Author Archives: Lloydville

THE SUNDOWNERS

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Kierkegaard once remarked that many of the greatest human virtues, like loyalty and faithfulness over time, are almost impossible to dramatize, which is why there are legions of great dramas about adultery but hardly any about good marriages.

A drama about a good marriage has to deal with subtleties, with crises that don’t lead to disaster, with everyday acts of love that don’t erupt into shattering passion.

And yet . . . is there anything more suspenseful than a good marriage? Is there any murder mystery more intricate than the process of accomodation, of creative sympathy and adjustment which keeps a good marriage alive?


Fred Zinneman’s The Sundowners, from 1960, is a movie about a good marriage — about the accumulation of small dramas, never quite reaching a climax, never quite being resolved, that hide within the miracle of a good marriage.

Set in Australia in the 1920s, it’s about a family of itinerant sheep drovers.  It’s filled with spectacular location photography and has a few suspenseful action sequences, but at its
heart are a hundred and one things that don’t go wrong, when they should.  The father and mother of a teenage son who make up the family don’t change in the course of the film — they have no “arc”, to use a bit of terminology from modern Hollywood storytelling, which turns
characters into geometrical shapes.  We just watch scene after scene in which they struggle to remain who they are — two married people deeply in love with each other, deeply committed to each other.

We watch the compromises they make, their acts of forgiveness, their miraculous triumphs of sympathy and empathy, their well-worn joy in each other.

Then suddenly . . . nothing happens.  They endure.


As the couple, Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr give miraculous performances, quiet and understated — you need to watch them carefully to see the deep currents flowing between them . . . but they’re there, especially in their bedroom talk, where you get glimpses of a grown-up sexuality that mainstream filmmakers rarely portray, probably because they’ve never gotten closer to it than passing a copy of Anna Karenin on their way through a Barnes and Noble bookstore.

The Sundowners may not be great drama, but it’s spiritually exhilarating — something more than drama, perhaps.

ICKY THUMP

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Mark your calendars — the new White Stripes album Icky Thump arrives on 19 June.  Meanwhile, here's a video
of the title song to whet your appetite.  It seems to have been
partly filmed in a Mexican whorehouse, and the lyrics have a message
for people obsessed with illegal aliens from south of the border —
“kick yourself out . . . you're an immigrant, too.”



¡Viva Stripes!

A WATERHOUSE FOR TODAY

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You could get lost in the spatial complications of this painting, Destiny
by John William Waterhouse, which take a while to sort out.  The
sorting out is part of the artist’s strategy for drawing you into the
image — as the female figure’s dream of the adventures those ships
could take her on becomes your own.  For her the ships are reflections
in a glass, for you they’re paint on canvas — dreaming makes them both
real.

NO SUCH THING

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Someone once remarked that there's no such thing as a bad film noir.  It's a strange propostion and the strangest thing about it is that it's pretty much true.



I've just watched over 30 films noirs
and none of them was anything less than a wondrously entertaining
B-picture.  There are some clunkers that are labelled films noirs but really aren't — like Otto Preminger's Whirlpool,
for example, which is in fact a Hitchcockian suspense thriller made by
a man who had no clue as to how Hitchcock created suspense . . . but even among the faux noirs, films that are noirish only in visual style, for example, most have dialogue and images that are thrilling.



I'm not sure how to explain this consistency of quality except by suggesting that noir
represented such a release from the thematic and stylistic conventions
of the traditional studio product that filmmakers responded with an
outburst of pent-up creativity and daring.  They must have known
that they were inventing a new kind of film, even if it didn't have a
name yet, and the fact that there were no set rules for this kind of
film made it hard for the studios to wrestle it into a set
formula.  Films noirs
were relatively cheap to make, and people couldn't seem to get enough
of them, so the studios stepped back and let the experimentation
continue — for almost 20 years.


The first film that displayed the characteristic visual style of the noir was a fairly routine murder mystery called I Wake Up Screaming (above) from 1941.  Double Indemnity, from 1944, gave us protagonists who were morally currupt to the core.  Neither was, to my way of thinking, a genuine film noir, but Double Indemnity
was a radical indication that a change was on its way — that audiences
could accept a darker view of the world than the Hollywood studios had ever been
willing to embrace.



