Tag: femme fatale

Film Review: Out of the Past

While it may be true that for some of us, Mamma Mia! or There’s Something About Mary is the best film of all time (Are you sure?), it’s likely that any film aficionado with an eye for quality will draw up a reasonably predictable list of movies that has a certain resemblance to another’s. Of course, there may be the odd obscure title included in there somewhere on account of some personally preferred artistic or inventive merit but generally the same titles will crop up again and again. These lists, and there are countless of them online, are a great way to create a ‘watch-list’.

It wasn’t one of these lists that brought me to watch Out of the Past but rather a moment of web surfing that brought to my laptop screen a poster of Robert Mitchum nonchalantly lighting a cigarette while a demure Jane Greer inspects his ears for wax. The truth is, I’d never heard of this film before but having enjoyed noir-ish revelations with The Killers and Double Indemnity, both of which I watched for the first time a couple of months ago, I felt confident that I was about to view another classic. It came as no surprise to subsequently see all three of these films feature in high positions on numerous lists of best ‘noir’ films ever.

Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, owner of a gas station in a small out-of-the-way Californian town. His romancing local girl Ann Miller (Virginia Huston) is not viewed well by her parents who are mistrustful of him and sure enough, when a tough guy turns up at his gas station, it becomes apparent that Jeff has a past. This henchman, Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine) informs Jeff that his boss, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) wants to see him and after some glorious dialogue, Jeff reluctantly agrees to the meeting. That night, after picking Ann up for the drive to Whit’s lakeside retreat, he tells her all about his past.

The next section of the film is told in flashback with Jeff narrating the story of his mysterious past as a private investigator. Together with his partner Jack Fisher (Steve Brodie), he was hired by Whit to find his girlfriend Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) whom he claimed had shot him and run off with $40,000 of his dough. Using his investigative talents, Jeff traced Kathie to Acapulco but on meeting her, fell for her charms and her pleads of innocence and decided not to hand her over to Whit, who would likely have punished her for something she claimed she didn’t do. Instead, the two headed north to San Francisco where they attempted to live together as inconspicuously as possible, out of sight and reach of Whit and his henchman. But (isn’t there always a but?), one day they were spotted by Jeff’s old partner, Fisher, who demanded a heavy payoff for his silence. A fight broke out between the two men, which Kathie brought to a sudden end when she shot Fisher dead. She then drove away, leaving poor old Jeff to cover up her crime. In doing so, he came across her bankbook which had an entry for a $40,000 deposit.

Back now to the present where Jeff and Ann arrive at Whit’s home. Before turning the car around to drive back to town, Ann forgives Jeff for his past and hopes he will return safely to her once his meeting with Whit is over. Jeff is surprised to see that Kathie is back together with Whit, who for his part, displays genuine delight in seeing Jeff again and wants to hire him for one more job in order to make things even between them. The job entails breaking into Whit’s lawyer’s office to steal documents that include income tax records proving Whit guilty of tax fraud, a fraud which his lawyer is using to blackmail him. Jeff refuses the job, suspecting a set-up, but Whit insists and so after trying to warn the lawyer, Jeff returns to the man’s office to find him dead. Now Jeff’s job is to locate the documents, which also include an affidavit from Kathie swearing Jeff was the one who killed Fisher, as well as to prove that he is innocent of the killing of the lawyer but with a henchman on his tail and a femme fatale who switches allegiance more times than Lady Gaga changes outfits, he needs to use all his street-smarts to stay alive. It’s all mildly convoluted, as the best crime dramas are, but well worth paying attention to.

Released in 1947, Out of the Past was directed by Jacques Tourneur, a man perhaps better known for low-budget horror films such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, rather than hard boiled crime films but he had a great team around him, many of whom had already worked together for RKO on numerous pictures. The film was adapted by Daniel Mainwaring (under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes) from his novel Build My Gallows High with uncredited revisions by Frank Fenton and James M. Cain. This point is clearly evident from the superb dialogue so typical of the genre but here somehow a little less contrived and more natural. Don’t forget, James M. Cain was the genius behind, among others, Double Indemnity.

