Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime

by Richard Schickel

  The marvel of the film is Cotten’s chilling performance. He had come to Hollywood with Orson Welles and his Mercury Players, and he had been excellent as Jed Leland, the drama critic obliged to eviscerate the performance of Kane’s mistress in an opera the newspaper mogul paid for. He was scarcely less good in The Magnificent Ambersons, as the man who observes the rise and fall of the Ambersons. By all accounts Cotten was a likable man, given to practical jokes, and a loyal supporter of Welles and his ways, but his work in Shadow is extraordinary as he explores and exemplifies the possibilities of the psychopathy that may underlie charm. (See Hitchcock’s work with Cary Grant; he alone could bring out the danger that lies beneath charm, about which Hitchcock was always—I think rightly so—suspicious.)

  Cotten went on to other good roles (in The Third Man, for instance), but one always has the uneasy feeling that he was a second-choice charmer, which was perhaps all right with him. In Shadow of a Doubt, though, he was first-class, because he could let the menace in his character out early; his obligations to charm were cursory. He could get on to being scary early and let the darkness in him take flight.

  I don’t know if Shadow of a Doubt is really a noir film. It is not particularly dark in its mise-en-scène, and it’s not wisecracking in its ways (rather the opposite). On the other hand, like many of the true noirs that shortly followed it, the film makes a point of bringing evil close to ordinary life—an intrusion that is not necessarily as rare as we are generally pleased to believe in our well-defended bourgeois culture. In any case, it is a good picture, one that Hitchcock was right to be proud of—the first but by no means the last time he adumbrated what was perhaps his greatest theme—the need for our fat, happy, predominant middle-class culture not to let its guard down, to be aware that it will sometimes brush against people who do not mean it well. We must always allow for the possibility—not necessarily murderous—that there are people out there who want, at the least, to take advantage of us. Yes, there are.

  Just ask Charlie. Or for that matter Walter Neff, of Double Indemnity (1944), a full-fledged noir. In their excellent encyclopedia of the genre, Film Noir, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward cite movies dating back to 1927 as having aspects of noir about them, and in the 1940s they list such titles as The Glass Key, I Wake Up Screaming and This Gun for Hire as noirs. They will get no argument from me. But I want to be something of a purist on this point. It seems to me that Double Indemnity (adapted for the screen by Wilder and Raymond Chandler from the James M. Cain novel) has elements that must be present in this genre if they are to be called noirs. Otherwise they are crime pictures—some of them very good—borrowing style elements from noir but missing some points that are crucial to, let’s call it, genre satisfaction.

  In 1992 I wrote a small book about Double Indemnity for the British Film Institute’s admirable “Film Classics” series. It was basically a love letter to the picture, which I began with a quote from Woody Allen: “It has all the characteristics of the classic forties film. It’s in black and white, it has fast badinage, it’s very witty, a story from the classic age…and the tough voice-over. It has brilliantly written dialogue, and the perfect score by Miklós Rózsa. It’s Billy Wilder’s best movie…practically anybody’s best movie.”

  So, yes, that dialogue. You can’t have first-class noir without it. But Allen omits the nexus of it: the central male-female thing. The film has got to have a man willing to be manipulated by an amoral woman, ready to bring him down—to death or, at the very least, dishonor or disgrace. That, to me, is the central mystery of noir, never played out more brilliantly than in Double Indemnity.

  Where did these films come from? There had been nasty and scheming women in movies from their beginning, of course, but not quite of this determinedly evil nature. Why should they suddenly appear in the midst of World War II, when the most basic drive of the movies was otherwise: to show loving couples enduring all sorts of separation, including death, under the terrible impress of world war. I have never seen a persuasive explication of what we might call the Stanwyck-MacMurray phenomenon. Maybe it was very simple: Everybody was just tired of simpering, good-natured films.

  But let’s be a little more tough-minded. Noir is a literary conceit, not a cinematic one. Movies, since sound came in, had always had good dialogue, but of a rather genial nature. The kind of hardness noir featured came out of the tough-guy crime novels—Hammett, Chandler, Burnett—which began attaining popularity in the 1930s. Those damaged protagonists liked tough dames with lip and a taste for fraudulence. It was probably Mary Astor who pioneered the type (deliciously) in The Maltese Falcon. Her Brigid O’Shaughnessy does not, I reckon, ever once tell the truth in that picture, but Bogart loves her, even as he “sends her over” at the end of the film. Brisk needed to become brusque. The type needed to gel, to harden up (à la Stanwyck), if she was to assert her spell on guys like Walter Neff—and us.

  Noir also needed a sympathetic character, which is where Edward G. Robinson comes in. His part was expanded from the novel by Wilder and Chandler so that his relationship with Neff became, as Wilder said to me (and others), “the love story in the picture.” I think it is about as good an adaptation as has ever been made. It cleaned out a lot of arty bunkum that marred the ending of Cain’s novel, and in MacMurray it found the leading man that it needed.

