The Asphalt Jungle: John Huston

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/an-essential-the-asphalt-jungle/.

Rating: 8/10

Key Largo: John Huston

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/bogart-and-bacall-a-four-film-retrospective/.

8/10

To Have and Have Not: Howard Hawks

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/bogart-and-bacall-a-four-film-retrospective/.

6/10

The Big Sleep: Howard Hawks

To read this review, go to: theretroset.com/bogart-and-bacall-a-four-film-retrospective/.

6/10

Don't Bother to Knock: Roy Ward Baker

Man, all I wanted was something light before I went to bed. Turns out Roy Ward Baker's Don't Bother to Knock is a complex, superbly acted noir tragedy featuring none other than Marilyn Monroe as a suicidally insane ex-mental patient moonlighting as a babysitter in a lavish hotel. Freaking what? I've never seen Monroe do a role like this before. Complex ones, deep ones, dramatic ones...sure! But I've never seen her actually be crazy. And she's not half bad. Sometimes her trembling voice seems to channel none other than Jacqueline Kennedy, and at those times she starts to slip over into the realm of camp. Thankfully there are a number of other great actors and actresses pinch-hitting for her: Richard Widmark, Anne Bancroft, and Elisha Cook Jr., just to name a few. It's always a treat to find such ensemble casts in films that fell to the wayside of film history. I think I need to revisit this one when I'm not half asleep. It was quite good.

7/10

The Postman Always Rings Twice: Tay Garnett

[Revisit Review]

Wow...talk about a difference in quality between a source novel and its cinematic adaptation. Earlier today I finished James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Then I rewatched the Tay Garnett version. It doesn't do the book justice. The book is a marvel of calculated simplicity--there's not a word out of place anywhere. It's lean, mean, and utterly without pretension. Garnett's film takes the trappings of Cain's story and stretches it over a romantic melodrama mold. I could never believe that the two characters played by John Garfield and Lana Turner could possess the ruthlessness to kill. Turner herself gives a curiously sub-par performance: I counted three times when her character responded with a throaty, community-theater "Ha!" when confronted with unpleasant news. The film also feels overlong, Garnett doing a rather poor job balancing all of Cain's plot developments which take only one or two pages in the book but drag on for 4-5 minutes of run-time.

4/10

The Big Clock: John Farrow

Huh. And here I was thinking that I had already seen all of the great film noir. I saw John Farrow's The Big Clock as the second part of a double feature shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (the first was Anthony Mann's superlative Reign of Terror [1949]). While I admit that I might have nodded off for a few seconds once or twice, I was still blown away by the film's air-tight plotting and razor-sharp screenwriting. It reminded me a great deal of Irving Pichel's Quicksand (1950) in that it spends the first third setting up an environment and a cast of characters and devotes the rest of the run-time utilizing them to create the ultimate bad day for the protagonist. The film's central idea--an innocent man being hunted in a skyscraper by people who may or may not know what he looks like--it absolutely ingenious. Charles Laughton is delicious as the evil head publisher.

8/10

Murder, My Sweet: Edward Dmytryk

[Revisit Review]

Just like how Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely is a superior novel in all respects to his more famous novel The Big Sleep, Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet is a superior film to Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946). Darker, moodier, and more cutting, Murder My Sweet may not have the sheer star power or quotability of Hawks' film, but it captures Chandler's vision better with amazing impressionist sequences that mimic Philip Marlowe's mindset--just take the sequence where he's being drugged by a corrupt doctor.

9/10

Strangers in the Night: Anthony Mann

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/b-roll-anthony-manns-strangers-in-the-night-1944/.

8/10

Night at the Crossroads: Jean Renoir

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/b-roll-jean-renoirs-night-at-the-crossroads-1932/.

9/10

Call Northside 777: Henry Hathaway

Henry Hathaway's Call Northside 777 feels like an odd middle stage between the early film noir shot mostly on studio sound stages and the middle era film noir shot mostly on location in cities and suburbia. Based on a real-life court-case about a man wrongfully arrested and imprisoned for eleven years for the murder of a police officer, Call Northside 777 sometimes feels like the dying embers of Expressionism. I was particularly interested in its depiction of a culture of corrupt cops more than willing to imprison possibly innocent people in the name of vengeance for the murder of one of their own. In this sense, it seems eerily timely considering the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. I kind of wish that this sub-plot had extended beyond the second act. But unfortunately it is largely dropped for a rather tedious third act where we watch the characters repeat investigative information we largely already know. The ending where the exonerated man reunites with his family also seems bizarrely anti-climactic. Maybe some music would have helped?

