John Lehman, UK, hardcover, 1948. Ace, paperback, date unknown (shown). London Books, UK, 2008. No US edition.

THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT. Warner Brothers-First National (UK), 1938. Emlyn Williams, Shorty Matthews, Ernest Thesiger, Anna Konstam, Allan Jeayes, Anthony Holles. Based on the book by James Curtis, who also wrote the screenplay. Director: Arthur B. Woods.

   They Drive by Night is one of those rarities: a uniquely enjoyable book turned into a rather different but equally fine film.

   The book details the travails of Shorty Mathews, a petty crook just out of gaol and anxious to return to his larcenous ways. He looks up some old mates, makes a few disparaging comments about a lady-friend currently working the streets and pays a call on said lady, only to find her brutally murdered.

   Fearing the Police, Williams turns to his old partners in crime for help, is spurned by them, and takes it on the lam, hitching rides from friendly truck drivers plying the north and southbound roads through the rain-drenched night (hence the title of the piece) and narrowly escaping the pursuing authorities.

   He runs into a co-worker of his murdered girlfriend — a hooker named Molly who works truck stops, hence a “Lorry Girl” — and eventually persuades her to help him. As they work to evade the law, thief and whore begin to develop feelings for each other and then . . . well that would be telling.

   Curtis spins the tale in lively first-person cockney rhyming slang (as in loaf = head because bread would rhyme with head if you said bread so you say loaf instead. Get it?) dealing out action and suspense in equal measure along with some colorful characterization. One measure of an author is how much care he takes with the bit players, and Curtis meets the mark and then some, filling his tale with sharp cops, hard-edged crooks and working stiffs so real you can smell the sweaty armpits.

   He also throws in one of the most real-seeming psychopaths I’ve ever encountered in literature or film: a character suffused with the shabby narcissism one finds in real-life criminals, brilliantly translated into prose. The chapters dealing with his lethal stalk through a seamy city offer a poetic realism and tense energy I’ll remember long after lesser (but better-known) serial slayers have gone their loony way. And if the wrap-up of the books is a bit prosaic, perhaps it’s all the more memorable for its tough-but-tender realism.

   The British subsidiary of Warner Brothers filmed this the same year and turned it into a fast-moving, moody little thriller directed by someone named Arthur Woods, who was set to replace Hitchcock when the Master of Suspense moved to Hollywood, but was an early casualty of World War II.

   Like Woods’ career, this film came to an untimely end when Warner Brothers decided to use the title and the truck-driving elements for their umpteenth remake of Bordertown two years later and “buried” this little gem for the next few decades.

   Be that as it may, this version of They Drive by Night is an enjoyable bit of work. Emlyn Williams plays Shorty with just the right touch of superficial toughness. Released on the morning when another inmate is executed for murder, he casually tosses off a flip comment about the dead man, then turns movingly repentant when he finds he’s talking to the man’s brother — a haunting stretch of cinema.

   For purposes of censorship, his lady-friend hooker is now a taxi-dancer (called Dance Hall Hostess over there) but she’s just as dead and the ensuing chase is just as lively, played out across a countryside that seems permanently hostile, wet and windswept. Of course Molly the Lorry Girl is now another dime-a-dance girl (played tough-but-not-brassy by Anna Konstam) and in another departure from the book, she helps him return to London to find the real killer.

   At which point the film shifts gears, concentrating on Molly’s efforts to find the killer by getting to know the dead woman’s regular customers, a theme that was (coincidentally?) developed into a memorable short story by Cornell Woolrich. One of the “regulars” played with customary gothic relish by Ernest Thesiger, is a learned eccentric, fond of reading and stray kittens, and with his entry, the movie glides smoothly into the realm of the horror film, right up to a moody, memorable finale.

   Existing prints of They Drive by Night are not of the best quality, but the film has enough action and intelligence to reward the viewer patient enough to give it the occasional squint. And the book is definitely worth your time.

