Some Came Running

We have all got it coming, or, Joseph Losey meets the plausibles: some observations on the finale of "The Prowler" (1951)

As you might infer from the title of this post, spoilers will follow. So  when better than now to entreat you, if you haven't yet seen The Prowler, a remarkable film on a number of levels ("the best picture I ever made," according to costar Evelyn Keyes, who makes the pronouncement in a memoir titled Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister, so there), you really have little excuse now that VCI has put the superb UCLA restoration of the film on DVD, complete with a package of nifty extras including a commentary by noir expert Eddie Muller and a documentary featurette on the film featuring the enthusiasms of author James Ellroy, for whom the film was a huge source of inspiration. Among other things, The Prowler is one of the great Los Angeles noirs. When Losey was on, one of the key attractions of his films was just how well he got environments—L.A. in this film, and in The Big Night, and yes, even his rethink of M; Venice in Eve; certain sectors of London in The Servant; and so on. In anyevent, by the finale of The Prowler, we are pretty far from L.A.; we are literally, as it happens, in a ghost town, and it's here that the film's disturbed antihero Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) is to meet his fate.

This film being what it is, generically, the viewer is pretty certain that the goat is gonna get his throat cut for the end of the song, as it were. But the way Losey stages the whole thing that's oddly unusual, and is kind of the cherry on top of a film that, while in a certain sense highly "realistic," brims with touches of irrationality that usefully bleed outside of the accepted outlines of genre. Film noir is a very good enabler in that respect, one might say. In any event, Webb is cornered; the police have been summoned, they're here, they're armed. As he runs, someone shouts, wisely, "You'll never get away with it." An odd thing to say, really, as the presence of the police signals that, for all intents and purposes, he hasn't "gotten away" with anything; it's too late for that. As for actually getting away, that, too, seems unlikely. 

With the cops in pursuit, Webb, rather ridiculously when you think about it, opts to go up instead of down. He takes to a hill, what looks to be a man-made one, and scurries up the thing furiously. "Do as they say, Webb!" shouts a friend at the scene. "You'll never make it!" As the unhappy Sisyphus approaches the peak of the desolate grey mound, the question "Make it where, exactly?" springs to mind. Once Webb gets to the top, there's...nothing. Not even a gas leak via which he can immolate himself from the "top of the world," as in White Heat. If Webb makes it to the top, he will literally be no place. 

But Webb will not make it to the top. He will be stopped, as he climbs, by a bullet in the back, fired by a policeman's rifle, at a suspect who was by all visible indications not armed. This goes against procedure, as they say. Or at least against proper procedure, at least as I understand it. This flouting of realism and/or plausibility has a dual function of heightening the film's irrationality and underscoring a kind of questioning of authority. Yes, we have our sacrifice, yes, it was good and proper, because the goat, as it were, had it coming; and yet...is this really how it's done? The movie's end title comes up mere seconds after Webb's final fall, leaving that question, and a few more, hanging.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, 'cause I'm so modest and stuff, that I had given this film some amount of consideration in a prior post, an entry in my series on Manny Farber's favorite films of 1951. Those were fun times, huh?

Image of the day, 1/26/11

Peter Breck in Shock Corridor, Samuel Fuller, 1963.

Now this, really, is my idea of an unimpeachable film.

Love this shot, from the nightmare flooding-of-the-hallway scene. The image could conceivably inspire a caption contest, if I had a prize, anyway. But I don't. Still, I'll start. Here are two:

"No really, I have a great time on Twitter."

...and...

"This debate concerning the lack of historical accuracy in The King's Speech is so invigorating, isn't it?" 

Image of the day, 1/24/11

Richard Attenborough and Charles Mingus, All Night Long, Basil Dearden, 1962.