7/10

Detective Story: William Wyler

To read this review, go to: http://www.theblackmaria.org/2015/08/04/b-roll-william-wylers-detective-story-1951/.

9/10

The Big Heat: Fritz Lang

[Revisit Review]

The first time I saw Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, I was relatively unimpressed. It seemed rather dull and blasé. Roger Ebert's claim that beneath its (relatively) pleasant exterior lurked one of the most sinister, sobering examinations of evil in American cinema seemed unmerited. But it's been a few years now and I have to say that maybe Ebert was on to something. If anything, I found Glenn Ford's portrayal of an oblivious walking force of utter destruction fascinating.

8/10

A Woman’s Face: George Cukor

To read this review, go to: http://www.theblackmaria.org/2015/06/23/b-roll-george-cukors-a-womans-face-1941/.

8/10

When Strangers Marry: William Castle

What a delightful discovery! I never would have imagined that William Castle, the master of gimmicks and ridiculous horror films, could have directed such a moody, tense, and wonderfully atmospheric thriller as When Strangers Marry. The film, which centers on a young wife who begins to suspect that her husband might be a murderer, incredibly outshines Suspicion (1941), an earlier film with a similar plot directed by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. There are a handful of magnificent sequences that I can only imagine would have made the Master of Suspense green with envy: the suspected husband flummoxing a sideshow carny who boasts that he can guess anyone's profession with only three guesses; a couple on the run being forced to share a cramped cab with a screaming infant; a hallucinogenic scene where the wife is plagued with visions of people calling her husband a murderer while traveling down a darkened tunnel at night. It reminds me of another early noir with a run-time that barely exceeded 60 minutes: Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). Both made up for their low-budget production short-comings with excellent performances, hyper-stylized sequences reflecting their characters' inner paranoia, and a crackerjack script. Where When Strangers Marry falters is that it gives away its major twist with an unfortunate bit of casting. The moment this character appears you know that he's up to no good. They should have invested in a more milquetoast actor. I bet Elisha Cook, Jr. would have been perfect.

8/10

Boomerang!: Elia Kazan

To read this review, go to: http://theblackmaria.org/2015/05/05/b-roll-elia-kazans-boomerang-1947/.

8/10

Double Indemnity: Billy Wilder

[Revisit Review]

Yes, yes, well all remember how Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity is a trademark of the film noir genre. Its cinematography, its screenplay, Barbara Stanwyck's turn as one of the greatest femme fatale to ever grace the screen...We remember all of it. But during my third viewing of the film, I was amazed at just how much genuine tension I felt during the Edward G. Robinson scenes. In particular, the moments when he comes to Fred MacMurray's apartment and Stanwyck hides behind his door and when Porter Hall visits his office are incredible. That's the true mark of excellent craftsmanship: when something is still suspenseful and thrilling even when you know what's going to happen.

10/10

Sweet Smell of Success: Alexander Mackendrick

[Revisit Review]

Is Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success a perfect film noir? Dodging the obvious absurdity of the question itself, it is hard to deny that the film is not just one of the towering exemplars of the genre but of 1950s cinema in general. The stars must have aligned when it was made. How else could you reconcile the combination of James Wong Howe's cinematography, one of the greatest screenplays ever written (that is NOT an exaggeration), Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster's performances, and a story which refuses to relent in its nearly nihilistic intensity?

10/10

Murder by Contract: Irving Lerner

I agree with both Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Rosenbaum in their celebration of Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract as a triumph. The film is an existentialist masterpiece that I earnestly believe fits right alongside of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as a penetrating glimpse into the mind of a murderer who believes themselves to be either above or outside of the law. The film's protagonist is Claude, a disaffected man who one day decides to become a contract killer. After rising through the ranks of the underworld, he is assigned to kill a woman in Los Angeles. And for the first time Claude is uneasy with his orders: he hesitates killing women because he views them as less "predictable" as men. This late era film noir is dripping with effortless style and magnificently embodies the aesthetic of the "cool." The restrained camerawork, the isolated electric guitar soundtrack, Vince Edwards' insouciant performance as Claude, and the film's frequent passive passages that focus on Claude biding his time, exercising, and waiting either for his next assignment or for the right moment to strike, make Murder by Contract unlike any other American film of its era. One last thought: when Claude's mob handlers in Los Angeles mock him by calling him "Superman," are they referring to the superhero or to the Nietzschean ideal? Or maybe, just maybe, are they calling him both?