As early as 1945, in Edgar G. Ulmer's no-budget thriller Detour,
the combination of an exaggerated, expressionistic visual style and a
sense of the world as morally unhinged at its core produced a template
for the classic film noir, a vehicle for the subterranean mood of existential dread that gripped America in the wake of WWII.



None of the movies made about the war itself ever expressed as
eloquently its psychic cost to a generation of Americans as did the
movies we now call film noirs. 
They crackle with the excitement of artists suddenly allowed to deal
with truths that couldn't be addressed in the official view of
things.  Corporate entertainment tends to gravitate towards the
official view of things but there are times when the official view of
things diverges so radically from the actual mood of the audience that
accommmodations have to be made.  Film noir was one of the most radical of those accommodations.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

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[Note — this post contains plot spoilers and shouldn’t be read if you haven’t already seen Leave Her To Heaven.]

Leave Her To Heaven is one of the strangest films ever made in studio-era Hollywood.  The tension between its text and its subtext is so violent that it can induce mild dizziness.  It’s sometimes called, unhelpfully I think, a film noir.  It’s certainly a dark film, despite its gorgeous Technicolor photography, and it deals with some of the same cultural neuroses that inform the noir tradition, but it comes at them from a different perspective — a female perspective.

At the heart of the film is Ellen, played by Gene Tierney — a
beautiful, narcissistic psychopath.  We’re told early on that
Ellen wrecked her parents’ marriage by her obsessively close
relationship with her father.  The minute we hear this
extraordinary bit of information our perceptions should be alerted that things
aren’t always going to be what they seem in this film — though I
imagine that it’s mostly women who pick up on it, and perhaps only
subconsciously.

Think about it.  A grown man allows his marriage to be ruined by his obsessively close
relationship with his daughter — and the child is blamed.  This
strikes me as a kind of emotional code, alluding to the phenomenon of blaming
women for the psychic and moral failings of men.

Ellen will go on in the course of the film to do horrible things — she
will murder a crippled boy, her husband’s brother, she will induce
the miscarriage of her own unborn child and she will try to frame her
innocent cousin for murder.  She becomes a monster and no rational
consideration can induce us to sympathize with her — but we do.
We do because of the coded text embedded in the overt one.

In the film, Ellen falls in love with and marries Dick, apparently
because he reminds her of her father.  Cornell Wilde is
brilliantly cast in the role.  He looks like a hunk but is a kind
of black hole on screen, with a blank face and eyes that express little
more than hurt and bewilderment.  He’s further un-manned in the
narrative, which makes him a fumbler, insecure around Ellen, easily led by
her and only too happy to retreat to the female company of her mother
and cousin, “good” women but good in a bland, smug way.

Dick has a crippled younger brother who comes to live with the
newlyweds — sleeping in the room next to theirs behind a wall so thin
that he can talk to them through it without raising his voice.
Dick doesn’t seem to comprehend why this situation makes Ellen
uncomfortable.  When the brother is finally moved out to a guest
house Dick secretly invites Ellen’s mother and cousin to come visit,
another intrusion on their intimacy, and once again can’t understand why this disturbs Ellen.  He whines out his reasoning — “I thought you’d be pleased!” — without the slightest apparent awareness of Ellen’s point of view, much less her right to be consulted on such things.

Ellen over-reacts, of course — drastically.  She lets the brother
die in a swimming accident.  But part of us understands why she
does it.  All the people around her are so drippy, so dull and, in
the case of the men, so weak, that part of us wants her to kill them
all.

This is how the deep tension of the film is created — by giving Ellen
real grievances, maddening and suffocating, while at the same time
giving her responses that we can judge as thoroughly
reprehensible.  Men are allowed to righteously condemn a woman who
sees through male weakness, women are allowed a vicarious revenge
against those same weak men.

