The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions (Decade Project Vol. 4)

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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knives
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#226 Post by knives » Mon Jan 13, 2020 8:11 pm

I've seen McGraw in other films, but this is the first I really noticed him in. He's great in it in a way that feels genre defining.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#227 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Jan 13, 2020 9:16 pm

A few more Preminger from the last several weeks:

The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell: A precursor to the better historical courtroom movie later in the decade, this feels a bit like Preminger on autopilot (sorry). However, the reserved stance provides a more objective account of the events that service the idea of the courtroom movie better than Anatomy of a Murder, a film that has more passion and is thus more inviting even with distancing techniques. I won’t pretend that I liked this very much but the dynamics between the emotional Cooper and the more rigid oppressors shows a degree of attention in direction with a clear purpose for examination, even if divorced from that passion behind the intellect.

River of No Return: I want to love every Mitchum western but this was an empty offering. Even in these failures I admire the medium shots that are just a bit farther than the average, and contain a care for technical prowess practically unmatched by other filmmakers. It doesn’t matter if it’s stale, creative, or dynamic, because Preminger issues a mastery over the form that separates itself from concern with the imaginative in favor of the strong knowledge and skill in methodology of the medium. This movie is full of these wide shots and we see a lot of action fill each frame, so even if what’s at the center isn’t always engaging, the process itself is.

The Moon is Blue: This was worth a rewatch because memory served it being one of the best Premingers of the decade and I retract my earlier comment that it has no chance at making my list, for it could be a dark horse. Preminger’s form couldn’t be more perfectly fitting for this play adaptation of a kind of less elitist comedy of manners. The objectivity allows all odd mannerisms, quirky personalities, and shifting dynamics to ebb and flow to unexpected rhythms, playing out in front of us like radical specimens under a microscope. Regardless of a pretty standard plot, every instant is a surprise because of such mystery and interest taken by the camera and actors resisting any spoon feeding for audiences of logical progression of character development. The social is thus rendered as absurd as it is in real life as people’s personalities clash and confuse and warm to one another through what feels like natural, wild, loose pathways and yet this is meticulously scripted and directed. How does one infuse a picture with so much expertise and control to draw a composite of fortuitous exchanges and whimsical social energy. I don’t think the material is laugh out loud funny, but the collective elements are incredibly charming and amusing and even relatable in feelings of shock for the general interpersonal experience even if the actual situations are not.

Bonjour Tristesse: This revisit numbed some aspects, probably because the novelty had worn off with the stylistic color shifts and menacing build to unexpected destruction was no longer a biting surprise; and yet in spite or perhaps because of this waiver, I noticed other more emotional attributes for the first time. For all the complaints about Seberg in this film, I think the critics misinterpret her reserve for lack of skill. Like Saint Joan, her comfort in remaining aloof to subjective alignment with the viewer allows for an ignorance between us and her as well as her character and the impact she has on others, which heightens the melodramatic sobriety that occurs when she awakens from her self-conscious slumber to the consequences of her determination to resist change and remain comfortable. The narrative this time around felt more emotional and less didactic than indicative of the general process of one’s personal development, accepting of change and embracing the information that one gathers from choices and experience with dysphoria. Seberg’s current black and white scenes are of a woman who cannot forget and has undergone trauma and brokenness simply by existing in a social world - let alone shared responsibility for tragic events - but even without the specifics her progression is relatable or at least rooted in some deserved sympathy.

Niven is excellent as the playboy father whose own reservations and childlike behavior paints a social context and family dynamic that alleviates the load from resting on Seberg. This is a grey milieu in essence of story, perfect material for Preminger to adapt. The subtlety of her jealousy is the highlight of the film for me, and Seberg’s restraint and distanced approach from the camera is crucial to obtain this effect. I could always sense the disruption of harmony, the invisible discomfort that populated the space once airy and free and now foggy and suffocating, but realistic enough to allow Seberg to hold it in barely with enough ego functions to sustain her composure. This isn’t an easy predicament to demonstrate; it would be a far simpler acting exercise to go ham or flatly under-emote without emitting clear feelings amidst the layers. The film may not be one of my personal favorite Premingers of the decade - it’s a bit thin beyond this complexity when consumed as a whole unit - but it’s a very good film with merits both loud and quiet, and probably more to discover next time I see it.

I'll have to revisit my favorites of the decade Angel Face and Anatomy of a Murder, the former of which goes hand in hand with Whirlpool as a pair of very unique noirs that seem to subvert the categorization with aims that divert to extra bitter psychology while adhering to its bare essential ingredients all the same to bring it back to the anxious fatalism that exists in the inescapability of one's position and self rather than death itself- though perhaps that's the only way out..

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#228 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jan 14, 2020 10:46 pm

What makes Angel Face so special is that the femme fatale is both the central character and not driven by greed or a solipsistic ego on fire, she’s not a sociopath or manipulator in the traditional sense. Jean Simmons is a depressant, lonely person who wants the kind of love that will allow her to escape from herself into another, a far cry from the strong-willed archetype who swallows men to escape into them. Mitchum knows what she is and yet his own fatalism is not magnetized to her helplessly, but born from apathy and Simmons provides him with something different to subtly liven up his passive existence. She is the emotional one, not him (he bails as soon as he can once he is sobered to the seriousness of the situation and can easily fight his apathy with logic), another change in the genre (despite the male leads’ toughness, even the Mitchums, they usually play the emotionally driven characters). Simmons’ psychology is indicative of an untreated personality disorder (Borderline, probably) and yet it doesn’t need to be any one thing to reflect the anxiety of simply being alive in the body of someone so uncomfortable in their own skin. Look at them during the trial. Mitchum is calm, laid back, emotionless, and inactive in his own life; while Simmons’ intensity can be misread as evil or sociopathic. She’s really afraid, nervous, constantly on alert, perpetually disturbed by herself and all stimuli around her. The actions she commits, from flirtations to crimes, are resilient. Sick, twisted, and dangerous, but rooted in a place of ‘need’ (not ‘want,’ as in most femme fatales) and from a genuine place of fear rather than an artificial trick of pretend fear. She is scary because she’s only too real. And when one is this emotional, unpredictability is run rampant, able to surprise Mitchum after he’s already awake to the crazy, or so he thought. There’s no clarity in trying to understand one who is completely divorced from logic, floating up toward the clouds and ready to leave this earth with no gravity keeping her here. She’s been ready all her life in fact, it’s her baseline, and once we see that we wonder how resilient she must have been to hold onto straws as long as she has.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#229 Post by barryconvex » Thu Jan 16, 2020 4:34 am