9/10

Moonrise: Frank Borzage

By 1948, Frank Borzage, that old master of Hollywood, that unapologetic romanticist whose work triumphed during the Twenties and Thirties, had fallen by the wayside. The man who had won the very first Academy Award for Directing in 1927 was now struggling to secure projects. Perhaps Borzage’s brand of earnest melodrama turned sour in the mouths of a generation who had struggled through the hell of World War Two. As the years marched on, war-time idealism melted into nihilistic cynicism. This was no longer a time when a director who concluded an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms with doves and church bells could flourish. And yet, as his career began to crumble, Borzage managed to release one more true masterpiece; a film that reconciled his passion for lovers facing adversity with the nightmare psychoses consuming America ego. That film was Moonrise.

The opening few minutes of Moonrise set the tone for the rest of the film. It begins with the execution by hanging of a man accused of murder. The proceedings are shown via shadows that seem chiseled onto the wall behind the gallows. As the hangmen pulls the lever, smash cut to the crib of a newborn. A grim outline of a toy doll literally hangs over the bedsheets as the criminal’s infant son, Danny Hawkins, wails and wails. Jump cut to Danny as a schoolboy forced to endure the taunts of his classmates. “Danny Hawkins dad was hanged! Danny Hawkins dad was hanged,” they chant as their ringleader Jerry Sykes wraps his hands about his throat and pretends to choke himself to death. Another cut, another few years pass. Danny’s torment continues. And finally, one night as Jerry beats him senseless, two things break: Danny’s mind and Jerry’s skull.

Those who know Borzage purely by reputation as a romanticist may be shocked by the jagged, neo-expressionist visual grammar used in these scenes: extreme shadowplay, stilted frame compositions, and high-contrast chiaroscuro lighting. But Borzage had been using such techniques for decades, having first picked them up from his contemporary F.W. Murnau while they were both working at Fox in the 1920s. Though Borzage’s films were rich in sentimentality, they demonstrated acute stylistic acumen. As the film continues, Borzage continues to reveal bold stylistic techniques. One of the most apparent is his consistent use of crossfades between charged images: a young woman wringing her hands in church into an old woman’s hands knitting; a paranoid man’s face into a raccoon. Indeed, Moonrise is not a film that can simply be watched passively. It demands to be watched, not merely observed.

From Danny’s desperate act of murder, the film charts his mental decimation, emotional reconstruction, and psychological reconciliation with his actions. A few kind souls help in his rehabilitation. The first is Mose, a retired brakeman who lives in self-imposed isolation in the woods with his hounds and guitar. Played with great dignity by Rex Ingram, Mose may be a kindly old Black Man who helps the White Protagonist, but instead of solving Danny’s problems, he helps force him to confront them.

But the other is sweet Gilly Johnson, a schoolteacher who quickly forms the other half of Borzage’s romantic universe. It is here that we find the major difference between Moonrise and many of Borzage’s other films: the forces that seek to tear the lovers apart. Often these forces are external ones such as World War One in A Farewell to Arms (1932), the sinking of a lavish ocean liner in History Is Made at Night (1937), or the rise of Nazism in The Mortal Storm (1940). But in Moonrise the adversity springs from Danny’s tortured mind. It manifests itself physically, such as an early scene where traumatic flashbacks cause him to crash a car while she was in the passenger seat, and  mentally. During a coon-hunt with Mose he has a minor breakdown while shaking a raccoon out of a tree. Borzage cuts to a pile of logs next to a cabin...a pile suspiciously similar to the one where Danny murdered his tormentor. Does Danny project himself on the raccoon? If so, then what does it say about his desperate attempts to capture it?

Danny’s internal dilemma of coming to terms with a forced act of violence takes on new meaning when evaluated in the context of post-World War Two American society. One of the cornerstones of film noir were protagonists who were damaged, either physically or mentally, by their time in the armed forces. If we consider Danny’s psychoses as allegorical, then Moonrise becomes more than just a dark melodrama; it enters the realm of bona-fide film noir. Consider Danny as America: haunted by the specter of a violent tragedy (Danny’s father’s hanging/World War Two), the protagonist is goaded into violence (murder/World War Two) by an incessant attacker (Jerry Sykes/the Axis) that leaves him broken, beaten, and bruised.

Of course, this is merely one possible reading. While it isn’t absurd to believe that Borzage may have deliberately made such comparisons, there is no doubt that at the end of the day his primary concern in Moonrise was Danny Hawkins and Gilly Johnson. Their love is no panacea, but it offers hope that Danny can rebuild his life. And therein is Borzage’s secret: the belief that despite everything the world may throw at you, love can be a force for salvation and goodness. His romanticism does not deny the world, it burns in spite of it.

9/10