The Film Noir Foundation and AFI roll out Noir City DC October 16th-November 3rd, and it looks to be another raging success. The lineup this year is an embarrassment of riches:
Border Incident-Anthony Mans's gritty illegal immigrant noir, featuring amazing work by cinematographer John Alton.
Vertigo-Hitchcock directs Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in one of the truly essential American films.
Criss Cross-Robert Siodmak directs Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo in a 100% perfect film noir. A masterpiece.
Act of Violence-Robert Ryan and Van Heflin in this long dark night of the soul. A beautiful and brilliant (and vastly underrated) masterpiece.
Pitfall-Lizabeth Scott, Dick Powell, and Raymond Burr in Andre De Toth's love triangle from hell. One of my favorite films.
Pushover-Yet another underrated masterpiece! Bad girl Kim Novak and bad cop Fred McMurray fall in love and hell opens under their feet.
The Night of the Hunter-Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish square off in this Flannery O'Connor meets Caligari nightmare. Brilliant--and not to be missed on the big screen.
And more!
This is an extraordinary collection of films, a mix of established gems and overlooked works of genius. If you live in or around the DC area (or if you just happen to be in town for the Jon Stewart/Stepehn Colbert rally on the National Mall), do not pass up an opportunity to see some of the these works on the big screen in the gorgeous AFI facility.
(note: an earlier version of this article appeared in the Noir City Sentinel, which you can subscribe to by becoming a member of the Film Noir Foundation. For more information of the FNF, click here)
Hollywood doesn’t make fight scenes like it used to, however odd that may sound in the age of CGI and advanced stunt work. Today’s blockbusters may spend millions on martial arts choreography and fiery set pieces, but often the action lapses into redundancy and mindlessness. The newest trend is to edit action scenes so quickly that watching them feels like staring into a strobe light.
There’s a lot to be said for a fight that takes place for a reason, between two guys (or three) messing up their suits and Brylcream, thrown together in cramped quarters in the sudden violence of a moment. When these slugfests occur in noir, there’s usually a motivation: one guy has loved another guy’s wife, or a criminal has decided a witness can be silenced, or a normal man finds himself eyeball to eyeball with a psychopath. Whatever the reason, the genre has had more than its share of notable brawls. Here’s a ringside seat to some of the most memorable:
10. Gene Nelson Vs. Timothy Carey in Crime Wave (1954)-This one’s short and sweet, but the sheer weirdness of Timothy Carey earns it a nod of recognition. Psycho Carey is trying to kill Phyllis Kirk when her husband Nelson busts in. The two men briefly tussle before taking a spill down a flight of stairs. The priceless part is watching perennial nutjob Carey leap into action. This guy even fights weird. (for my review of the movie click here)
9. Dana Andrews Vs. Craig Stevens inWhere The Sidewalk Ends (1950)-Another short brawl, but this one’s notable for a couple of reasons. For one, badass cop Dana Andrews gets to hand it to hood Stevens. Note to hoods: don’t sucker punch Dana Andrews. The other reason this tussle stands out is that it has repercussions. It’s after the fight goes bad that all hell breaks lose, so the outcome of this unexpected little altercation determines the course of the rest of the movie.
8. John Garfield Vs. Victor Sen Yung inThe Breaking Point (1950)-Tough guy John Garfield was in more than his share of onscreen scraps, but the most desperate came aboard a fishing boat off the coast of Mexico in the middle of the night. Down on his luck, boat captain Garfield has decided to take a job sneaking some illegal immigrants across international waters under the nose of the Coast guard. When the gangster in charge of the operation, Victor Se Yung, tries to renegotiate the payment at the point of a gun, all hell breaks lose. Director Michael Curtiz was a master of action, and this was the most intimate fight he ever filmed.
7. Charlton Heston Vs. A Roomful of Punks in Touch Of Evil (1958)- Orson Welles was never a great physical actor himself, but the man could direct an action scene when he felt like it. He redefined battle scenes in Chimes At Midnight, and in Touch Of Evil he unleashed one of the great barroom brawls. Pissed off cop and worried husband Charlton Heston is franticly looking for his missing wife when his search leads him to a border town strip joint. He is unwilling to accept “We don’t know where she is” for an answer and proceeds to take the place apart in a storm of ass-kicking. It’s Heston versus a roomful of younger men. Guess who wins.
6. Steve Cochran Vs. King Donovan in Private Hell 36 (1954)-Director Don Siegel and writers/producers Ida Lupino and Collier Young kick off their 1954 bad cop drama with an almost comically destructive brawl in a drugstore. Still-honest policeman Cochran jumps a couple of punks trying to make a late night score. He shoots one and tussles with the other, in the process laying waste to the entire establishment. By the time they crash out into the street, there’s not much left to destroy. The proprietor of the drugstore might understandably wish he had just lost the night’s cash register receipts.