Note: Another review of this film, the earlier one one written by Walter Albert, was posted here on this blog some four years ago.

SONG OF THE EAGLE. Paramount, 1933. Richard Arlen, Charles Bickford, Jean Hersholt, Mary Brian, Louise Dresser, Andy Devine, George E. Stone. Director: Ralph Murphy. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   Hersholt plays a genial brewery owner who attempts a comeback after the lifting of Prohibition, but refuses to go along with the extortion scheme of former employee and now big-time mob boss, Charles Bickford.

   Arlen is the honest son, Dresser the naive, and Devine a brewery employer who stays with Hersholt while certified rat George E. Stones casts his lot with Bickford. The scene in which Bickford gets his comeuppance is highly improbable although enormously satisfying.

   This plays like a Warner Brothers meller that got a bit soft in the head when it was re-routed through Paramount, but it’s still great fun.

ISLAND IN THE SKY. 20th Century Fox, 1938. Gloria Stuart, Michael Whalen, Paul Kelly, Paul Hurst, June Storey, Leon Ames. Director: Herbert I. Leeds. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   Beautiful Gloria Stuart is the fiancee of assistant D. A. Michael Whalen and when Whalen refuses to go out on a limb to save a young man on death row, who Stuart is convinced is innocent, she commandeers a reluctant Paul Hurst to help her prove the condemned man’s innocence.

   The climax is staged in an elegant roof-top restaurant and may strain your credibility but not your interest. This is Stuart’s film all the way and she commands the screen with such skill that you wonder why she interrupted her career so abruptly in 1946.

SLEEP, MY LOVE. United Artists, 1948. Claudette Colbert, Robert Cummings, Don Ameche, Rita Johnson, George Coulouris, Raymond Burr, Hazel Brooks. Director: Douglas Sirk.

   The disparity between actions and words in Caught (see my comments here ) was brought home even harder by the movie I saw right after it, Sleep, My Love, adapted from a novel by Leo Rosten, directed by Douglas Sirk, who helmed juicy films like Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows with a lurid sensitivity all his own.

    Sleep is basically Gaslight in modem dress: faithless-husband Don Ameche (quite nice in a rare bad-guy part) convinces naive-wife Claudette Colbert that she`s going loopy, with the help of a bogus shrink (George Coulouris, the nasty banker from Citizen Kane) so he can have her put away, grab her money, and marry lovely-but-cold Hazel Brooks (whose career apparently went nowhere after this promising start).

   Be that as it may, Don’s byzantine schemes … which are not exactly what they appear to be … get thwarted by healthy young Bob Cummings, one of the few leading men in Hollywood who could romance married women on the screen without losing audience sympathy.

   Okay, so Sleep, My Love goes through the whole Gaslight schtick, with Claudette hounded by nasty George Coulouris, then pampered with false sympathy by rotten Don Ameche, who gently prepares her for a nervous breakdown, while setting up his partner for a nifty double-cross.

   Director Sirk has some fun along the way, adding depth to the picture with carefully-observed scenes of a Chinese wedding, or an interview with a black housekeeper who is much sharper than we might expect. But the real impact of his direction comes with an ending that beautifully melds Style and Substance:

   Sirk has previously established that the Colbert-Ameche living room is curtained from the foyer by a frosted-glass sliding pocket-door. Toward the end, Don arranges to have his partner George waiting in the tiling room to hound Claudette some more. Or at least that`s what George thinks; (WARNING!!) actually Sneaky Ameche is handing his half-doped wife a gun and telling her that her persecutor is just beyond that door.

   Claudette almost shoots, but at the last minute awakens, whereupon her husband grabs the gun and shoots through the door himself, shattering the frosted glass to reveal Coulouris on the other side, who shoots back in revenge. (END OF WARNING.)

   Mere description doesn’t do justice to this scene, where, at the moment narratively when her husband breaks through his web of deception, he also visually breaks the barrier that hides his scheming partner: for once, we get a perfect visual correlative to what the story is telling us. And another reason why I go to the Movies.