Room At The Top (Jack Clayton 1959)

Harvey's character here -Joe Lampton- is meant to be seen as tragic: a victim of his own ambitions and forced to betray himself by circumstances out of his control. I saw him as an opportunist more than anything else, clueless as to how his machinations might effect the people he's come to care about, spineless, materialistic and ultimately rather pathetic. He's not uninteresting however, and as played by Harvey he's a complex man, stifled by his lot in life and convincingly angry about it. But even though the deck is stacked unfairly against him I can't feel pity for a man who is given the love of a beautiful woman (Alice-played by Signoret) who understands who he is and cares about him and then betrays her by selling himself out to the rich girl, Susan (Heather Sears). She also cares about Joe and is like a younger, guileless version of Winona Ryder's character in The Age Of Innocence. But where Ryder was knowingly cynical in her role and ended up using Day-Lewis' affections for another woman to entrap him, Sears' has no such agenda and is seen here as blindly romantic, content to be little more than a pet in Joe's life and blissfully unaware of his true feelings even as he can barely make it through their wedding ceremony. She's a perfectly lovely girl leading a sheltered life with an older (and typically snotty) upper class suitor, Jack Wales (John Westbrook), constantly looking over her shoulder when Joe upends her life; getting her pregnant and caught up in the middle of something she's not mature enough to handle. If she'd had more time to develop, had a better sense of the power a family fortune grants a direct heiress she could've been a formidable character. Instead she's incomplete, her biggest flaw is not having enough knowledge of self to command her own fate. So on top of being trampled underfoot by those who do, she must also spend her life with a man who's using her as a stepping stone to greater fortune. If anyone is a tragic figure here, it's Susan.

Alice on the other hand, has been around the block. She should be able to have a carefree fling with a younger man but her relationship with her husband, who cares nothing about her, has left her vulnerable to her own feelings. Perhaps it's why she makes some critical errors in her initial assessment of Joe- mistaking his opportunism for ambition and immaturity for inexperience. They have a huge argument when Joe learns she once posed nude for a painter but instead of seeing him in a different light it's the moment when she comes to fully accept him while also opening the door for him to break her heart. When her husband learns of the affair he issues Joe an ultimatum that, because of England's draconian view of divorce at that time, severely constricts whatever hope that he and Alice may have had for a life together. He does love her, as much as he's capable of loving someone, but it's trumped by his desire to sit at the privileged table. I couldn't help thinking this would have been a more effective story if Joe got neither his chance at prosperity nor the love of the proper woman. Those thoughts partially stem from a feeling that, considering the amount of damage he's left in his wake, Joe just hasn't been punished enough. Whatever consequences he's suffered on the road to the materialistic promised land are strictly the ends justifying the means and compared to what the two women in this story end up paying, one with her life and the other with her youth, Joe's destiny of a cushy job, and an adoring wife seem like a small price to pay for his guilty conscience.

As a point of comparison to a another character who also wants a chance to mix with the elite of his world and who also causes a woman to be sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions, consider Eddie Felson in The Hustler. Would the impact of that film's finale been the same if Eddie had accepted Gordon's offer? That's essentially the route that Room.. takes, arguing that by selling out Joe will be more severely haunted by having to live a life of servitude with the people he actually sold out to. I can see its point and it may have worked in a different film but I don't buy it here. Aside from lessening the movie's overall dramatic weight, letting Joe exit the film with anything more than he came in with feels like a victory for him rather than any kind of tragic outcome and only solidifies my feeling that he got off way too easy.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#230 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jan 16, 2020 7:43 pm

It Happened to Jane: I liked this, which was a relief after a rocky start of meandering irritating and unfunny glacial introductions. This didn’t take long to click as necessary setup for the friction of contrasting logic, temperament, and priorities between the two leads that feeds the ‘mismatched duo’ trope briefly until Quine gets bored of the same-old rhythm, allows bygones to be bygones and aligns politics to make room for new comedic avenues. Quine shifts gears a lot, implementing a keen vision and relaxed approach to malleable relationship dynamics as they work to form, and this mirrors that flexibility in two people getting to know each other on deeper levels authentically instead of shoehorning the personalities and pitting them for laughs. Sometimes the progression moves a mile a minute which plays into the artificiality of cinema, and Quine walks that tightrope per usual between honesty and playful exaggeration. For all the stories of the small town genuine folk rising up against the heartless conglomerates, this balances the seriousness and intelligence with humor perfectly. Quine’s female-dominated oppression may seem obvious here in the main storyline but I admire his smaller jabs, like the spy reporter who phones in the story only to be cut off when the boss says he’ll send in one of his “guys” to take over. The camera’s lingering on her in silence takes what would be a devious two-dimensional character and transforms her into another heartbreaking portrait of a woman trying to be seen and participate in life, and getting shot down, causing us to empathize with her when she is shown as more than the label of double crosser. It takes a very humanist eye to see the worth in the souls of typical caricatures. This is a messy narrative that alters its attention frequently, skipping around a lot to silly objective scenes and detours to other characters in town and their quirks, but its loose structure always comes back to the central drive that all characters share, a wonderful common ground of morality and social politics in this utopia of homogenous empathetic culture in Maine. I’ll buy this kind of optimism for 90 minutes, and since it’s Quine, rest assured there’s a compromised subtext lurking beneath.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#231 Post by barryconvex » Fri Jan 17, 2020 4:07 am

Une Simple Histoire (Marcel Hanoun 1959)

In search of work, a woman and her five year old daughter move from their hometown of Lille to Paris where they wander the streets and the metros like ghosts looking for a job, a handout, a friendly face. Some kindnesses are shown to them but what they mostly find is cold indifference and as the woman's meager savings quickly dwindle, and their cheap hotel rooms beginning to resemble mausoleums we're very quickly into Bressonian territory. The casting of first time actors Micheline Bezançon as the mother (who is never given a name) and Elizabeth Huart as her daughter, Sylvie, is one clear signpost while the film's rendering of a merciless environment with all consuming currency at its core leads it to play out like a primer to both Mouchette and L'argent simultaneously.

