The film is a sort of whodunit, with three Roberts in the leads. But since Robert Young is the evident good-guy cop, and since Robert Mitchum is doing his very coolest work as a laconic bystander, it’s hard not to guess that the jaw-grinding, fatally anxious, and ingratiating Montgomery (Ryan) is the bad guy. But as if to compensate for lack of surprise, Ryan makes him as nasty as possible. Nevertheless, this would be a more intriguing film if motivation was more muddled and if everyone else didn’t regard hating Jews as worse than talking and chewing gum at the same time.
That may sound ungrateful as a commentary on a truly enterprising B picture that is made with confidence and skill. But the more you see it, the clearer it is that the fabulous lighting (photography by J. Roy Hunt) is trying to distract you from rough edges in the scenario and a somewhat smiley-faced attitude to the good old Army. So the daring is as isolated as the offense, if you see what I mean. There’s an underlying assurance that places like the Army are sound and true—and I’m not reassured.
What is best about the film is its effortless command of the city at night and the way frightened, hard-up people live; time and again, the real breakthrough in American noir is to give you the texture of working-class life. In that respect, I don’t think there’s any real doubt that the most striking scenes in the film are those that involve Gloria Grahame and Paul Kelly in a relationship that smacks of Jim Thompson. If the rest of the film could have been securely rooted in that alarmingly vague and unreliable mood, then Crossfire would be a masterpiece instead of a worthwhile curiosity.
All that said, there remains Robert Ryan, acting a touch too hard, I think, but still a remarkable performer, so far ahead of his time you sometimes marvel that he was employed. In life, Ryan was liberal, decent, and troubled. Onscreen he could be the least sentimental villain America has. It’s as if somehow this actor had access to levels of psychosis not available to others. And it’s still both troubling and intriguing. This is not his best work, but Crossfire could hardly function without Ryan’s commitment to his own idea of black malice. Here is an actor who seemingly had no wish or need to be liked. He makes everyone else look soft and complacent.
The Crowd (1928)
Beginning with sweeping crane and tracking shots that traverse Manhattan skyscrapers, and ending on a long, emerging crane shot that starts on our reunited family at the theater and then shows them as part of a large audience, King Vidor’s The Crowd is a monument to populism, to the little guy refusing to be small, to some ultimate alliance between society and show business—and to the very mixed feelings that make Vidor so remarkable and American a director.
There is not a sweeter Hollywood story than the one Vidor tells of how he bumped into Irving Thalberg on the lot and Irving asked, What next? So Vidor proposed the ordinary guy, his battle in life. “Why didn’t you mention this before?” says Thalberg. And Vidor admits he’s just thought of it. Vidor thinks of a first title, One of the Mob, but then he goes for The Crowd, with a boy and a girl, ordinary people, barely making out—this in the year before the Crash. Thalberg says make it, and it costs more than half a million dollars. But it makes a small profit, and there it is still, one of the great silent pictures, and a tangle of issues. A few people said it would outlive The Big Parade, and they were right.
It’s the John and Mary story, two good-natured young people. They meet. He’s a friendly dreamer. She’s a doll who chews gum on the first date. She is Eleanor Boardman (Vidor’s wife, and a great beauty working hard to look “regular”), and he is James Murray, a clown but a sweetheart, a natural actor who became an alcoholic and was dead at thirty-five—a man Vidor never forgot, and an eerie shadow to John in the film.
John is a clerk at the Atlas Insurance Company, one among hundreds, who dreams of his ship coming in. He and Mary have two children, a boy and a girl, and live in a small flat. He writes advertising slogans for a hobby, and one wins $500. They celebrate. They call the kids to get their gifts, and the little girl is killed in a street accident. It nearly breaks the family up.