KISS ME DEADLY. United Artists, 1955. Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, Albert Dekker as Dr. G.E. Soberin, Paul Stewart as Carl Evello, Juano Hernandez as Eddie Yeager, Wesley Addy as Lt. Pat Murphy, Marian Carr as Friday, Maxine Cooper as Velda, Cloris Leachman as Christina Bailey. Screenwriter: A. I. Bezzerides, based on the novel by Mickey Spillane. Director: Robert Aldrich.

   Robert Aldrich’s classic 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly came out on video recently with the original ending — truncated for Television ever since it fell off the Big Screen and landed in Tube-Land — restored for the first time in 40 years, and it set a lot of B-movie critics to re-writing their ideas about just what the film`s creators — director Aldrich and writer A. I. Bezzerides — had in mind.

   Kiss Me Deadly always was a subversive little film, full of stylish violence and sexual innuendo, unfolding a plot more hinted-at than explained, where “thieves and murderers fashion the tools of their own destruction,” with a hero (like Hammer, played with brilliant egotism by Ralph Meeker) callous and self-centered rather than heroic.

   And for years critics watched this film on television and saw an ambiguous ending (WARNING!!) where Mike and Velda run for the door to escape just as the house explodes. Did they make it? (END OF WARNING!) The uncertain resolution seemed to fit perfectly with the moral anarchy of the film, several critics who saw the movie only on television praised Aldrich`s underhand genius; Just imagine, they said, Sneaking an ending like that onto a mainstream film like this.

   Turns out, though, that as originally released, Kiss Me Deadly ended (WARNING!) with Mike and Velda clearly escaping — wading through the surf and looking back to see the villains of iniquity get vaporized. (END OF WARNING!) The few seconds extra footage that showed this (along with some shots of a torch singer in a nightclub handling her microphone a bit -ah- suggestively) were scrapped to make room for extra commercials when the film was sold to television, not restored till now.

   So for years, critics, general audiences, and mystery fans have been evaluating this movie and its creator — both of them — plenty subversive enough anyway — based on how they thought Kiss Me Deadly was filmed. And a movie that ends (WARNING!) with its thuggish hero battling through to survival is substantially different from one that seems to end with him possibly destroyed by his own lack of brains. (END OF WARNING)

   Which is what we mean, I guess, when we say “Trust the Tale, not the Teller.” Or something like that. Myself, I kind of like the truncated ending a little better, even if it was accidental. It seems to fit more with the overall mood of the piece. Trust the tale…

THE WHOLE TOWN’S TALKING. Columbia, 1935. Edward G. Robinson, Jean Arthur, Arthur Hohl, James Donlan, Arthur Byron, Wallace Ford, Donald Meek, Etienne Girardot. Director: John Ford.

   I waited a long time for The Whole Town’s Talking to come out on Video, and then it reminded me of my experiences with Spillane and James Hadley Chase: I wanted to like it a lot, but found myself disappointed,

   The Whole Town’s Talking (not to be confused with People Will Talk or The Talk of the Town) has some impressive credentials indeed: A Gangster/Comedy film with Edward G. Robinson and Jean Arthur, based on a story by W. R. Burnett and directed by none other than John Ford, not shown on television in years, so you can imagine how I looked forward to it.

   Turns out, though, to be an unimaginative little comedy, revolving around a meek clerk, played by Robinson, who resembles a Dillinger-like desperado, also played by Robinson, and the supposedly comic complications this has on his life. There’s a lot of Capra-esque business about poor little Edward G, abused by uncaring bosses and local politicos, and the presence of Jean Arthur pushes it even further into Capra territory.

   The film also features on performances by two supreme milquetoasts of the cinema, Etienne Girardot and Donald Meek, who actually share an all-too-short scene together. Unfortunately, the whole thing revolves around a character who never seems to do very much; the story just sort of moves — slowly — along without him… and without engendering too much interest.