Hanoun has pulled off a remarkable experiment in sound design here, overlapping the mother's third person narration onto her dialog as it's being spoken in the first person as well as with the street sounds and other background and ambient noises. It's a brilliant decision with Bezançon's flat, monotone delivery giving the effect the feeling of an out of body call from the outer reaches of limbo being placed to the corporeal realms- that is if the gray and crepuscular Paris that Hanoun shows here qualifies as such. Everyone in this film lives a meager existence with enough for the bare necessities and nothing more. There are no diversions and little comfort for any of the people who inhabit this cheerless vision of Paris and it's a key part of its greatness. This has a definite chance to make my list.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#232 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Jan 17, 2020 11:03 pm

Sunset Boulevard: This has always divided me greatly because the parts of the film that work for me do so in spades, and yet the lows don’t just dip but nearly sink the ship. The negatives start with the narration from a dead man which is dumb because it shakes the audience to see its thematic explanation of fatalism and thinks it’s assisting the viewer from attachment beyond watching a story unfold. The tactic is rather manipulative and it knows it, and this wouldn’t even be problematic but the idea that Holden is a screenwriter so his narration sounding like his hard boiled spunk is cheeky in an annoying manner. The focus on unlikeable and pathetic characters is fun for a bit in a very oily kind of way. Swanson is good (I used to think her perf was much better but I think she gets a lot of credit for the metacontextual irony) and the anxiety and depression that permeates her mansion provokes such unsettling discomfort it postures at horror. Swanson’s whole “career resurgence” scenes gets tiring and the dynamic loses its steam too as Holden’s personality gets old grating against her wants.

I used to find the psychological decay of Swanson and Holden’s natural consequence for blindly following greed to be fascinating, but they coast a bit as the purpose seems to become convoluted itself. This film serves as a kind of predecessor to Vertigo’s control with genders reversed, but it’s not one-way; each sex is getting something from the other which has an opportunity to explore the complexity of relationship dynamics. The dynamic shifts into one that establishes roles of the jealous and the trapped in a hostage situation of codependence and manipulation through mental health concerns and suicidal threats, which carries a wealth of potential for digging. Unfortunately everything is SO surface-level in this exposition that any information we get is half-realised and shallow. What bothers me most is that I think Wilder may actually want us to sympathize and root for Holden after a certain point during his stint as a “prisoner” which undermines the entire grim ideas of humanity this film gets closest to success with when at its best.

I do love the sense of space though, with well-documented areas to draw the viewer into its world. This is a beautifully shot and designed movie, with setpieces that are etched in my memory even if they seem like they don’t belong there (the scenes involving the garage are memorable but nothing happens in them to warrant that excitement!) which is a testament to Wilder’s visual interest and passion for creating a milieu that sucks us in. If only the story itself did a better job at balancing the alluring with the depth of content, but after, I don’t know, five or so watches of this film the sparkle has worn off a bit and the film is more transparently flawed. Still, I can’t deny its charms even if they’re superficial.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#233 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jan 19, 2020 1:29 am

Three revisits:

Detective Story: This one always grows on me upon repeat viewings. Rare is it to share the time so generously between a variety of personalities, fleshing out each by pitting them against each another under the same roof in a controlled setting. In the absence of culture the stale vacuum still welcomes human development and understanding, to show the power of interaction and optimism in the idea of the self emerging under even the most oppressive of circumstances. The station abides by a conflicting code with the chief verbally designating it a morally ambivalent space while each man is susceptible to their own subjectively moral magnetic pull, pitting socially constructed systems vs human nature. Douglas may be the loudest example but Bendix and even the guy who wishes he was eating a home cooked meal are guilty of breaking this, while Wyler knows all they’re guilty of is being people. This reflects the criminals, with Craig Hill’s thief a virtuous man despite his illegal action, and the film takes great risks to also show Eleanor Parker as a dedicated ‘perfect’ loyal wife having skeletons in her closet that shake Douglas’ jealousy causing him to emasculate himself due to his own rigid thinking and emotional stakes in ideology. Wyler both celebrates and condemns the idea of holding onto morals vs. embracing perspective and wisely doesn’t suggest any one direction or solution. He respects moral principle and he sees the harm in blinding oneself to flexible thinking, landing on a call for compromise, but admittedly not knowing to what end.

Lee Grant’s character has been redone countless times in movie history without even knowing it, with many women winning Oscars for their perfs, but for my money no one has matched it yet. And of course Parker plays the opposite of her Caged role just a year earlier, unrecognizable here next to that performance that should have won her an Oscar. Bendix plays perhaps his warmest role, and Douglas is the angriest, saddest, strongest and weakest man all at once, broken until he can bend with the wind and accept life on life’s terms. All his deep-rooted social conditioning and pride stunt his will power to overcome the barriers of his structure - again, not a judgmental reflection of the worth of the man, but a presentation of the complex facets that affect choice and brew toward acute consequence.

Wyler’s humble approach to value sacrifices ideology for the priority of studying people, and layers each to dismiss judgment and refuses to commit didacticism. The attention to character and the use of placing of them around the station to elicit charge as they all interact is like a higher level of blocking aided by an intelligent and intricate script. It’s like a zoo that never feels too overwhelming despite allowing us to feel its chamber of chaos brewing. This is like if Nashville limited its scope and tried to explore that many characters and individual contexts clashing without the space to roam, and it works.

Funny Face is a great looking musical and though I am usually severely influenced by the attractiveness of Astaire and Hepburn, it plays like more of a collection of sublime moments than a cohesive whole, and every time I see it I find myself having difficulty getting lost in the story or atmosphere for more than the scene I’m in. Perhaps my expectations are too high, but all the pieces plus the American love letter to France should be the ultimate set up for continuous enjoyment. At the same time, I don’t dislike this film. It’s beautiful and has some enchanting numbers, but never rises above bubbly entertainment for me, which I find frustrating because other than something emotional missing in the connective issue this film is nearly perfect as window dressing- and I really don’t mean that in a negative way. I’d love to hear a defense on the story element because I want nothing more than to remove some weight on the sole anchor holding this one back from greatness.

The Gunfighter: This ironic tale of karmic fate has always been a strong western entry for its dissection of the archetype and questioning of morals in defending oneself from the plagues of reputation. Consequences spruce up constantly and the relativist perspective of killing in self-defense as an exponential condition of killing in the first place. Peck wonders in the first scene why someone starts trouble with him everywhere he goes but all signs point to him creating his own nightmare swallowing him up through working as a death machine poisoning the world as leaving behind tar tracks that are bleeding tattoos on his feet forever. It’s a realistic and relatable composite, for we can not outrun our pasts or right our wrongs, and suffer the consequences of our actions for the rest of time.