The role of gumshoe fitted Mitchum as comfortably as the raincoat and fedora he wore much of the time and it’s easy to see why he would later go on to portray Philip Marlowe. He breezes through this film with a cool self-assurance and a likability that make you (almost) overlook his potential for violence. Jane Greer’s femme fatale, with her baby face and deceitful eyes, smoulders, like the best of them and Kirk Douglas plays the gangster with controlled intensity – sure, he seems charming enough but you wouldn’t want to be around when he looses his temper.

For a film noir, the locations are worth noting too. Yes, we get the usual nighttime cityscapes and atmospherically lit bar rooms and office interiors, trademarks of the genre, but we also get out into the wide open Californian countryside as well as sunny Acapulco. The way cameraman Nicholas Musuraca captures this variety of locations lifts the film well and truly out of the murky pool where a high number of the genre languor.

In 1991, the film was included in the US National Film Registry as being deemed, “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. Also, it will doubtless come as no surprise to learn that it features highly in many of the American Film Institute’s 100 Years of cinema lists. For me, it’s a recent discovery I’m very thankful for and yet another reminder that the ’40s was an awesome decade for movies. It’s one that has aged extremely well and one that will encourage me to continue scanning the Internet and the lists of films people consider the best ever made.

 

 

 

 

 

The Killers – Film Review

The more I delve through the cinematic archives, the clearer it becomes that the 1940s was the decade for film noir. Like Double Indemnity two years earlier, The Killers, made in 1946, is a terrific example of the genre. Once again, I watched this classic for the first time a couple of days ago and am amazed that I’d never seen it before. I make it no secret that I’ve always been a great fan of the genre.

The Killers is the title of a short story by Ernest Hemingway and the first twelve minutes of the film which sees a pair of hit men enter a diner one evening in their search for and ambush of “Swede” Andreson is a faithful adaptation of his writing. Played by William Conrad (later of TV’s Cannon and Jake and the Fatman fame) and Charles McGraw, the two assassins open the movie with an incredible sense of menace and deadly intent. The dialogue is sharp and typical of tough guys of the era and you are immediately gripped by the tension and sense of foreboding.

Their mission is to kill Swede (Burt Lancaster) who they know comes in every evening at around 6pm for his dinner but tonight he’s late and the diner’s owner manages to convince the gun men that he won’t be coming in so late. So they leave the diner and head for Swede’s apartment. Swede’s co-worker, who was in the diner when the killers arrived, bolts out the back way and warns Swede that the men are coming for him but Swede, laying on his bed in a cold sweat of resignation, makes no attempt to escape. The killers break in his door and gun him down. Brilliant, brilliant opening.

The rest of the film (an original screenplay co-written by an uncredited John Huston) follows life insurance investigator Jim Reardon (the always excellent Edmond O’Brien) who has been assigned to locate and pay the beneficiary of Swede’s policy. As he tracks down and interviews the dead man’s friends and associates and slowly pieces together the puzzle of Swede’s life, we learn through well-constructed flashbacks that the Swede was involved in a $250,000 heist and then how he came to meet his demise the way he did.

Being a noir, the film obviously has a big cheese bad guy and a delicious femme fatale and Albert Dekker and Ava Gardner fill these roles superbly, respectively of course. Indeed, the entire cast is well put together and Lancaster, 33 years old and in his screen debut, plays his role of a pro boxer washed up through injury then falling for a mobster’s girl and mixing with the wrong crowd admirably. He has a likability and the unmistakable presence that would quickly make him a star.

The black and white cinematography, so often a defining trademark of the noir genre, doesn’t disappoint here. There are many moments of beauty where starkness, shadow and silhouette take turns to create mood and enhance the atmosphere. Sometimes it’s worth watching these films just to see what the director is doing and in this case, Robert Siodmark, a pupil of the highly influential school of German Expressionism really knew his beans.  The lighting inside Swede’s apartment when Reardon encounters “Dum Dum” looking for the loot and then later inside the Green Cat night club towards the end of the film are just perfect. Check it out and see what I mean.