   The University of Pittsburgh recently hosted the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies and more than 150 scholars spent four very busy days delivering and listening to papers, attending film showings, and socializing. There were twenty-nine panels, each of them consisting of the reading of three or four papers, followed by discussions, and there was a variety of screenings, highlighted by Robert Altman’s 1982 film, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, which the director attended for a post-screening session at which he responded to questions from a large and very sympathetic audience,

   The general topic of the convention was film genre, and the often sparsely attended screenings — film scholars seem to prefer to talk and be talked at rather than cluster anonymously in improvised screening rooms — featured a series of films “on, in, and beyond the genre.”

   Since the films were scheduled at the same time as the panels, I was constantly faced with agonizing decisions. However, I was able to reconcile most of my warring interests and managed to spend several hours in the dark watching Frank Borzage’s Mannequin (1938), a “melodrama of fashion and fetishism with Joan Crawford”; Dario Argento’s stylish horror film, Suspiria (1977); Robert Altman’s very individual and probably unclassifiable comedy drama, Brewster McCloud (1970); and Max Ophuls’ 1949 movie, The Reckless Moment, in addition to the festival screening of Altman’s Jimmy Dean film.

   Since I had already seen DeMille’s Unconquered (1947), Cassavetes’ Gloria (1980), and William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979), I managed a fairly comprehensive coverage of the convention films.

   One of the things that was clear from several of the panels I attended was that there is increasing recognition of the fact that the sub-genres (musical, western, science-fiction, film noir) are not aIways “pure” and there is a fair amount of “bleeding” among the various types, with, for example, elements of the crime film or film noir turning up in westerns or in musicals.

   Since writers on film have traditionally had difficulty defining film noir, establishing firm chronologies, and identifying those films which are undeniably noir, this makes it possible to examine a wide range of films in a number of different categories. Anyone who has looked very closely at the two major books on film noir, the Silver/Ward Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (Overlook Press, 1980) and Foster Hirsch’s work, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (A. S. Barnes, 1981), will have been struck by the lack of agreement on the basic body of films thought to constitute the official canon.

   There is, thus, under way what could be a very fruitful re-examination of the subject , and I would expect that over the next few years there will be major reformulations that will both define more precisely noir elements and refine their applications to particular films.

   While both Silver/Ward and Hirsch list Max Ophuls’ Reckless Moment in their filmographies, Silver/Ward point out the anomaly of casting a woman as the potentially doomed victim, rather than, as is usually the case in noir films, the tracked male. The casting is also ironic in that the woman is played by Joan Bennett, who was the destructive femme fatale in Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window, here playing an upper middle-class housewife who embarks upon a sequence of lies and deceptions to protect her daughter whom she mistakenly believes to be responsible for the death of her blackmailing lover.

   The film is based on a story by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, “The Blank Wall,” and has all the elements of standard woman-in-peril magazine fiction but reshaped by the superb direction of Ophuls into a subtle study of middle-class morality threatened by a seductive outsider (Shepperd Strudwick) who is “removed” and then replaced by an even more potentially dangerous threat (a blackmailer, James Mason, working with a totally unprincipled partner).

   The strength of the film is not only in the fluid, accomplished camera work which tracks Bennett in her increasingly more frantic quest for salvation and liberation, but in the bond which develops between Mason and Bennett, the rootless outsider, the black sheep, as he tells her, of his family, and the mother whose only concern is to protect her daughter from the consequences of her folly and keep the stain from contaminating the house and the other members of the family.

   The film is at its most intense and claustrophobic (she is, after all, walled in by her fears and assumptions) in its handling of the interior spaces of the Harper house. Bennett paces incessantly through the house, nervously chain-smoking, trying to hide her machinations from her family, as if she were turning in a cage.

   In the foreground, the camera is most obsessive about Bennett’s every move, but it is also recording, in the background, the routine of the family, so that the spectator is bound by a sense of a precarious balance between the two levels and of the constant threat of the possibility of the rupturing of the fragile membrane that separates the two.