Peck’s likeability works in his favor here and yet his acting strikes a perfect shade of vague where we sense that by surrendering his moral compass long ago this post-Faustian lifetime will be the first time he’s awoken to his responsibility as an agent that affects the world, only because that world now affects him and won’t let him lose sobriety to that fact. I love the conversation towards the end between Jimmy and Mark where they reminisce on their dumb choices as kids haunting them, and the moments of clarity that sparked change. It reminds me of the alcoholic reeking havoc and the person in recovery trying to cope while looking back in hindsight, able to rehabilitate but not achieve redemption. Change is possible for the self but not beyond, and this narrative goes to great lengths to find resolve in this fact, an acceptance of which he finally finds in a bizarre kind of happy ending that appears to be devastating until we think of the bound soul that could only be freed one way in this social context. The bliss that comes before the storm is all Ringo ever could have dreamed of, and the actual ending reverses the reputation of dishonor to presenting a crowd of people show up to honor, the curse lifted and a life’s worthiness cemented and validated with equality.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#234 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jan 21, 2020 11:04 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Thu Dec 19, 2019 3:47 pm
Subida al cielo (Luis Bunuel 1952)
A good son travels on a rickety bus to see a lawyer in order to write his dying mother’s will in this collection of disparate parts in search of a satisfying whole. That hasn’t stopped some rather intrepid reachers from reading this hot mess as something more by virtue of its director— auteurism strikes again! As is, this movie is fitfully entertaining in spells but nothing that happens ends up mattering, the people we meet aren’t all that interesting, allegedly important actions have seemingly no consequences or narrative stakes, and so we’re just left with nothing (well, nothing plus a second-hand embarrassing dream sequence). To put it mildly, this sure ain’t no Mr Thank You. My least favorite Bunuel so far.
I basically agree with this. It’s a weaker Bunuel and not particularly investing but I got a kick out of the Bunuelian eye that sees through the intent and behavior of his people, even if it’s so underdeveloped and sloppy. The dying mother is a skeptic of her sons’s apparent altruism and we quickly see even the ‘good’ son is playing into a role to service himself against expectations and against other people. There is talk of the other siblings having materialist priorities but Bunuel supposes that the ‘selfless’ man’s aims aren’t necessarily superior, and even if on a conscious level he is genuine, the joke is on him too. This idea isn’t fleshed out to spectacular degrees or in particularly creative ways and so it’s a comparably lesser film but the meaning in the fingerprints is still giddily sour even if it’s not a strong execution. Bunuel sees these people as fools but he’s compassionate towards a few of them, and yet we aren’t afforded the maturity of his best works that finds a space between, where the irony is validated in that ignorance of slipping into one’s lopsided perspective and personal narrative as another option not necessarily to be judged. By depriving us of this development into a shrugging resignation to internal reality blocking out the objective (best exemplified perhaps in El), it’s just a juxtaposition with no special meeting point: characters damned but appreciated who aren’t deserving of either damnation or appreciation because Bunuel doesn’t show how they play a role in the game beyond him playing god. That omission destroys what makes Bunuel succeed in his best works, and so beyond the uninteresting and disconnected arcs that domino mentions this fails despite some decent potential of ideas.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#235 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Jan 22, 2020 2:52 pm

I found Subida al cielo sporadically interesting -- but agree that its nowhere in the top half of my Bunuel list. ;-)

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#236 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jan 23, 2020 12:17 pm

A round of noir rewatches:

Drive a Crooked Road: Another Rooney noir, this time apparently tempted by the typical greed and femme fatale one-two punch though I love how motivating the two men are in his decision. Their candid demeanors lay transparent the criminal aspect with calm nonchalance which shakes up Rooney and forces him to confront his own ‘unmasculine’ sensitivity, which is the initiator that coupled with his love interest’s gentle push persuades him to make the strong, 'manly' choice. Does he want the money to fulfill his dream, the affection of the woman he loves, or to feel adequate in his skin, or even further.. to be someone different: comfortable, suave, confident; the qualities of a successful race car driver and a wanted lover? Rooney in some ways takes on the female role in Quine’s films, conforming and committing cognitive dissonance in order to feel some sense of homeostasis with his psyche, but actively moving against his identity all the same.

The slow-burning suspense of the actual robbery and aftermath is well-conceived but it’s the bulk of the film stalling in setup that allows for the punch of the surrender of the self for the false security in idealization by way of social comparison to appear honest. In a way that’s the real suspense, not the physicality of the car winding the crooked road but Rooney winding his own crooked self-consciousness and coming out far more morally flexible and resigned of convictions as a result of sociological pressure.

Gun Crazy: This is an old favorite where I don’t revert to placing too much analysis (even though there is plenty to dissect) because for me the primary appeal is just such great storytelling. The opening crime and subsequent spins of narratives at the early trial paint a portrait of our protagonist before we hear him speak in the present. The fetishistic hypothesis of him as a gun-crazy psychopath is quickly squashed when we see a normal man as an adult who is not at all like the boy who could not control his obsessive impulses. The narrative becomes much more complex and yet simplified against the fatalism of a boy’s preoccupation with guns. It is she who is gun crazy, which is just an analogy to being drawn to chaos and self-interest at all costs. He is just a guy looking for connection: first it was love for specific objects in guns and now it’s love for a specific person in Laurie. Her femme fatale is perfectly summarized against his good natured moralist (despite sacrificing them) through the sociopathic attempt to kidnap the baby, which he puts back immediately - not willing to cross certain lines even after losing all social ties and so much moral ground, he cannot or will not sacrifice his core values that underline his sense of self.

The noir fatalism here is kicked off by a compulsion to an object of power as a child who has none, that happens to be a weapon with deadly consequences. So in our youth we are unaware that we plant the seeds of determinist breadcrumbs that may haunt our later years, but this could be anything - whether a skill or trade like Bart’s or a conditioned behavior from social learning during early developmental years. I don’t see any ‘danger of guns’ reading here and instead a story of a man fighting his morals vs fate by way of a grave his life has been building towards relatively innocently and ignorantly. As Bart gains traction in his sense of self he comes to terms with the psychology he has suppressed in the possibility of killing a person, but the key is not that he’s fighting his derangement, but normal intrusive thoughts. The psychological drive of aggression that exists in all humans and the emotional pull towards a love forms a brutal cocktail when wrestling with the cognitive processes that is the conscience, impossible not to be blended and convoluted by the others.