I'd been listening a lot to Money Jungle, the wonderful record Duke Ellington made with then new-breeders Mingus and Max Roach, when the latest Eclipse box, Basil Dearden's London Underground, arrived. I'm can't wait to carve out some time to delve deep into it. Although I don't believe in past lives, I sometimes wonder that I didn't have one, one in which I was British, so cozy do British-made pictures from the quota quickies on make me feel. Dearden's films are, of course, far more distinctive and largely dark, yet I still snuggle up to their worlds as I would to a particularly soft and warm blanket. Night, a modern-day Othello rethink set in the somewhat dank but peaty London jazz scene of the time, features the future SIr Dickie as a wealthy buff who knows how to entertain his musicians. I do love the physical contrasts in this shot; and the gentle expression on the great bassist and composer's face. 

Hat tip: Vadim Rizov. 

Tales from The Warner Archives #11: "-30-" (Jack Webb, 1959)

In my heedless youth, with my slovenly wannabe-hippie attitude and all, I was never much of a Jack Webb fan, so I wasn't even aware of his film -30- until I read this evocative writeup of it in Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, published in 1983 (the year I turned 24): "Another Thursday night shift at the Los Angeles Banner. Jack Webb arrives late from his weekly visit to the graves of his wife and son to settle in with city editor William Conrad for eight hours of cigarettes and stale coffee. David Nelson and friends relax with 'Copy Boy' for voice and bongos, while assorted newsroom types await progress reports on a 5-year-old girl lost in the city's storm-drain system. Cannon and Friday's backups include Richard Bakalayan, Joe Flynn of McHale's Navy, and Hazel's Whitney Blake." (The writeup itself was not by Weldon but by his collaborator Charles Beesley, a very cool and taciturn customer—he looked a bit like DeNiro's Johnny Boy, without the stupid hats—who was sometimes seen in the company of Hoboken's most enigmatic musical luminaries, and who appears to have disappeared from the face of the earth. But that's another story.)

The film sounded like a little slice of heaven to a guy who still hadn't much of a clue as to what life after the college paper was going to hold for him. Cigarettes and stale coffee was my idea of some kind of breakfast of champions. Of course the film, like so many in Weldon's book at the time, seemed almost impossible to see at the time, and even when I became friendly with Weldon shortly after the book appeared, I never asked him if he had a copy I could borrow (Psychotronic pictures were often passed around like VHS or Beta samizdat by like-minded cinephiles). Maybe I was afraid the reality of the picture would disappoint me. Having now finally seen the movie via a recent DVD from the Warner Archive, I can report the film does not disappoint at all, although Beesley's writeup makes it sound a little more impressionistic and aimless than it actually is. 

For this IS a Jack Webb picture, after all, and Jack Webb pictures—not to generalize overmuch, but still—are about regular Joes doing really important things. And getting the morning paper out is an important thing, in spite of it all. The "it all" part does involve tedium and flim-flammers and editors heading up nonexistent departments, but -30- hardly takes as cynical a view of the old-school news-gathering process as does, say, The Front Page, or Front Page co-author Ben Hecht's account of his early days in newspapering in his autobiography A Child Of The Century, which it so happens I'm reading now. (See here.) Hecht's faux-pokerfaced recountings of his exploits as a "picture-chaser," going to almost any lengths (including simulating a house fire to make a family flee, the better for Hecht to break in and ransack the photo albums) to acquire pertinent photographs of victims of crime and natural disasters and such, are enough to make any contemporary ombudsman's blood run cold. In -30-, with respect to the photo of the aforementioned 5-year-old-girl stuck in the city's storm-drain system, well, at one conference an anonymous editor allows that the picture the Banner is going to run was "hustled off a next-door neighbor." Well, all right then. 

While maintaining an admirable unity of space of the sort that some critics like to cite in support of a claim of "formal rigor"—that is, the camera never leaves the newsroom during the entirety of its nearly 97-minute running time—the picture juggles multiple storylines and what they now call character arcs. The will-the-5-year-old-girl-make-it? question is of course paramount, but there's also the dilemma of the lovely female obit writer who wants a crack at a real story, but is afraid of getting it because she's the daughter of the paper's owner; the pride and anticipation of another female staffer, a longtime reporter, whose son grandson the rest of the staff never even knew she had is making a daring cross-country flight; the frustration of the copy runner stuck in a go-nowhere job, or so he thinks; and other such stuff. All of which is both driven and punctuated by lots of  newspapering nuts-and-bolts jargon, as witness this exchange between Webb's M.E. Sam Gatlin and Conrad's Jim Bathgate:

Gatlin: Jim—this shot of the catch basin, let's run it same size...across pages two and three.

