The Endless Night: A Valentine to Film Noir

As a nod to the current film preservation fundraising event, For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon, this seems like a good vid to bring back to the front of the line.



Video by RubyTuesday717
Song: "Angel" by Massive Attack

For the Love of Film (Noir): a week-long, multi-platform blogathon

Go to Ferdy on Films and spend too much time (which will actually feel like not enough time) supporting the second film preservation fundraising event, For the Love of Film (Noir): The Film Preservation Blogathon:

"This year, the Film Noir Foundation is our special valentine, and they've honored us by earmarking our funds for a very special film: The Sound of Fury, aka Try and Get Me (1950), with blacklisted director Cy Endfield at the helm, and starring Lloyd Bridges and Frank Lovejoy. A nitrate print of the film will be restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, using a reference print from Martin Scorsese’s personal collection to guide them and fill in any blanks. Paramount Pictures, which now owns the film, has agreed to help fund the restoration, but FNF is going to have to come up with significant funds to get the job done. That’s where we come in."

Go there, browse, click links, and donate if you can. Like last year, there are more good-to-excellent film bloggers represented than you can shake Joel Cairo at, all of them active contributors to the diverse, intelligent, often illuminating web-wide conversation about movies and moviedom and the folks who love it.

Alternate universe movies: "The Maltese Falcon" with Gene Tierney instead of Mary Astor

Recently, while watching 1944's Laura with Elizabeth, I hit the Pause button during a pivotal scene featuring Gene Tierney. (Although it wasn't only to admire Tierney's form in that white satin gown during the party scene, I did turn to Elizabeth to mention,"You just want to reach out and stroke her ass." Replied Elizabeth: "Yep." We watch movies well together.) I paused it to note something that occurred to me while watching — that I wish the alluring yet mysterious Tierney we see in Laura had been cast as scheming temptress Brigid O'Shaughnessy opposite Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade in 1941's The Maltese Falcon.

While I, like most movie buffs, adore The Maltese Falcon, I never have felt the lusty heat from or toward Mary Astor in the role of the "knockout" O'Shaughnessy. She feels miscast to me. And that's frustrating since I really do want to identify with Bogart/Spade as the hardest of hardboiled noir detectives falls for — and then cynically plays — the lying, murderous femme fatale for all he's worth. But I just can't find it in Astor's portrayal. I acknowledge that I'm in the minority on this one, as though I'm the only one who can't see the pretty pony in the picture full of colored dots, which just adds to the frustration.

Now, ordinarily I flinch away from using words like "unfeminine," and certainly this isn't a post that should meander into concepts such as the "male gaze" effect; nonetheless, for such a period "sexy dame" Astor strikes me as too, oh, mannish or schoolmarmish to generate the kind of sexual heat and disorienting desire that makes a tough cookie like Spade crumble, even temporarily, contrary to his own professional nature and personal interests.

In Dashiell Hammett's novel Brigid is — or at least successfully passes for — a "girl" only 22 years old, exuding an innocence and timidity so convincing that it works on both Spade and, to a deadly degree, his partner Miles Archer. I don't think I'm simply preconditioned by the novel when Mary Astor enters the office of Spade & Archer and I see a considerably older woman (Astor was 35) who's been around the block so often she has her own stool at the corner bar. From then on, the chemistry just isn't there, which has always slightly spoiled the experience for me.

So that crucial element of The Maltese Falcon has always held me at arm's length, and I miss that sweat-stained, seductive noirish heat.

It's all subjective, of course, whether an actress or actor pushes one's va-voom! buttons, and The Maltese Falcon has plenty of pleasures to keep me held from start to finish. Plus, Astor does a fine job in the role, even if she was wrong for it. Still, I've tended to watch The Maltese Falcon imagining Brigid played by, say, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, or Veronica Lake. Geraldine Fitzgerald had been offered the role, but when she opted to do a stage play instead, Brigid went to Astor. The Fitzgerald we see in the following year's The Gay Sisters would have put an intriguing, and in my mind more appealing, spin on the role, though I have to squint and cock my head to see her as the femme fatale type.

And now here I was watching Laura when it clicked — Gene Tierney would have been ideal as Brigid. She could have played a va-voom! sexuality hiding a steely determination, and mixed a dangerous schemer with an inescapable allure, all without leaning too hard on any single aspect of the character. Granted, Falcon was three years before Laura (Tierney would have been 21, ideal for Brigid), and Tierney was signed with 20th Century-Fox instead of Warner, and in Astor the studio had a much more established "name" than Tierney. But in my imagination's alt-Hollywood, it all works out.