Is Bart’s fate sealed because he likes guns, because he hooks up with Laurie, because he’s not very intelligent, because he has low self-esteem and self-efficacy from years being locked up in boarding school deprived of normal attachment, or because all of these factors and more weigh too much for his superego to bear as it contests with his lower brain. I don’t know, but this is one of the more existentially interesting noirs because Bart is so likeable and good-natured, as simple or complicated as we want to make it. As a story alone though, it’s a wonderful ride. The early carnival scene of their public courtship is an all-time favorite moment of sexual tension in any movie, and reminds me of the release of dopamine that comes when showing off a skill with confidence in those rare situations of flirtation that come so rarely in life.

Kansas City Confidential: A fun caper aftermath story that mimics the Le Carre spy novels for a bit in the deliberate anxiety of the wait, intricately detailed so that plot falls by the wayside initially as we are immersed in the strange settings. The atmosphere sets the stage but then the story kicks in to sell this as our protagonist ventures into the underworld to get a last chance at life. I love these kind of noirs where characters move between social worlds hidden beneath the surface, developing layers of context, and clarifying invisible spaces that exist in plain sight of the visible once sobered to them. It’s no surprise that this film inspired Reservoir Dogs but it’s more successful at the deception and gambling with trust than the Tarantino, and the sense of stress and dark sides of humanity explored make for a film razor sharp with high stakes and a resilience against fatalism that inspires a juggling act of resistance at a level of severity uncommon in most noirs.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#237 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Jan 25, 2020 5:22 pm

Giant: I used to really like this epic but it’s always been due to James Dean giving what I believed to be his best performance of the three (an unpopular opinion to be sure). A rewatch shook up that perspective but revealed that what I’m really drawn to is his character. He should be the good-natured good-looking underdog neighbor in a typical epic, but his character is full of resentment which sinks him and puzzles our impressions of who he really is. Jett’s true colors are shown early on and the wealth only exacerbates what is already there. The alcoholic later stage is terrifically performed by Dean and this is arguably his most complex character, certainly his most unlikeable. He takes a man who is ‘other’d’ from the characters within the story and by the movie itself to transform from a mysterious threat regarding intention to a more public but still mysterious threat on a character level. We can’t figure him out and his brokenness, passive aggression, and pitiful isolative behavior including his alcoholism, are all just left there to be objectively measured from a distance that is torn between wanting to comfort and know him, while also urging to run away from the mess of whatever identity exists within the shell that’s left. Dean uses his own gentle likeability to subvert himself and make the character naturally ambiguous, and another actor probably would have been incapable of making him anything but a painful presence. I’ve changed my mind back: This is his best performance. I say that as someone who considers Rebel Without a Cause to be one of the fifty greatest films ever made, largely thanks to Dean, and who doesn’t even like this film much at all outside of him, but this is the film that convinced me that his praise wasn’t exaggerated or hyperbolic due to his premature death. The potential of his range, and most importantly the capacity to be convincingly the opposite of all the qualities his first two perfs suggest, exists in this performance. Watching this, or even just his late scenes proposing and final drunken crying toast to an empty room signifying an empty life, are reminders of what was lost in that bike crash.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#238 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Jan 25, 2020 8:07 pm

barryconvex wrote:
Fri Jan 17, 2020 4:07 am
Une Simple Histoire (Marcel Hanoun 1959)

Hanoun has pulled off a remarkable experiment in sound design here, overlapping the mother's third person narration onto her dialog as it's being spoken in the first person as well as with the street sounds and other background and ambient noises. It's a brilliant decision with Bezançon's flat, monotone delivery giving the effect the feeling of an out of body call from the outer reaches of limbo being placed to the corporeal realms- that is if the gray and crepuscular Paris that Hanoun shows here qualifies as such. Everyone in this film lives a meager existence with enough for the bare necessities and nothing more. There are no diversions and little comfort for any of the people who inhabit this cheerless vision of Paris and it's a key part of its greatness.
This is a great point about the sound design, and the choice of the apathetic voiceover completely burying any emotion in the dialogue is what makes this film an interesting experiment. The implications of the way this narrative is told to us through sound and vision is of a detachment between internal experience and reality, memory and facts. The narrator is so broken that all the life is sucked out of the action although if we watch instead of listen we can detect some emphasis in the voices we hear, we see the little child looking around, the mother having experiences of perception beyond factual statements of circumstance. In the present day, there may be an absence of hope but the juxtaposition between the unreliable narrator and the reality of experience, as a result of displacement from actuality in memory, is fascinating as we contrast the emotionless voice from the emotional image, creating a void of truth where we can find our own truth in the image. I wonder what Godard would think of this film.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#239 Post by mizo » Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:34 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sat Jan 25, 2020 8:07 pm
I wonder what Godard would think of this film.
He gave it one star in "Le conseil des dix." I thought he'd written about it at some point, but I'm having no luck finding it. Maybe someone with Godard on Godard on hand can check? I did find a short review of it by Cahiers also-ran Louis Marcorelles, which I could translate if there's interest.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#240 Post by domino harvey » Sat Jan 25, 2020 10:46 pm

I just pulled it off the shelf and he does (entry 76 in Godard on Godard). He calls it an amateur film but then lauds a lot of sideways praise on it in a way that could possibly be sarcastic depending on how one reads it (very "Brutus is an honorable man"-ish) -- as mizo says, Godard gave this one star in the Conseil, and if I didn't know that, I'd think his writeup was a rave. I might try to dig up the original French review later-- after doing a little translating of Godard myself, I've been pretty disappointed with Milne's highly literal translations that make Godard seem more obtuse than he already is (and Godard doesn't need any help in that department), and this may be a case of the translator missing the point... or Godard is really, really tough in his rating rubric!

Worth noting that no one really seemed into the Hanoun film at Cahiers: two stars from Doniol-Valcroze, Rivette, Rohmer, and Sadoul, and one star from Moullet (and Godard)

EDIT: Nevermind on my giving it a go, as it appeared in Arts, not Cahiers, so I don't have access to the original French. Milne's notes on the review make it clear he takes Godard's words at face value (ie as praise)

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#241 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jan 26, 2020 12:22 am

I’m not incredibly surprised given my readings of Godard’s early-career reviews (I must have missed it in Godard on Godard), but I guess I’d expect his older self to have some thoughts specific to what he’s tried to do (more complexly and much better) in his essay films. But I don’t think I’d necessarily expect him to like it either perhaps because of those reasons along others! I’ll have to pull out my copy and have a look at the specifics

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#242 Post by senseabove » Sun Jan 26, 2020 6:03 am

Seems odd to write up two films that aren't otherwise available, but it was announced they'll come out on BD eventually, so I guess it's for posterity, if not this round of the list. This year's edition of my local Noir City festival opened with Film Noir Foundation restorations of two early-50s Argentinean films directed by Román Viñoly Barreto, The Beast Must Die and The Black Vampire.