The mixed feelings: Well, begin with the shots of skyscraper architecture, meant to show the alienating world in which the little man may be crushed—they could be buildings by Howard Roark from Vidor’s The Fountainhead. Vidor has faith in the individual, but only if he succeeds. John lurches into self-pity, he nearly kills himself—and you feel Vidor’s loathing of that despond. But Vidor can’t or won’t admit the politics that can save the little guy, whether the socialism (of Our Daily Bread) or the welfare state that Vidor’s innate conservatism resisted. The ordinary guy and the crowd is still the American story in 2007, and Vidor is a chaotic mix of populism and self-reliance. The Crowd is a “simple” film in some ways, but its fable story is just the surface in a profound battle of ideas that neither John and Mary nor Vidor can settle. But Boardman and Murray give it a naturalism that is so energetic. Vidor wanted to do a sequel—and we long to see it.
Cutter and Bone (1981)
Santa Barbara is a place much favored by retired movie people (Robert Mitchum lived there) but seldom used in movies. More’s the pity, for it is sweet, attractive, pleased with itself, rich (and poor), decadent, and probably corrupt. Cutter and Bone (also known as Cutter’s Way) is a small, insidious film noir set there, and a picture that has nearly vanished from sight these days. Our loss. One day a campaign has to be launched to retrieve the many intriguing films made by Jeff Bridges that went nowhere. He is among our best actors, and very bold and searching in the material he does. But there are those in the business who tend to write a picture off if Bridges is in it.
Richard Bone is one of his key parts. Handsome, lazy, compromising, vulnerable, he “works” as a yacht salesman and a gigolo—you can guess where his heart is. His friend Alexander Cutter (John Heard), who left an arm, an eye, and a leg in Vietnam, is alcoholic, brilliant, and bitter. Of course, he and Bone are a perfect mismatch: Each one grinds on the other’s nerves. Cutter’s wife, Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), worn out by his diatribes, is aware that Bone lusts after her but disdains him.
Late one night, Bone sees or thinks he sees a body being dumped. He begins to think the guilty party may be J. J. Cord, a leading figure in Santa Barbara society. Bone would let it go, but Cutter is too angry and desperate for that. He latches on to the incident and says that he and Bone have to solve the case. Their pursuit gets into very dark waters.
The picture comes from a novel by Newton Thornburg and a very good script by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin. The film was directed by Ivan Passer, one of those Czechoslovakian directors who came west with Milos Forman in the late 1960s but whose careers never settled down in Hollywood or thrived like Forman’s. The moody cinematography is by Jordan Cronenweth, and the music is by Jack Nitzsche. What Passer does so very well here is leave us in real uncertainty as to whether this plot is real or hokey. But Cutter has resolved that his life depends on its being a chance to confront evil and all his own bad luck.
Heard is the revving engine of the film. Bridges drifts and looks at his mustache in shiny surfaces. He really is so easy an actor. And then there’s Lisa Eichhorn—quite wonderful and tragic as Mo, and soon to disappear from view. These days, I don’t know what she does, or Ivan Passer either. But I can easily believe that someone like J.J. Cord still has Santa Barbara under his thumb. So don’t expect the world from Cutter and Bone. But if you’re ever in the mood for a thriller that will wake you up after too good a dinner, this is it. Also with Nina van Pallandt as a woman of Santa Barbara.
Daisy Kenyon (1947)
Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) is single, in Manhattan, a designer. She is having an affair with Dan O’Mara (Dana Andrews), a success, a man-about-town, and a married parent. Dan carries all before him, calling everyone “honeybunch” and reckoning that he can arrange or fix anything. But then Daisy meets another man, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda), a man messed up by the war but wanting to be a boatbuilder. So it’s a triangle film, apparently conventional, except that Daisy comes to see that
both these men are feeble and immature next to her. It ends up a classic case of the woman’s picture, in which women everywhere are encouraged to put less reliance on men.
Add to this promising recipe the fact that it is an Otto Preminger film, made by a man alert to ambiguity and human weakness. He made it at Fox, on a screenplay by David Hertz taken from a novel by Elizabeth Janeway. Enormous production values come from the photography by Leon Shamroy and the music by David Raksin. Moreover, this was a loan of Crawford to Fox right after Mildred Pierce and Humoresque.