The film starts on a train and climaxes in a courtroom, but in between
it plays out in a series of glamorous vacation homes, shot in wild,
almost lurid color.  The whole film is like a paean to the
well-decorated second home — a glossy magazine-spread celebration of
bourgeois comfort and excess.  But Ellen makes us feel the
oppression of those homes — they are for her what the urban labyrinth
is to the lost souls of film noir, and they’re lit with the same expressionistic exaggeration.

Gene Tierney was an actress of limited range but she turns up in some
of the great films of Hollywood’s golden age, radiant and unforgettable —
this film, Laura, Heaven Can Wait and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
She had a unique quality on screen, part aristocratic, part down to
earth, always suggesting a secret that will never be revealed.
That quality, and especially it’s sense of impenetrable mystery, is
what allows us here to project onto her our unconscious approval of her
wickedness.

While not a true film noir the movie fits nicely into a category that might be called domestic noir — along with Shadow Of A Doubt and Double Indemnity,
both made around the same time.  In these films, the nightmare of
moral chaos doesn’t play out on dark city streets but in middle-class
homes . . . yet the existential dread invoked is almost exactly the
same.

THE DARK CORNER

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“I feel all dead inside.  I'm backed up in a dark corner and I don't know who's hitting me.”



With this little speech, the hardboiled private-eye protagonist of Henry Hathaway's The Dark Corner, from 1946, leaves the world of 30s pulp fiction where he was born and enters the realm of the film noir. 
He's lost the romantic nobility of the traditional private eye, summed
up by Raymond Chandler when describing his idea of the hero in a work
of detective fiction — “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,
who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”



The hero of The Dark Corner, played by Mark Stevens, is
tarnished by a past frame-up for manslaughter, almost unhinged by the
memory of his impotence in the situation, his sense that it will follow
him forever and destroy him in the end.  He's a tough guy, not
afraid of taking his licks but gripped by the dread of a consuming
darkness he doesn't understand and so can't control.  The film
documents what is for him essentially an existential nervous breakdown.


His secretary, played by the still luscious, pre-ditzy Lucille Ball, mothers him,
bucks him up, challenges him to get his act together.  She saves
him — but it's clear enough that she could shatter him, too.  Her
strength is a gift which he can't match.  She has, in other words,
all the power of a femme fatale — she simply chooses not to exercise it.



The male neurosis and confusion at the heart of the film constitute a
deconstruction of the traditional figure of the hardboiled private eye,
the wisecracking knight errant of Chandler's fiction.  This
private eye is “wailing on the margin of nonentity”, in Blake's great
phrase, held back from the abyss only by Ball's unaccountable faith in
him.  You just have to imagine her losing her patience to project
yourself into the darker universe of even bleaker noirs like Out Of the Past, where the fatal femmes rule.

ON DANGEROUS GROUND

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Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground is a problematic film noir on many grounds but in an odd way it helps define the genre.  More precisely, it helps us realize that film noir
isn't really a genre at all but a way of identifying a particular
strain of post-WWII dread as it came to infect many different kinds of
film.



This strain was characterized by a sense that the world had gone
hopelessly wrong, that existing paradigms for male identity were
suddenly useless in terms of setting anything right, that women, faced
with the existential nullity of men, were sudddenly in a position to
destroy them at will.



It's this profound and comprehensive existential dread that distinguishes film noir
from the dark pulp fiction of the Thirties, which investigated the
corruption of American society through the eyes of cynical but
personally incorruptible men like Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, or the
crime thrillers which gave us glimpses of the underworld while still
positing forces which could combat and contain it.



These popular forms took us on a tour of the wild side, the dark side of American culture, but the film noir suggested that there was no other side.



On Dangerous Ground violates every standard rule of Hollywood storytelling, and eventually most rules of the noir
tradition.  The dream logic that propels the narratives of all
great suspense thrillers is stretched beyond conventional bounds —
just as in dreams sometimes incidents occur which make us realize, even
in the middle of the dream, that we must be dreaming.