The Beast Must Die (1952), based on a novel also adapted by Chabrol in 1969 as Que la bête meure, is a revenge tale about a man who, after his son is killed in an accident, tracks down and insinuates himself into the family of the killer. It starts in extremely high melodrama, a poisoning in the middle of bitter family dynamics, with accusations and resentment immediately flying between the dead man's mother, second wife, sister-in-law, business partner, mistress, and stepchild, then takes a sudden turn to the quiet life of our main character immediately before his son's death, following him as he grieves, connects the dots, and plots. What sets it apart is how it builds us back up to the wail of that high melodrama it starts with, the poisoned man's cruelty acting as the input for a feedback loop of anxiety and fear and anger in everyone who surrounds him.

The Black Vampire (1953) is a remake of Lang's M from two years after Losey's (which I haven't seen), with a shift to focus on the women affected, directly or indirectly, by the killer's actions more than the killer or the pursuit of him. There are some truly astonishing passages, notably a cabaret scene that introduces the main character, a singer who is the only person to have seen the murderer, but who wants to avoid any association with scandal. The close-ups of the club milieu are grotesquely fascinating, the inciting incident is an ingenious bit of staging, and the script cannily develops a theme of how different people cope with bitter loneliness. The ending is curtailed into a total flop, unfortunately...

These two are both partially exceptional in different ways, if a little too distinctly unsatisfactory overall, but Barreto seems like someone very much worth rediscovering. I hope there's enough enthusiasm generated by these two to restore whatever others of his films can be. He's a strong stylist, and I'd be very curious to see how he developed.

Razzia sur la chnouf (Henri Decoin, 1955) The third 50s feature in this year's Noir City is a kind of inverse procedural, following, instead of the cops piecing together a drug cartel, Jean Gabin as a mob boss brought in to take over and overhaul one. It's very lightly motivated, just sort of drifting through the entire production line, from the train the raw opium arrives on, to the lab where it's cooked, to the distributors who get it to dealers, to the dives where it's sold and consumed, and the various mobsters who need to take people out or be taken out in the process. The highlight is a sequence of entrancing street-level scenes, carried by a wonderfully broken-down performance from Lila Kedrova, who leads Gabin through a series of shady bars: classy lesbian, upscale dance hall, back-room Arab, divey gay (where a young man gives Gabin the most overt "fuck me, Daddy" eyes I've ever seen in black and white). My first, hesitant instinct is that this deserves to be mentioned alongside Touchez Pas au Grisbi, and I'm very much looking forward to picking up the Kino Lorber release to give it another spin as a double-feature with it.

Did a quick search to see if anyone else has talked about this one, and barryconvex was as enthusiastic about it as I am.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#243 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jan 26, 2020 1:29 pm

A Ticket to Tomahawk: This is a solid color musical-comedy western, a subgenre I admittedly don’t often enjoy, but this film balances an intriguing enough plot to drive the action with strong characters in Baxter and Dailey to deliver a light and enjoyable genre melting pot of adventure and romance amongst the others. I found this to be a very pleasant surprise, and the mise en scene held a fullness of comfort that made me smile for most of its runtime. A potential contender for my list, all the more impressive because it takes a weird mess of ideas and and somehow makes them work with gusto.

Western revisits:

No Name on the Bullet: This wasn’t as good as I remembered, but still decent enough. Another 50s movie about systems, this time in the disguise of a western. A bit different than some of the others, the independent variable carries a reputation that serves as a spherical mirror for all town members to confront their own guilt and kick into fight or flight mode. Whatever harmony existed in the immoral brew of the town is undone and characters accelerate towards sacrificing their honor, attempting suicide, or plotting murder. It’s a fun movie for a while, because the villain is an empty threat of fear for most that exposes all the characters as villains who were only protected by a narcissistic expectation that they wouldn’t need to take responsibility for any of them. It’s a good thing this film is so short but even still it doesn’t have the energy to sustain 75 minutes with the momentum it began with. I guess that’s what happens when you drive so many people to such extreme lengths as they die existential deaths like wildfire in the first half hour!

Seven Men From Now: This was my introduction to the Budd/Randolph pairing a while back, and I agree with most that it sits with his best alongside The Tall T. There’s a rigidity to Randolph’s hero that feels a more authentic portrait than Eastwood’s intense aloofness or the typical more emotional hero, finding a mixture in between. The tension in small scenes like Marvin’s coffee stop during the rain storm is full of subtext in verbal sexual assault and humiliation through calm temperament and fake niceties. The innocent, guilty, and Randolph stuck in the middle, belonging to no group or at least not allowing himself to, is something not wholly original but is often not as colorfully drawn in other westerns as it is in these collaborations. The mostly nonverbal energy between Scott and Gail Russell isn’t so much sexual in roots as it is an emotional intimacy. The brashness of Scott’s one-word answer in response to Gail’s proposal that she still loves her husband despite his weakness says it all while he doesn’t offer anything further, including himself, as a way out. Here is the rare western that just makes its characters and audiences sit in the stew that is complex experience, dysphoria coated in comfort, and picks at it briefly before leaving the open scab alone. For a movie that’s so lean in plot and characterization there’s a lot going on that challenges conceptions if we look close enough. And as always, Lee Marvin makes the movie so much better than it could have been without him. The sharpness isn’t just in the performances and exposition of thematic content, but in the dialogue which can present like a film noir: “He talked himself to death in front of the general store.” “A man can do that.” Brilliant.

Rancho Notorious: A revisit for this one sadly didn’t hold up to the potential of this color western with noirish plotting. Kennedy’s man on a mission places himself in all kinds of situations and environments to find out the information on his wife’s killer, and although Kennedy shows off his adaptability in merging from vengeful to yukking it’s up with the locals to get the details he needs, all with a passably authentic air, the rest of the cast and mood can feel a bit off, including Ferrer and Dietrich. The musical interludes to the action eliminates a lot of the darkness of the material and the entire vibe winds up failing despite a few strong ideas. The love triangle is lame and I couldn’t always tell if it was for camp or an attempt at drama, and I’m afraid it’s the latter.