Bathgate: Across both pages, 16 columns?

Gatlin: That's right.

Bathgate: No can do. 

Gatlin: Oh, can do. We'll run two eight column cuts with a gutter down the middle. Now run a type overlay, white on black, across both pages. Use 72-point Bodoni caps..."Danger, Kids: Stay Out Of These." Exclaimer. Then in lower case: "One little girl didn't."

Yeah, this Gatlin fella's got it all—the sizzle, the steak, and a great big heart that's been broken bad once and doesn't wanna get broken again. Which leads to his mule-headed resistance to his new wife's scheme to adopt a little tyke. You can likely see where all this is going, right? 

Which hardly detracts from the pleasure of it all; in fact I dare say it adds to it. In any event, when Conrad's had enough of the griping from those damn copy runners and launches into his grand, "Why sure, it's just a newspaper" speech, you may well be harumphing right along with him. -30- is as affectionate as Fuller's great Park Row, while being infinitely more mushy, and mushy-headed. But if you're one of the increasingly rare breed who still has a bit of printer's ink in his or her blood, it may well be just your preferred variety of mush. Now where's a DVD of Webb's next collaboration with screenwriter William Bowers, the ineffable The Last Time I Saw Archie?

"Jeu" on

Marie Bell, perhaps about to demonstrate that blondes don't necessarily have more fun, in Jacques Feyder's fascinating 1934 Le Grand jeu, a fabulous Eureka!/Masters of Cinema rediscovery that's the subject of today's Foreign Region DVD Report, at The Daily Notebook. 

Mr. B in Blu

The French, they are...well, they are the first to put out some great silent pictures by the extraordinary director Frank Borzage on Blu-ray. And wait, there's more! I have a look at these items in today's Foreign Region Report, at The Daily Notebook. 

Tales From The Warner Archives #10: Dick Powell, Debbie Reynolds and Anne Francis in a film by Kenneth Anger...

...oh, no, wait, it's the aforementioned. That is, Frank Tashlin's Susan Slept Here, 1954. A weird one, not just because of the whole "she's-seventeen-years-old" thing. Obviously. Not major Tashlin, but thoroughly worthwhile, and as you can see, the transfer is aces. 

Four adventures of Anne-Marie and Jean-Luc

People who think that ECM is only good for New-Agey, "soft" sounds and such clearly don't know from Roscoe Mitchell (whose new jam on the label, in which he fronts a big band that also features Vijay Iyer, simply kills), or It Had Been An Ordinary Enough Day In Pueblo, Colorado or, for that matter, a nifty Europe-only DVD collecting four extremely essential short films by Godard and Miéville, the last of which is the subject of today's Foreign Region DVD Report, at The Daily Notebook. Said report also containing the required ruminations concerning what it is we talk about when we talk about Godard in these United States these days (and man, for a guy who can't stand Raymond Carver, I sure do find that "what we talk about" formulation a handy one, don't I?).

Tales From The Warner Archives #9: "Stranger on the Third Floor" (Ingster, 1940) and "The Outfit" (Flynn, 1973); an Elisha Cook, Jr. double feature (sort of)