Robert Ryan plays a cop on the edge of a total breakdown, overcome by
the sheer meanness of streets which can't be policed effectively except
by adopting the rules of the bad guys.  For his own good he's sent
out to a rural community to help with a murder investigation, but
there's nothing redemptive about the country he enters.  Bleak,
snow-covered, peopled by vicious, suspicious, isolated farm-dwellers,
it's just as soul-killing as the city he's left.  It reminds one
of the landscape of Bergman's Winter Light — a place where the soul shrivels and dies.


But then he meets a woman, played by Ida Lupino — not the traditional femme fatale who waits to ensnare and destroy lost men in many films noirs
. . . but a blind woman paradoxically attracted by his distant,
unengaged treatment of her.  His failure to pity or patronize her
gives her a sense of power, encourages her to trust him,
irrationally.  And that trust saves him, gives his existence some
meaning.



The film, made at RKO, was much meddled with by studio head Howard
Hughes, which may account in part for its disjointed tone.  Ray
disowned the film in later years, saying that Ryan's redemption
involved a miracle and that he didn't believe in miracles.



But the film believes in this particular miracle, and that's all that
counts.  And even the miracle fails to violate entirely the dark
vision of the film noir,
since it presents us with a love that's possible only because both
partners in it are disabled, outsiders, in touch finally with their own
despair because they're able to recognize it in each other.



You could call it a religious film — and you wouldn't be far wrong.

FROM CANVAS TO SCREEN

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Here is Anders Zorn at his most academic.  The composition offers a dramatic illusion of deep space, with an optical integrity which evokes the photograph — but it’s all inflected with the suggestion of narrative, as we’re invited into the darkened area just off the ballroom where private intercourse is taking place.

And yet for all this we still have Zorn’s delightful treatment of the
surface of the canvas, with its sensual strokes reminiscent of the
Impressionist style, its magical ability to render the subtlest play of light.

The total effect can only be described as cinematic — and wouldn’t it
be nice if cinema offered more images as exciting as this one, visually
and plastically?

I think it’s possible that this image was in the back of D. W. Griffith’s mind when he composed the shot below from Intolerance, with its own darkened area just off a ballroom that opens up brightly behind it:

As I’ve written before, we tend to see early film as a medium emerging
from the Victorian stage, but Griffith himself wrote this about Intolerance:

“You will see the world’s greatest paintings come to life and move and have their being before your eyes.”

The important thing to remember is that painting itself, even before
the invention of movies, was aspiring to the condition of cinema.
The spatial depth of Zorn’s image, its desire to evoke movement in
space, found a kind of fulfillment in the cinema, especially in the
cinema of D. W. Griffith.

NOIR, NOT NOIR: LAURA

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Film noir
is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase to designate any film from the
1940s or 1950s which has moody black-and-white photography, snappy,
cynical dialogue and some sort of crime element in its plot.  In
the process, the term becomes too vague to be really useful.



Gritty underworld crime dramas have been with us since the early silent
era, as has moody expressionistic cinematography, and the private-eye
murder mysteries of the early 40s had plenty of snappy, cynical
dialogue.  But the true film noir
didn't emerge until after WWII and it brought something new to
Hollywood cinema — a comprehensive vision of the modern world as a
dark, hopeless place, morally compromised at its core.



Underworld crime dramas could be dark, but they always imagined forces
of order and decency ready to do battle with and overcome the forces of
chaos and destruction.  The private eye, for all his cynical talk,
had a kind of nobility and honor that he carried with him into the
shadowy realms in pursuit of truth and rough justice.



Traditional crime dramas and police or agency procedurals continued on
into the post-war era, as did murder mysteries, and though they became
inflected with the atmosphere of true films noirs they didn't stake out quite the same territory.


Laura, made during WWII, is
one of the most stylish and diverting entertainments ever concocted in
Hollywood, and it's regularly classed as an early film noir
— but it's nothing of the kind.  The film believes in romance and
love, in the triumph of justice and the possibility of knowing the
truth about things.  In a genuine film noir this sort of faith has been lost.