  It was not easy. Wilder, logically, approached most of Paramount’s tough guys for the role. George Raft, who became something of a specialist at turning down great roles, rejected this one for lack of a “lapel” scene—where he would turn over the collar of his jacket and reveal the badge pinned there. Wilder found himself eyeing MacMurray, a sometime dance band saxophonist whom Paramount was using as a light comic leading man. He was by no means a dope, but on the other hand he was not the sort of man one readily thought of being led to murder—which, as Wilder considered the matter, was precisely the point. He was perfect in the part, an emotionally stunted wise guy.

  The picture was released in September 1944, and it did all right—decent reviews; fair, but not spectacular, business—and Oscar nominations the next spring. Paramount had two horses in the race: this picture and Leo McCarey’s soppy Going My Way, which was popular (can’t beat Bing Crosby as a singing priest and Barry Fitzgerald as an older, funnier brother in Christ) and made a ton of money. In effect, it ordered its employees to vote for the priests, which they largely did. Wilder was reduced to watching McCarey bustling down the aisle to collect his laudatory hardware. Forty-seven years later, sitting in his one-room Beverly Hills office (“If I’d made Home Alone it would be a suite”), he stuck a shoe out in my direction. He had been sitting on an aisle as McCarey came past one last time. Wilder wiggled his foot for me as he apparently had those many years ago, upon which “Mr. McCarey stumbled precipitately,” he said, smiling happily at his ancient mischief.

  Of course, the larger last laugh is Wilder’s. McCarey is sort of a footnote in Hollywood history; Wilder, thanks to Double Indemnity and other wonderful films, shines far more brightly in the annals.

  It seems to me that the first years of film noir are among its best. It is a genre that hit the ground running. Personal note: I was just the right age for noir—ready for it and sick to death of A Date with Judy. Or maybe I just had a previously unrecognized fondness for people who were kind of screwed but trying not to be. People like Mildred Pierce, for example. I don’t know how I happened to see this 1945 movie, but since it did not include any on-screen murders, I guess my parents thought it was on the morally okay list.

  So there I was as Mildred (Joan Crawford, of course) built her restaurant business with the wisecracking aid of Eve Arden, playing her sensibly smart-mouthed assistant and trying to keep her daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) from self-destructing (not a chance). The kid is a monster of materialism and avaricious sexuality, too. This was a comeback picture for Crawford (she’d been fired by MGM and hired by Warner Bros., where she belonged all along), and she gives a very good performance (f
or Michael Curtiz), fully deserving of the Oscar she won—mostly because in some ways she underplays the part. She’s tense, but she’s never nuts. She’s the victim, not the criminal, here.

  She has her own romantic tribulations, but she is mostly, against all odds, keeping it grimly together. I think the film works—not that I saw this at the time—because Mildred is a kind of everywoman. In some ways, she keeps hoping against hope that Veda’s just an adolescent “going through a phase,” that their relationship is not unlike thousands of real-life parent-teenager relations, one that will eventually come out all right once the hormonal firestorm of adolescence runs its course. You can’t blame Mildred for not realizing that Veda really is a psycho.

  A case can be made that Mildred Pierce is not really a film noir, that it’s just “a woman’s picture” (as the cliché then went) raised to flash point. But it has the style of a noir, particularly in the lighting. And—herein lies its largest claim to originality—it has a noir antiheroine. She is not who she is supposed to be. We keep expecting Crawford to turn into her. She’s the right age for the part, and her Hollywood history makes her seem right for it, too. But Veda’s the first-class schemer. You can’t really blame Mildred—or us in the audience—for failing to notice that until it’s too late. Among other things, the kid is making a play for one of Mom’s lovers. I’m not entirely certain on this point, but I think she’s the first teenager to be shown as irredeemably awful. Let me make one of those big statements I’m sure I’ll live to regret: Some part of our American innocence is lost with Mildred Pierce. Ever since Veda, we’ve always had to consider that adolescents carry within themselves the possibility of corruption—of themselves, of everyone they encounter along their twisted paths.

  Having said that, I want to retreat to a smaller generalization. So far, I’ve neglected the character actors who brought so much to the movies in these days. Two of them are outstanding in Mildred. One is Jack Carson. He could play dumb. He could play a smart aleck. He could be affable and he could be mean as a snake. (Remember him as the dreadful press agent who finally brings down Norman Maine in the second version of A Star Is Born, or as the father of the “no-necked monsters” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?) Here he’s one of Mildred’s lovers, who, had he been wise instead of merely a wise guy, might have been part of a peaceable solution for this drama—not that we would have wanted that. And then there’s Eve Arden (like Blyth, nominated for a supporting Oscar) giving balance to the picture; she lent common sense and perfectly delivered zingers to lots of films in her day, but never more effectively than she did here. She saves it from the lugubriousness that is always lurking around this film; she saves it for sanity.

  Figures like the ones played by Carson and Arden are vital to movies that, like Mildred Pierce, aspire to be something more than genre pieces. George Cukor, that shrewdest of directors, once remarked to me that almost all American films are based on convention and that it is their business to penetrate to the reality—that human truth, if you will—that sustains those conventions, gives them those quirks that draw us into engagement with them, despite their “been there, done that” clichés of plot and structure and, often enough, their star performances.