The ineffable Mr. Cook, Jr., does not spend a whole lot of his brief screen time in this exceptionally engaging RKO B-picture looking so chipper. Rather, up until precisely this point, he has been kicking and screaming and kicking and screaming and insisting "I didn't kill anybody!" and kicking and screaming some more. And then, in a lengthy German-Expressionist-inflected dream sequence, he sneers and snickers at the film's hero, who's about to get the chair for the murder that he himself accused Cook's character of, getting a bit of his own back with some "How YOU doin'?" sarcastic insolence. Cook plays a cabbie who's fingered by stolid but apparently insufficiently attentive hero John McGuire (and the character's a reporter, too; damn sloppy journalists...) and is not-quite-cooling his heels in the death house as McGuire's cutie girlfriend is menaced by the real killer and title character, played by Peter Lorre in one of his most seriously weirdly menacing turns. Proudly showing off his seriously bad teeth, indolently draping his long gray scarf around his neck, lunging for our heroine as if in the slow-motion of a smack-induced trance, his work here is part of why this picture is sometimes referred to as "the first true film noir" (and that is the quoted blurb on the back of the Warner Archive box). An arguable claim, for a lot of fairly obvious reasons we needn't get into here. As enjoyable as this picture is, it is not what you'd call an incredibly inspired piece of work. Which is part of what makes it so enjoyable. There is certainly some brilliance here, but also a lot of expedience, and it's the combination of the two that make this a kind of surreal experience. Because it's a B-picture and it's got to get its work done in like an hour and change, its narrative traffics in a kind of ruthless efficiency (to use the wonderful phrase from the Monty Python "Spanish Inquisition" sketch) that creates, among other effects, breakneck, seemingly arbitrary changes in tone, as when the hero's interior monologue begins, 19 minutes into the action. (Said monologue features the immortal reflection, "Lotta people live in Brooklyn. Why couldn't I?") These shifts give the picture as a whole a peculiarly, and I'd say largely uninitentional, alienated surreal feel. Nothing is weirder, however...and I guess this should be classified as a spoiler...than Cook's transformation at the end. The once surly and manic fellow—not that he didn't have a damn good reason to be—has had his name cleared, and his job as a taxi driver (!) reinstated. Waiting outside the diner where the newlywed hero and heroine have said their goodbyes to the neighborhood, he's genuinely eager to show the man who almost had him executed that he doesn't hold anything even resembling a grudge. Offering the couple a ride, he practically screeches, "This one's...ON THE HOUSE!" The pause there indicates that maybe all is not as well as he would like it to look, and that maybe he's gonna drive them all off of a bridge after they get in. We never do find out. 

 

Cook is somewhat more consistently low-key in his even smaller part in John Flynn's 1973 The Outfit, a particular aspect of which was discussed here. Playing the counterman at a rural diner overseen by Joe Don Baker's character, he expresses very Cook-ish suspicion at the two bogus "hunters" who ooze in looking for his boss. Baker makes quick work of the pair (not in the way you might think, though; one of the ways this is such a refreshing film is the resourcefulness shown by its criminal class—part and parcel, of course, of the Richard Stark "Parker" novels, one of which is the source material for this picture). This post-noir picture features a really exemplary group of glorious classic presences in bit and supporting roles: aside from Cook, there's Jane Greer from Out of the Past, Marie Windsor, who did Cook very wrong in The Killing, Robert Ryan, Timothy Carey (also in The Killing, as you'll recall),Henry frigging Jones, and more, and more still. (And Army Archerd as Ryan's butler!) Despite this near-parade of seemingly referential cameos, one never gets the feeling of being winked at, as one often does in the post-Tarantino age of supporting-role stunt/homage casting; all of these pros act like they belong. Because they do.

In any event, a better-than-solid anti-policier, happily replete with scenes and dialogue snatches very well transplanted from the book, and one or two zingers that the filmmakers appear to have come up with themselves. One favorite in the latter category: "Goddamn you, why'd you have to kill him?" "He owed me money."

"Dead" sexy

Call me a slob if you will, but I just gotta say that regardless of her subsequent accomplishments and stuff, Jane Fonda was just a heck of a lot more diverting, strictly cinematographically, back when she was hanging out with that suave perv Roger Vadim. Above, she's being all decadent coquetteish in Vadim's Metzengerstein, just one groovy episode of Spirits of the Dead, a swinging '60s anthology of Euro-Poe adaptations that features quite a few other screen icons back When They Were Funsier. I discuss this state of affairs in my review of a SPECTACULAR new Blu-ray disc (a region-free one, at that!) of the film for my Foreign Blu-ray Disc Report, at The Daily Notebook.