In her book From Reverence to Rape, Molly Haskell argued that Daisy Kenyon was an example of the “choice” in a situation where the idea of choice was actually spurious. And I think that’s what concerns Preminger—the notion that through intelligence and independence, a woman might argue herself out of this allegedly confining dilemma. And it’s in the persistent observation of small things in the men—cheerful dismissal from Andrews, mounting depression in Fonda—that Daisy is required to make decisions for herself.
As always with Preminger, this way of assessing people is borne out in small movements within the frame—the way they meet, how they regard each other, what they notice in the world. Daisy’s apartment building is a fascinating contrast in how her two men behave and move—very basic things, not unduly underlined in the script but staples of performance.
The quality of the acting is remarkable. Crawford is restrained, ironic, wry; Fonda is lofty, high-minded, and a little pompous; Andews is smart but compromised. As so often, Preminger had the ability to show us parts of stars hitherto unseen. Much the same applies to the genre, the woman’s picture, which in this case begins critical of the men but discovers redeeming features. In fact, it’s the wholeness of life that is being treated—Daisy Kenyon could almost as easily carry the names of either of the two men.
And, ahead of his time, Preminger brought a Manhattan realism to the picture. When the O’Maras go out to the Stork Club, we see the real figures of Walter Winchell and John Garfield passing by. Yet Preminger uses that very sequence as a measure of privilege and boasting in his two men. The cast also includes Ruth Warrick, Martha Stewart, Peggy Ann Garner, and Connie Marshall.
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)
Begun in 1944 in German-occupied France and not released until 1945, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is a great film in danger of being neglected simply because it does not fit tidily into the mainstream of Robert Bresson’s work. You can see the problem. Bresson is hard to grasp and harder to teach. Yet a stylistic gravity (and a way of seeing) that begins with 1951’s Diary of a Country Priest applies to all the later films. So let Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne slip? Or recognize that Bresson did once deal with melodramatic emotion, and though in later films he rigorously tames that wildness, it does not go away—Bresson characters are wild but imprisoned. And in Les Dames, there is less of the prison apparent, and far more theater.
It was taken from a story told in Diderot’s novel Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître. Bresson did the bones of a screenplay, which was then given to Jean Cocteau for the dialogue. Cocteau’s work was exemplary. He seems never to have disputed Bresson’s line or intention, but the dialogue is luminous—some of the best in French cinema. In turn, this lets us feel the eighteenth century and a tough-minded Lubitsch–like world. But the story itself may remind people of Choderlos de Laclos.
Hélène (Maria Casares) has lost the love of Jean (Paul Bernard). In her pride, she claims it doesn’t matter, because she no longer loves him. This is not true. So she plots vengeance. She finds a cabaret dancer, Agnès (Elina Labourdette). She is poor, and she lives with her grasping mother (Lucienne Bogaert). Hélène gives them some money so they can set up a better establishment. She then sees that Jean meets them and falls in love with Agnès. Only then does Hélène reveal that Agnès and her mother are no better than prostitutes—that’s what “les dames” in the title refers to. But the cruel plot fails.
It is not just Casares’s baleful look (something Cocteau would employ for his own purposes) that makes Hélène so hateful; it is almost the pressure of the Occupation. And for a long time it looks as if her control is faultless. So it is very much a film about class and money and the things money can buy. The décor is resonant. The camera moves with purpose. And there is a lot of very good acting—even if several of the players complained that Bresson controlled them to the tiniest detail. Later that control will show or be felt; here we feel the restless nervous energy of the people.
Philippe Agostini did the black-and-white photography. Max Douy was the art director. Jean-Jacques Grünenwald wrote the movie music. The result is enclosed and rather claustrophobic, and you may judge that the eroticism is all at the level of chess. But the instinct for both cruelty and grace is remarkable. Les Dames was not a great success, but it quickly became a cult film. Bresson had to wait six years to do his next film, but he was a marked talent.
The Damned (1969)
Deep into The Damned, you see Ingrid Thulin, as pale as white chocolate, shooting up, and you see Dirk Bogarde howling with grief. Ostensibly, his problem is that his position as managing head of a family-owned steelworks is being undermined by the rise and fashion style of the loathsome Nazis. Believe that if you will; my guess is that the very fastidious Bogarde could only get himself to cry out loud by asking the question, “How did I get into a piece of shit like this?”