5. Dennis O’Keefe (with assistance from Marsha Hunt) Vs. John Ireland and Tom Fadden in Raw Deal (1948)-The seemingly messy three-man melee in the back of Grimshaw’s Taxidermy is another of Anthony Mann’s deftly choreographed and psychologically rich pieces of film violence. Once he had positioned his subtly moving camera under chairs or in closets, the director loved to slam the action around a room and then have it crash down as close as possible to the lens. You might dock the scene a point or two for having Marsha Hunt stand by too long as a frightened spectator, but she comes through at the end, delivering the coup de grace to Ireland and sealing her love for O’Keefe.
4. John Payne Vs. Neville Brand and Lee Van Cleef in Kansas City Confidential (1952)- Here’s an irony: John Payne might have been a pretty boy singer early on in his career, but in film noir he became a human punching bag. His three-film collaboration with director Phil Karlson is an extended study in the fine art of thumping skulls. Payne’s cinematic pugilism got off to a good start in Kansas City Confidential. The film is packed with action, but for sheer sweaty intensity there’s no topping his three-way brawl with thug king Neville Brand and rat-faced Lee Van Cleef. Payne comes out on the losing end of this one, but he would live to fight another day.
3. John Payne Vs. Jack Lambert in 99 River Street (1953)- Payne’s second film with Karlson, 99 River Street, is their masterpiece of brutality, a veritable cornucopia of beatings, slappings and bare-knuckle fisticuffs. The best fight in the film is a down and dirty number in an apartment between boxer-turned cabbie Payne and a gun-wielding thug played by Jack Lambert. Payne takes a beating in the early rounds, but by the end he’s turned Lambert’s face into tenderized meat. A great fight in an underrated film. (for my review of the film click here)
2. Charles McGraw Vs. David Clarke in The Narrow Margin (1952)-Close quarters fisticuffs rarely got closer than this scrap between cop and crook in the men’s lavatory of a moving train. Director Richard Fleischer uses a handheld camera and no stunt doubles as McGraw and Clarke beat each other senseless. The most impressive thing about the scene is how much movement it packs into a room that’s no more than eight feet wide. Fleischer has his actors utilize every inch of the space, but most importantly he plunges his camera into the action until it’s almost a participant in the fight. The camera hurls itself forward, rolls around on the floor with the actors, and even takes a couple of licks. This might be the most famous fight in noir.
1. Robert Ryan Vs. Hal Baylor in The Set-Up (1949)-The best fight on record has to be the bout between aging, down-on-his-luck boxer Robert Ryan and the much younger Hal Baylor in Robert Wise’s masterpiece The Set-Up. The fight has been fixed, but no one’s told Ryan he’s supposed to take the fall. When he starts to win, we start to worry because there’s a gangster sitting in the audience who thinks he’s been double crossed. The tension pulls us two ways. We want this broken down boxer to redeem himself against the young upstart, but we also want him to lose, to spare himself the gangster’s wrath. The bout lasts much of the film—which famously unfolds in more or less real time—and it is an exquisite piece of work. Wise was always a strong director of action and here he was working with two real fighters: Ryan held a college championship and Baylor was the California Heavyweight Champion. Together, the three of them created what is probably the best fight scene of the classic period of film.
Man of the West was Anthony Mann’s last foray into the Old West before he began the third phase of his career. He'd started out as one of the best noir directors of the classic era (Raw Deal, Railroaded!), moved on to a lucrative and artistically successful collaboration with Jimmy Stewart on a cycle of Westerns (The Naked Spur, The Man From Laramie), and ended his career as the force behind a series of epics (The Fall Of The Roman Empire, El Cid). It was an amazing career, one of the best in the history of movies. In fact, it shows the depth of Mann’s work that a masterpiece like Man of the West has been overlooked by so many people.
The film is, in many ways, the best one Mann ever made. It is certainly one of the two or three best Westerns I’ve ever seen (up there with The Searchers and Unforgiven). It’s a dark and violent story about a man named Link Jones (Gary Cooper) who begins the film as an affable everyman traveling by train to find a schoolteacher for his little town of Good Hope. After a botched train robbery, Jones is stranded in the wilderness with a saloon singer named Billie Eillis (Julie London) and a card shark named Beasley (Arthur O’Connell). Together the three of them stumble into the hideout of the train robbers, a rough band led by an old outlaw Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb). Turns out Dock and Link know each other.
At the time Man of the West was made, the Western was at its peak. It had been the dominate genre in Hollywood (and, really the world) since the thirties. Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that the Western built Hollywood (after all, the desert is where you shot these horse operas). The genre would remain supreme until the seventies when the combination of Watergate and Star Wars killed it as a viable commercial force. On the one hand, institutional corruption threw the Western’s right-leaning worldview into disrepute. On the other hand, the space opera became the industry’s bread and butter. The frontier moved into outer space. The Western seemed old and hokey. It’s continued, of course, and good Westerns are still produced, but its day has passed.