   Bennett plays the role with a dark distraction in which she see ms always to be just a bit to one side of the on-screen action, plotting her next move. She is frequently interrupted, never really alone — even when she is driving with Donnelly, the character played by Mason, at a traffic light someone leans from the next car to talk to her.

   She is always tracked by the camera, but this is symptomatic of a larger trajectory at which her every movement seems to coincide with an intersection. There is no one moment in the film that is in itself irretrievably reckless. It is rather the narrative, restlessly exploring the implications of movements, that is reckless.

   Lucia Harper (Bennett) can only be saved by the intervention of an outside agency, initially threatening, finally converted into something benign and protective, a member of her extended family taking from her the role she cannot herself carry off successfully and restoring her as manager of the household and bearer of the telephone message to a no longer threatening exterior world, “Everything’s fine.”

   There are some of the recognizable features of film noir in the depiction of the doomed character (here uncharacteristically rescued), in the menacing shadows and reflections, and in the atmospheric — and sometimes sordid — milieux that we associate with the genre. But The Reckless Moment is no more to be restricted by a characterization of genre than any other film that uses form not for constriction but for expansion and elaboration.

   This is probably not a film of the same distinction as Ophuls’ Pleasure, The Earrings of Madame X, and Lola Montes, but it is a film of uncommon intelligence and taste, transforming its materials into something at once imperious and elusive, a perfect demonstration of Ophuls’ belief that, in art, “the most insignificant, the most unobtrusive among [details] are often the most evocative, characteristic and even decisive. Exact details, an artful little nothing, make art.”

THE RECKLESS MOMENT. Columbia, 1949. James Mason, Joan Bennett, Geraldine Brooks, Henry O’Neill, Shepperd Strudwick, David Bair, Roy Roberts. Based on the novel The Blank Wall (Simon & Schuster, 1947) by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Director: Max Ophüls.

TOO HOT TO HANDLE. MGM, UK, 1960. Also released as Playgirl After Dark, US, 1962. Jayne Mansfield, Leo Genn, Carl Boehm, Christopher Lee, Danik Patisson, Patrick Holt. Director: Terence Young.

   Too Hot to Handle proves an unexpectedly classy affair despite its tawdry background and leering attitude. Set in a seedy Soho strip club run by Jayne Mansfield and Leo Genn, it takes a diverse and mostly well-realized cast of characters through a tale of extortion, killing, and the odd permutations of love, pausing every three minutes or so for some young lady or another to remove most of her clothes and parade around a bit — who could want more?

   Well in fact, there’s a great deal more, starting with a fine cast of players you’ve mostly never heard of except for Christopher Lee, two years after he achieved horror-star status, here playing a duplicitous emcee in the pay of a rival strip-club owner (Sheldon Lawrence, a nasty to the manner born) and not above pimping for the patrons, including Martin Boddey who comes off truly creepy as an old letch trying to look “mod.”

   There are other able players about, including Carl Boehm, but the film basically belongs to Genn and Mansfield, eking out their emotional needs with each other, keeping the girls in line, fighting goons and trying to keep up a passable front (obvious Jayne Mansfield joke omitted here) while moving the plot along. They do quite well with it, thanks to able writing and fluid direction from Terrence Young, who would soon kick off the Bond series, and here shows a fine sensibility for violence and titillation.

   Ah yes, the titillation. Well it ain’t much by today’s standards, and the strip acts sometimes look more like overblown numbers from Al Jolson’s Wonder Bar than anything in a Soho strip club, with elaborate orchestrations, lighting, wind effects and even rain. Despite that, there is one surprisingly simple and steamy number that will appeal to the arrested adolescent in all of us. Look for it.

   You can also look for an ending you won’t expect. As the plot grows more violent, the characters surprisingly grow more mature, leading to a conclusion that some may think disappointing, but one I found convincing and downbeat, the perfect climax to a film of surprising intelligence.