Winchester ‘73: This used to be near the top of my favorite Mann westerns once upon a time and while it doesn’t hold a candle to at least two, maybe three, it remains an excellent use of episodic story strung together by an object or idea. Stewart is good and mysterious, as is much of the action and interplay. Instead of deep psychological meditations we get fleeting scenes like at the campfire where Stewart admits his fear, comments on the sounds in the dark, and wakes up to re-engage with the world. This movie is ultimately spectacular entertainment in small spurts of narrative arcs with problems and the facing of said problems, so while there may not be a long buildup to some long-gestated catharsis (although to be fair, there is that too) we mostly get a continuous loop of relief and satisfaction. In a decade where Mann made some of the best westerns- and films- of all time, this gem still may make my final list after the three that are already shoe-ins for the top half.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#244 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jan 26, 2020 2:18 pm

No movie theme song has so thoroughly etched itself into my head as "Buy me a ticket to tom-a-hawk, tom-a-hawk, tom-a-hawk" though I'd gladly trade the space for many others. As I've said before, it's the best western comedy ever made and a lock for my list-- imagine Criterion rescuing this instead of Destry Rides Again, which likely would have come from Kino Lorber anyways

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#245 Post by Rayon Vert » Sun Jan 26, 2020 2:24 pm

Love the appreciation of Seven Men from Now - that was still my favorite of the Boetticher westerns the last time around, with The Tall T a close second. I'll be back in this thread in a few months' time, so I'll have a lot to bounce back of from all your write-ups, twbb.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#246 Post by domino harvey » Sun Jan 26, 2020 2:36 pm

senseabove wrote:
Sun Jan 26, 2020 6:03 am
Seems odd to write up two films that aren't otherwise available, but it was announced they'll come out on BD eventually, so I guess it's for posterity, if not this round of the list. This year's edition of my local Noir City festival opened with Film Noir Foundation restorations of two early-50s Argentinean films directed by Román Viñoly Barreto, The Beast Must Die and The Black Vampire.
El vampiro negro is on back channels with subs, but I'm not seeing the other one (and it's the one I'm most intrigued by given the Chabrol movie)

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#247 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jan 26, 2020 3:03 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Sun Jan 26, 2020 2:18 pm
imagine Criterion rescuing this instead of Destry Rides Again
This thought permeated my mind so frequently while I was watching this that I think I need to revisit because of the severity of that distraction of frustration

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#248 Post by senseabove » Sun Jan 26, 2020 3:57 pm

domino harvey wrote: El vampiro negro is on back channels with subs, but I'm not seeing the other one (and it's the one I'm most intrigued by given the Chabrol movie)

Seems safe to say the restoration looks much better, if the review with watermarked screen caps on MUBI is any indication.

TBMD is probably the better movie on the whole, but I think TBV has the higher highs.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#249 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:06 pm

Image

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Picnic in the Grass)

Sign me up for the camp that believes this to be one of Renoir’s best films. When I watched it for the first time a couple of months ago I thought it was pretty great as a cute romp, but this time around I was taken by its playful attitude in addressing such polarizing ideas, and its implementation of the wonders of the medium and the experience of living your best life. Renoir’s eye for humanity’s bright side allows the film to take an objective yet intimate position on the battle of logic vs. emotion. Basing the plot in something as impossible to define or diagnose as love in relation to sex by way of procreation is a genius platform for each side to expose strong points and flaws in the other. Renoir treats the argument as a kind of joke but more as an overarching shrug towards beauty and away from solipsism or purely clinical mindsets, not with a shred of a condescending attitude (is he even capable of such an action?)

Instead Renoir’s presentation is playful and warm, exposing the silliness in such rigidly planted positions in the first place, and still taking the ideas of love and life as seriously as ever under this lighthearted umbrella. Alexander Payne did something similar yet far more didactic, obvious, and judgmental in Citizen Ruth but the concept of treating subjective blindness around sociopolitical issues with a sideways glance makes for a fun experience. Renoir of course doesn’t sneak in and looks the characters directly in the eye with open arms so this fun is also respectful and validating of its perspectives even if ultimately Renoir knows the simplest bare essentials of humanity’s complexities will eventually shine through, or at least it will in his world.

The kittenish Catherine Rouvel perfectly counterbalances the sterile mechanical somewhat schizoid behavior of the biologists. The titular centerpiece of the picnic scene implements a sense of magic as unstoppable nature, which is fitting for Renoir’s vision; owing a lot of its wild aura to Shakespeare’s comedies, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream in grounding the absurd. I love the juxtapositions that populate this film, particularly the arguing academics contrasting the majestic frolicking of the emotionally ungrounded free spirits. The histrionic banter and mannerist comedy feels like the humor of the new wave movement just around the corner, especially Rouvel’s carefree character’s effortless vibrancy, and some of the dialogue-heavy exchanges hint at a looser Rohmer film; however the wordless expositions on nature and joyful movement are just as significant to painting the picture of life intended here. This lively combination breathes life and color into the film as a comprehensive unit, and bends the calculated containment of the story, to become in content and energy what Renoir believes cinema and life can be. In that way it’s a bit metaphysical or self-reflexively his magnum opus, thesis film, and love letter to cinema and life at once.

This is a lock for my list and strongly recommended for anyone who is itching for the 60s to populate their lists with the playful films of the nouvelle vague. This is a pretty centrist blend of that tone and the stylistic security of the more traditional 50s picture. Special mention must be made for one of the best musical scores maybe ever, by Hungarian composer Joseph Kosma; so uplifting and positive but with enough of a subtle somber vibe to indicate a piercing sense of fullness of drama to this material for Renoir. This is how he sees the world- yes, but he isn’t going to be subtle about how seriously he takes this attitude, even in such a whimsical adventure as this. The professor says, “perhaps happiness is submitting to natural order” late in the film as he enjoys his ambient and narratively spacious encounter with Rouvel, devoid of the constraints of time or logic. The statement is vague enough to subscribe to his biological thesis and/or to the release of such restrictions of perspective as a surrender to the pleasures of nature. Renoir sees this joy as part of this logical purpose, and I wonder if he placed that double meaning to both prove there are two ways to view every idea and to expose that it may not be hypocritical for those logically minded folks to adopt an emotional lens, in fact it may be the most logical move one could make.