Still, one can see themes emerging in Laura which will play out more forcefully in film noir. 
Laura, the film's title character, is an unusually strong and
self-reliant woman, emotionally and financially independent.  She
destroys a weak man who loves her but can't win her — as does the femme fatale of the post-war noir
tradition.  But Laura's strength is seen as a positive thing here,
not as an insidious threat, and there's a red-blooded man on the scene
who can match her strength.



In the post-war noir,
something goes wrong with the whole idea of the red-blooded man, who suddenly
seems inadequate to the task of engaging a corrupt world or matching
the strength of a self-possessed woman.  The world, and desire
itself, come to seem like streets that dead-end in disaster and
oblivion.  Some lines from Two Noble Kinsmen, probably by Shakespeare, who co-wrote the play with John Fletcher, anticipate the realm of the film noir nicely:

This world's a city full of straying streets,

And death's the market-place where each one meets.

SIDESHOW

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The amazing object above is an 18″ statuette of the Bride Of Frankenstein made by Sideshow Collectibles.



Sideshow
started out as a model and miniature shop for the film business, with a
sideline in design and sculpting for toy companies.  Back in the late 90s, Sideshow
decided it could make better toys, and have more fun, if it got into manufacturing and
so started its own line of 8″ figures of characters from the classic Universal
horror films.



My sister,
shopping for toys for her kids one day, ran into the really
extraordinary 8″ figure they made based on the monster from The Son Of
Frankenstein.  She thought I would like it and bought me
one.  I loved it — thought it was head and shoulders above other
Universal figures I'd seen, with its first-rate sculpting and its
attention to details in the acccessories.  It became one of my
prize possessions — one of my penates, my household gods.






A lot of other
people felt the same way — the 8″ line sold incredibly well and
inspired the company to get more ambitious.  I'd checked out the
other 8″ Universal figures but only really liked the bride from The Bride Of Frankenstein.  The first 12″ Sideshow figure I saw blew me away, though — Lon Chaney's Erik, from The Phantom Of the Opera,
in his Masque of the Red Death costume.  (See it here.)  It
remains one of the greatest 12″ action figures of all time.



Again, it was my sister who discovered it and bought it for me. 
Tragically, I discovered that almost everything Sideshow produced in
the 12″ format was brilliant.  I started collecting them
feverishly.  They would sell out quickly in retail establishments
and on Sideshow's web site, so I had to track many down on eBay.



The success of the 12″ line, which came to include historical
figures as well as characters from TV shows, led Sideshow to up the
ante again with their 18″ line.  These were not fully articulated
action figures.  Sometimes they had slightly posable wire
armatures, sometimes they were cast fully in polystone.  The best
of them — like the vampire from Murnau's Nosferatu — were real works of art.



They were so expensive that, sadly, I had to get more
selective.  I couldn't resist the 18″ Bride, figure, though. 
She's just amazing.



CAMILLE PAGLIA ON ALFRED HITCHCOCK

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“Space is like an opaque medium that Hitchcock knows how to carve, trim and slice as if it were a side of beef.”



This is from Paglia's book-length essay on The Birds
— and what she says of Hitchcock is true of all the great directors,
who carve up and reshape space before our eyes, drawing us ever deeper into the
spatial illusion of the cinematic image, the core of its sensual appeal and the
primary medium of its emotional expressiveness.  This malleability
of space, its ability to be carved and reshaped in cinema, is what places cinema squarely among the plastic arts.

It's a hard concept to grasp, which is why film is traditionally
analyzed in terminology derived from the visual arts, like painting, or
the literary arts, like theater and the novel, even though its most
powerful effects more closely resemble those of sculpture, architecture
and dance.  Albert Einstein said, “Space is not merely a
background for events, but possesses an autonomous structure.” 
Film does not simply create occasions for visual or literary events — it investigates the structure
of space, associates the structure of space with the structure of
dreams. Orson Welles said that on some level every great film is a chase — which is
just another way of saying that on some level every great film is about space.


[Paglia's short book on The Birds,
published as part of the BFI Film Classics series, doesn't, to me, get
at the heart of the film's themes, but it's an exhilarating
intellectual tour de force
with a dazzling range of allusions to other works of art and to the
cultural matrix from which the film emerged.  It's an
indispensable text.]