All in all, a great film and a great noir. The use of flashback gives it a different feel to the usual main character narrative but it takes nothing away. Full of colourful, untrustworthy characters and intrigue, it’s definitely another one worth watching.

 

Film Review: Double Indemnity

Well, yesterday it happened to me again (and I don’t mean another bout of embarrassing public itching). I watched an amazing old movie for the first time and wondered how on earth it is I’d never seen it before. ‘Course, I’d heard of it somewhere, sometime but never felt inclined to watch it. Maybe it’s the film’s title, I don’t know. But having recently read a biography of Raymond Chandler – that wittiest and most influential of all hard-boiled crime writers – and learning that he had, in the 40s, worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had in fact co-written Double Indemnity, I sought it out and gave it a viewing.

Chandler is perhaps most famous for creating the character of Phillip Marlowe, the private detective that was made universally famous by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep in 1946. His distinct writing style and in particular, his ability to pen incredible dialogue has been often parodied but never bettered. This “Chandleresque” touch is clearly evident in Double Indemnity as the actors deliver their lines.

The story, based on a novella of the same name by James M. Cain, begins when Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) an insurance salesman for Pacific All Risk makes a routine house call on Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to renew her husband’s car insurance policy. There is an instant attraction between the two and plenty of flirting takes place until she asks about taking out a life insurance policy on her husband without his knowledge. Neff understands immediately that she has murder in mind and does what any sane insurance man would do and gets the hell out of there. But later that evening, she turns up at his apartment and continues to seduce him and before long, his gullibility and lust for her vanquishes his caution and the two agree to kill her old man.

Neff, being a hotshot insurance man, knows all the tricks of the business and comes up with a foolproof plan to get rid of Mr Dietrichson in such an unlikely way that it will trigger the “double indemnity” clause of the policy thereby making Pacific All Risk liable to pay Phyllis twice the policy amount of $50,000. The plan (which I won’t divulge so as not to spoil the film for those of you who haven’t seen it) goes off pretty smoothly and before you know it, the mourning Mrs Dietrichson is preparing to get her blood-stained hands on the dough.

But Neff’s friend and colleague at Pacific All Risk, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson, who plays a claims investigator) begins to smell a rat and although the head of the company believes the death to be suicide and is willing to settle the claim, Keyes persuades him otherwise by quoting a bunch of statistics on the probability of suicide. There are further complications for Neff when he becomes friendly with the victims daughter who believes Phyllis is responsible for her father’s death and…under the masterful direction of Billy Wilder the tension grows and grows.

As a film noir, it really is one of the finest American examples and clearly set the standard for those of the genre that would follow. The dialogue is a thing of beauty (typical Chandler), the acting is faultless – particularly Edward G. Robinson who in my opinion steals every scene he’s in – and the black and white cinematography is superb. The way they used light and shadow and silhouettes in those days was simply genius. It was nominated for seven Oscars but bizarrely failed to win any but in recent years it has been recognised in all manner of the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 something or other categories.

Stanwyck plays her femme fatale with controlled coolness and MacMurray is ideally cast as the charming yet somewhat weak willed louse. It’s interesting to note they were both playing against type in these roles and equally interesting that they were also the two highest paid stars in Hollywood around the time of filming. Robinson is always value for money and despite being third on the bill, he received the same pay as the two leads. To watch the scene where he’s spouting statistics is to watch a true pro at work. Sublime stuff. And if you don’t blink, you’ll even see Raymond Chandler in a one-off cameo (and the only known film footage of him in existence), sitting in a chair as Neff walks by on his way from Keyes’ office.

The film noir genre is probably something that I’ll come back to soon because there are a great many movies worth writing about and watching but for now, if you’re in a mind to watch just one, watch this one. You won’t be disappointed.