Oh, those dysfunctional families at the movies! And, oh, the decline that set in with the Duke of Modrone, otherwise known as Luchino Visconti. The action begins more or less in 1933. What will happen to this family business as power shifts in Germany? Well, along with the immense pondering by the prince in 1963’s The Leopard over what he’s going to do with “progress,” it’s good to know that the onetime Marxist Visconti was still grappling with such issues in 1969, even if the film did end up looking as if Monty Python might have made it.
It’s the crashing vulgarity that is most surprising here, after years and films in which Visconti had practiced the poise of aesthete and connoisseur. It’s the grisly summoning of so much camp homosexual iconography, and the worry that Visconti had gone nearly mad denying himself that life for so long. It’s the way women become cyphers so quickly: Claudia Cardinale in The Leopard is warm, ripe, in a dusty cherry-red dress, but Charlotte Rampling here is a study in gray and green (the hues of tooth decay), so thin she nearly disappears when she turns sideways, and without a glimmer of pleasure in life (or humor onscreen).
This family is rich and powerful, and their sense of downfall should come gradually, whereas these ghosts know they’re damned, doomed, and dull from the outset. It’s not just that they deserve what’s coming—they are ready to inhale it, like opium. I suppose that’s part of the point of it all, and I daresay Visconti would have said that he employed all those swift, ugly sock-it-to-me zoom shots because they might have been a Nazi invention. (He should have studied Leni Riefenstahl and made the style war so much more absorbing.) In the same way, many of the men are sweating all the time, though the atmosphere of the film is midwinter. It’s the flop sweat of moral terror, don’t you see? Yes, we saw it and we tried to look away.
Of course, real history suggests that the intricate compromises by which old Prussian industry (and aristocracy) went along with the Nazis might make a very good and valuable film. But that would require an approach to depth of character that is way beyond Visconti’s rush to get to the Götterdämmerung stuff quickly. And, to quote an Eric Idle bit, “Ooh, you do look damned, misses!” “Well, I should think so, I’ve been in makeup since four o’clock!” Thus the approach that makes Ingrid Thulin look dead while still alive (a hint that Bergman had been managing for years without resorting to makeup).
Dance with a Stranger (1985)
Her name was Ruth Ellis. She shot one of her lovers, and in 1955 she was hanged for the offense, the last woman ever executed in Britain. In the recent film Pierrepoint, she is shown for a moment laughing in the f
ace of her executioner, and that insolence is said to be enough to destroy the nerve of the somber Albert after more than six hundred drops. That’s not how Dance with a Stranger ends, and it’s likely an invention, but it is a kind of tribute to the silly bravery of Ruth Ellis as established in this film.
Ruth (Miranda Richardson) is chilly, brittle, sexy, but very limited. She’s pretty and sparkish enough to want a “good time” out of life. But she’s not smart enough, or classy enough, to make it for herself. So she’s a hostess in nightclubs, a whore, with a ten-year-old son. In her heart of hearts, she knows life is either a drawn-out disaster or some sudden mishap. And she has just about enough foolishness and bravado to go for the melodrama. She has a lapdog already, Desmond Cussen (Ian Holm), a small, clerical man, ready to be mocked by her if he can have her occasionally—this is a perfect portrait of the besotted man. But Ruth is hanging out for bigger game, and her eyes light on David Blakeley (Rupert Everett), rich, flashy, casually cruel, utterly patronizing toward her but ready to fuck her now and then. She is his Desmond.
In all this, Ruth tries to keep her dignity and her tight attitude toward life intact. She has a dream of being marriageable—I doubt she ever laughed at the hangman, if only because she can hardly smile at herself. She is the sort of woman who expects to be pleased and surprised every time she looks in the mirror. She is also the means of a prodigious performance from Miranda Richardson, then twenty-seven and making her debut. What makes the film work so well is her refusal ever to play for sympathy, allied to her obvious understanding of the idiot Ruth Ellis could be in her own cause. And the whole thing works beneath a bone-white china look that is eerie and frightening.
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