No matter. I love The Maltese Falcon for the well-cast, crisply written, precisely directed classic that it is. A couple of Christmases ago Elizabeth even presented me with my own film-authentic Falcon, which sits looming on the DVDs case. It's what dreams are made of, as the man says.

Another thing that struck me about Laura — Dana Andrews seems to have studied for his role as the dick by watching Jimmy Cagney movies. Several times his body language reminds me of Cagney, although his trenchcoat-and-fedora shamus is of the Bogart mold. And Vincent Price looks 11 feet tall and linebacker broad, especially when he's wearing that prototype of David Byrne's Big Suit.

Maltese Falcon trailer hosted at TCM:





Music: Jessica Williams Trio, "Kristen"
Near at hand: Hammett's novel, hardback edition with cool slipcase

Scenes I love: "The Third Man" — a slice of Lime

"The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly."

Everyone remembers Orson Welles' speech about cuckoo clocks, jaunty and murderous at once. And Anton Karas' zither music, plucking minor keys around our expectations. Then there's director Carol Reed's vertiginous canted angles and the way they bevel Robert Krasker's rich, deep black-and-white cinematography. The atmospheric rubble and melancholy damp of war-smashed Vienna. That moment when the story turns on the cat that "liked only Harry." Beautiful and haunted Alida Valli's long final walk away from both the cemetery and the happy ending imagined by Joseph Cotten's sadder-but-no-wiser pulp novelist Holly Martins. Graham Greene's script that knows precisely when to light its fuses. All that glittering, quotable dialogue.

In The Third Man, from 1949, Martins is a "scribbler" of hack Westerns who arrives in postwar Vienna to land a job and join his old pal Harry Lime. Instead he finds himself drawn into a murder mystery and a network of deadly black-market racketeers. It's a suspense-thriller-romance steeped in Hollywood's best influences and "gimmicks," yet it's crafted with enough looming European "art-house" style to topple Fritz Lang into an existential funk. It's a hybrid that blurs the lines between what's comic and what's corrupt and cankerous. It melds melodrama with razor-blade noir tones, smirking lightheartedness with ruminations on seductive evil.

Why, The Third Man delivers so many well-loved attractions, and endures as a favorite among casual and dogmatically zealous movie lovers alike, that opening it up for a film-crit autopsy risks deadening its rewatchable pleasures with the whiff of formaldehyde. And yet the film's richness invites deep-think bathysphering for any allegorical "meaning" it may contain. A U.S. foreign policy lens — Holly as well-intentioned but clumsy and naive America sticking its nose into other countries' business only to have it bitten — is one perfectly cromulent interpretative stance.

"We had no desire to move people's political emotions," wrote Greene. "We wanted to entertain them, to frighten them a little, to make them laugh." Greene thought of The Third Man as a comedy-thriller. Reed directed it like the bleakest of noirs. It isn't often that such a push-me-pull-you dynamic brings out the best in both forms. As if taking cues from the scene where clueless pulp-fiction writer Martins withers before a high-toned book society, the film is both James Joyce and Zane Grey. It's fitting then that The Third Man — co-produced in England by Alexander Korda and in the U.S. by David O. Selznick — ranks #1 on the British Film Institute's list of all-time best British films, while also making the American Film Institute's list of top American films.

Yet for all the fine nuggets in Greene's script, and all the exquisite camerawork and deftly sketched characters (including a gallery of economically realized supporting parts), the favorite attraction here for me is the film's big reveal, handily the ne plus ultra of big reveals. Even after a dozen viewings, when we reach that scene we're keyed up with expectation: The camera tight on a content cat grooming itself in the shadows between a pair of polished shoes. A local resident, complaining about Martins' shouting, opens an upstairs window and poof!, like a magician's trick there's Orson Welles snapped into being beneath the window light. Welles caps the instant with an "I know a secret" smile that brings his boyish and charismatic Harry Lime to coruscating life.



Soon afterward, we ascend into the Prater Wheel sequence, where Harry reduces the victims of his crimes, including dead and crippled children, to mere dots and those cuckoo clocks.

Like Casablanca, here's a movie that jelled from a perfect storm of talent in every department, and that made Vienna's labyrinthine subterranean sewers as famous as Rick's Cafe. Man, what an ideal double-feature! The Third Man is Casablanca's dark-souled half-brother, the one Shakespeare would call the villain but the one who'd get the coolest speeches anyway.

Music: The BPA, "Seattle (featuring Emmy the Great)"
Near at hand: Coffee mug with Tiffany Grapes Window pattern

 

Hanna-Barbera's German expressionism "Quickdraw McGraw" starring Peter Lorre

 

Thank you, Merrill Markoe.