Chief among the pleasures of the genre is a dark gem like Man of the West. As the film opens, we think we’re in one kind of film, but once Link and Dock square off their confrontation becomes a riveting drama. Mann had always been interested in violence as the result of thwarted masculinity and that theme finds its fullest expression in this film. There’s an extraordinary sequence in which one of Dock’s thugs, a psycho named Coaley (a young Jack Lord), holds a knife to Link’s throat and forces Billie to do a striptease. It’s a horrifying scene of symbolic rape (one aimed, really, at Link), and it is followed by an astonishing scene later in which Link beats Coaley and strips him naked, thus returning the symbolically sexualized assault.
This is dark stuff, but the film is deft in marrying its darkness to the bright form of the traditional Western. Look at the shootout in the ghost town of Lassoo near the end of the film. This sequence works on a richly symbolic level: while Dock thinks the town is a bustling mining community with a fat bank full of cash, it turns out to be an abandoned scattering of shacks. In this ghost town, Dock's hopes for the future are destroyed, and Link is able to confront his violent past. The sequence works as a piece of symbolism, but it also ends in a hell of a great shootout, up there with the gunfights in High Noon,Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and Open Range.
You can feel Mann’s presence throughout the film—and his direction was never better—but due credit must be given to the film’s other two main creative forces. The script by Reginald Rose (from the novel The Border Jumpers by Will C. Brown) is simply terrific. Every character has a distinct voice, and Dock Tobin in particular is fun to listen to as he gets excited and gives praise to God for the robbery the gang is about to pull off.
The other major player here is Gary Cooper. He had always been an actor uncommonly comfortable with silence, imbued with the screen actor’s greatest gift: his face registered thought on camera. Orson Welles once explained to Peter Bogdanovich that while Cooper knew nothing of craft, he simply showed up on camera. On the set, Welles explained, Cooper seemed to be doing nothing. Once his performance was projected onscreen, however, it turned out the camera had caught some magic not visible to the naked eye. By the time he made Man of the West, Cooper was nearly at the end of his life. He had pretty much created the Western hero with his performance in The Virginian in 1929, helped Capra define the Everyman in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe (the director once said, “Gary Cooper just looks like America to me”), helped create the screwball comedy with Lubitsch in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, was Hollywood’s biggest male star in the forties, and gave his iconic performance as the beleaguered lawman in Zinnemann’s High Noon in 1952. His career was a towering body of work, and Man of the West is probably the best performance he ever gave. Watch him at the beginning, affable but withdrawn from the other characters, then watch his worry deepen, his inwardness turning dark as the film progresses. This is film acting of the highest caliber.
Cooper has long been one of my favorite actors, up there with Bogart and Mitchum, but he’s something else: he’s my favorite cowboy, more sensitive than Wayne but less neurotic than Stewart. With this film, Anthony Mann and Reginald Rose gave him one last great cowboy part to play.
Like most people my age, I grew up with two images of Ricardo Montalban (who died Wednesday at the age of 88). One, he was the old guy on Fantasy Island. Much more importantly, he was Khan in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I don't have much to say about Fantasy Island because I only saw it a few times when I was a kid. Of Star Trek II, I can say this: his performance elevates the whole film. I'm not a Trekker, but perhaps that's my main qualification for recommending that movie. As a non-aficionado, I can testify that it's an exciting piece of science fiction and that Montalban is excellent in it. Take my word on that for what it's worth.
I know a lot more about film noir than I do science fiction, however, and on this subject I can highly recommend a couple of films you might be interested in. In the late forties and early fifties, Ricardo Montalban put in some time in the land of perpetual night, turning in good performances in two enjoyable noirs directed and shot by some of the genre's masters.
The first noir was Border Incident (1949), which was probably the best noir about illegal immigration (yes, there were others) made in during the classic period. It was directed by Anthony Mann and lensed by the incomparable John Alton. It's a good piece of work, with Montalban starring as Mexican agent who goes undercover to bust a gang of crooks who sneak migrant workers into the country and then double cross them once they get here. It's interesting to see this issue play out in a late-forties drama, and even more interesting to see Montalban's portrayal as the upright Mexican lawman.
His other film noir was the superior Mystery Street (1950) directed by John Sturges. Here Montalban is in Boston trying to track down a killer. The film (like Border Incident) is notable mainly for Alton's incredible lighting, but Mystery Street, in its way, also marks an interesting progression in the depiction of race in American films. Here's an American mystery story from 1950 where the hero is a Hispanic-American. It's not even part of the plot; he's just the good guy. Montalban might be best remembered as either an old dude in a white suit or as Captain Kirk's archnemisis, but fans of classic film would be well-served to check out his contributions to film noir.