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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#250 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Jan 28, 2020 10:03 pm

Noir revisits:

Mr. Arkadin: Perhaps Welles’ least appreciated masterwork, this is equal parts noir and adventure-mystery, stylized to the brim and pitch black in its content as tied to historical atrocities. Welles’ titular character encourages the kind of subdued menace that perfectly exudes his allegiance to his secret. The sense of powerlessness is heightened by the unpredictability and lack of audience participation in the murders, with us continuously caught off guard right there with the protagonist as Welles stunts any hopes at mastery or getting in on the action, so we take two steps back every time Arden does. The ability to confuse audiences with a manipulation of technique and narrative is one of Welles’ greatest strengths (and always has been, going back to that radio broadcast) which is why his Kafka adaptation is the ultimate existential horror, and why his most hailed film continues to make the charts for its mysterious storytelling that keeps audiences on edge even if they’ve seen it 100 times. Here he gives this gift to the noir, a more direct different use than Touch of Evil which instead opts for disruption of the senses in painting a disorienting and scary space for its characters while letting the audience in on the significant corruption, achieving a different kind of grimy and unsettling effect than here (for the record, Touch of Evil is my favorite Welles, so this is no dig!) This is a very enjoyable and original movie from beginning to end, with content so seedy I’m in awe that it passed the censors, and has a fighting chance of making my list, while the later film will undoubtedly land within the top 10.

Caged: Watching this yet again made me realize that I think I’ve seen this more times than any other prison film. And of course it’s among the best of its niche genre. The characters are so well developed and the small details provide a better transportation into this milieu than any other film I can think of in this subcategory of the prison movie, though this is a portrayal of community and resilience more than its about a specific setting. The noir fatalism is quite apparent, and Eleanor Parker gives one of the best performances ever in the celebrated space of drastic moral change typically praised in male roles. While A Man Escaped shoots for the methodical calm thriller (yeah that sounds weird), this takes the common ‘social problem’ piece and twists it to become about more than just the systemic oppression, to a place of fear, camaraderie, and self-preservation. The cynicism of the conditioning may reign in plain sight, but upon rewatches I can’t help but pay close attention to the self-actualization of Parker and admire her growth as much as I pity what she loses in the process. Here is a woman who goes through hell and gains strength, knowledge, and confidence as a result. It’s as much about the oppression of women in general as it is the literal oppression of criminals in the system. Agnes Moorehead’s butch demeanor is no accident and Parker’s ‘masculine’ qualities at the end provide an attitude that will serve as much as a protective factor in this world as a risk factor that will keep her in trouble. But at least she won’t be tricked or used again, and there’s something to be said for that. An ambiguous ending that is masked at a head shake but really is more complex than the code would allow.

Crime Wave: One of my favorite lean noirs thanks to expert direction of de Toth. The opening gas station holdup is one of the best opening scenes, perfectly constructed and edited together with the pretty music contrasting tones. The rest of the movie holds that momentum as a great potboiler that manages to hamper a blending with the didactic police procedural. Hayden does his hard-nosed shtick as a devoted policeman who thankfully doesn’t tilt the even balance with the strong tension on the criminal underworld side of things. Those details including the alcoholic doctor’s graverobbing antics and the stress on Lacey trying to stay clean despite ties that unpredictability keep pulling him back in are fleshed out with ample space despite the short runtime. I actually appreciate how this film goes to lengths to show, like Caged, the fatalism that exists because of, and is built by, the American systems and ideologies, which is very unAmerican in many respects, at least for the 50s! I don’t think this one often gets a lot of love, but I think it’s a great sleeper de Toth.

The Phenix City Story: I never loved this (I don’t typically like the docudrama noirs anyways) but after a few of the didactic 40s entries rose in esteem during the last project, I thought I’d give it another shot. This is a hard film to like, although its raw brutality and strong energy signify an authentic fighting response to self-preservation, this admirable quality feels at odds with the innate artificiality and contrived nature of the structure. I didn’t dislike it, but I’m still awed by the praise here and elsewhere.

Park Row: Fuller’s newspaper movie feels as personal as his war films, which is fitting because he lived the life and always thought of himself within the role of a reporter. It’s interesting to watch this film again after seeing Fuller’s intimate seven-hour interview on the Indicator set, because his late-life views on facts and perspective are rampant in this picture, which is full of characters hanging on to the integrity of the industry and trying to fight cynicism with optimism for the field. The idealization for the process of freedom of the press is what is fated to be crushed here on two levels, the first by systemic oppression of big business and the second by Fuller’s own admittance of the notion of subjectivity thwarting absolute truth as inherent to the process. Still, the heroes of his film are devoted to the idea that a newspaper can be authentic through morality if not objectively honest, and by the time he made the film Fuller had certainly adopted a grey worldview if he wasn’t already born with one. As always with Fuller, he believes in intensity and passion as the drives that make the world go round in the direction he sees as positive, and this is a love letter to the people who are on the front lines, like war, and fight for their own truths to be told against the masses. Maybe not a noir in the conventional sense, but this gritty, dark existential meditation on purpose and the fatalism of optimism seems like it should count.

Murder By Contract: I really like this strange beast. Its clinical in its assessment of meaning as arbitrary and flexible, with a great speech by Claude on treating killing as a business. The notion that men are predictable but women aren’t to a man is a fascinating psychological stir to the regulated anti-psychological Claude, of course he is comfortable insofar as he can relate to the thinking and mannerisms of the sex he’s studied on himself his whole life. The implementation of the unknown threatens his confidence and exposes his strength for the thin applicability it provides, and renders him existentially impotent, unable to work up the courage to embrace his self-proclaimed sense of self, fulfill his dreams, or even save his own life. This is such fun, and the dynamic between the three men is always exciting and often funny, when it’s not stressful. A stark and bold noir without a conscience makes for a breath of fresh air in the decade of ideology and scrambling for truth of virtue.

Two of a Kind: This is among my favorites of the lesser-known noirs, with a great mysterious setup, sordid main characters, and an intriguing plot with cringing details (that car door scene, and the way Lizbeth Scott commands it, is one for the books). The methodology in deliberate pacing and exposing cryptic desperation and an absence of values only serves to highlight the switch that occurs when a soul is discovered. In whom and how is part of the fun, even if a bit predictable, and at a brisk 75 minutes this is a heartless noir by which the emergence of heart marks its fate. It’s difficult to get more pitch black than that (even if the finale is a bit light and pat for the sour taste that bled throughout), but of course it can. The best noir of the decade, Kiss Me Deadly will take home that honor.

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