  Take Arden in this film, for instance. Wisecracking women looking askance at the muddles the leading players fall into were a staple—and a delight—of talking pictures from their beginning. They were a convention of romantic comedy, spokeswomen for the audience’s commonsensical view of the nonsense proceeding among the movie’s leading swells. But remember, this stock character—like all the other “types” in movies—was once upon a time founded in a somewhat forced-up reality. And in their way, they remain connected with that reality. They are the relief from the hugger-mugger of the main plotline, and we bless them for this vital service, a reminder that there is a real world clamoring for admission to the closed, conventionalized, sometimes really weird world that most movies—and especially film noirs—present.

  At any rate, the mid- to late forties were glory years for noir, beginning, I suppose, with To Have and Have Not (1944) and ending with White Heat (1949). These years contain, I think, more authentic masterpieces of the genre than any other era. In the former, Bogart finds real-life true love in the form of Howard Hawks’s discovery Lauren Bacall, as well as a cheekiness that rounded out his screen character to perfection. A perfect example occurs in The Big Sleep (1946), in a little throwaway scene where he has to enter Geiger’s Rare Books to pursue a lead. He did the scene, and Hawks pronounced it kind of dull. Bogart asked for a retake. He turned the brim of his hat up nerdishly and adopted a prissy lisp as he peevishly asked the salesgirl for an obscure edition of a particular volume.

  The key to the success of To Have and Have Not lies in its insolence, especially Bacall’s, and in Bogart’s willingness to cede the screen to her, so smitten was he when she was purring her invitations to him. These are not, perhaps, great movies; there came a time in The Big Sleep when it was not just improbable, but impossible for the characters to be where the script wanted them to be. But then everyone realized that was not the energy the picture was running on. It was the casual, careless-seeming “badinage” that gave the film its appeal. So everyone relaxed and had a good time exchanging zingers. If you’ve been away from it for a while, these seem to be as fresh as the day they were coined.

  In that same year (1946), there occurred a noir masterpiece: Notorious. Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and, much publicized at the time, the longest screen kiss—up to then—in the history of the medium. But it is so much more than that. A case can be made that it is the first fully realized Hitchcock film. Bergman is the daughter of a Nazi, recruited by Grant (a federal agent) to penetrate a ring of German agents, nominally presided over by Claude Rains but actually run by his mother, Leopoldine Konstantin, operating out of Rio. Bergman is initially presented as a careless, not to say feckless, woman, whom Grant wishes to introduce into Rains’s circle. They, of course, begin to fall in love (hence the big kiss). She is obliged to marry Rains, who begins to poison her. Can Grant rescue her? Can he obtain the wine bottles filled with uranium, with which the Nazis intend to build an atomic bomb and, one supposes, mount a comeback?

  Hitch was rather dismissive of the uranium. It was, in his view, just a MacGuffin—it could as well have been industrial diamonds, he thought. But in the aftermath of the atomic bomb, this scary form of energy was on everyone’s mind, and he went with it. He never cared much about what device set his characters into elegant motion, and the motion in this motion picture is ever elegant. Grant’s dark side is always showing itself, but alternating with his smooth side. Bergman is ever in a dither, but slowly coming back to her best self. And Rains comes close to being a tragic figure—loving her almost despite himself, yet unable to free himself from his scheming mother. It’s a lovely tangle, written by Ben Hecht at his best. No one ever raises his or her voice in this film, which at the plot level is nonsensical, I suppose, but at the emotional level entirely gripping. There is one scene in which Grant and Bergman discover the uranium sequestered in the wine bottles (they actually break one of the bottles) that is, I think, one of the best suspense scenes the master ever concocted—essentially out of nothing but a moment’s carelessness, a rescuing handkerchief, and some narrowly avoided menace. It’s glorious, like everything else in this deliciously understated, underplayed masterpiece.

  I have at least two favorite noirs out of this period, starting with Out of the Past (1947), featuring Robert Mitchum and company and the best overripe dialogue of a period that did not lack for hard-guy poetics. There are writers like David Thomson who are dubious—in a loving sort of way—about this movie, and I take their point. It’s wildly overplotted and, truth be told, Mitchum’s character sometimes seems too ready with le mot juste; you sometimes wish he would give the metaphors a rest and state his case simply. But then, more or less helplessly, you see the film again and are seduced anew by Jacques Tourneur’s cool direction of ho
t material, by Nicholas Musuraca’s impeccable cinematography, by the plot (which makes very little sense, come right down to it), by the sense of doom hovering over Mitchum—a smart guy rendered stupid by Jane Greer’s machinations—and the film’s utter refusal to cut him a break, which is so often one of the glories of noir. He says in the course of the film that he doesn’t want to die, but if he must he wants to be the last to do so. We keep hoping he will evade his preordained fate, but in our heart of hearts we know almost from the get-go that he won’t. Raoul Walsh once remarked that you could kill off Cagney at the end of his movies and the audience would accept his demise equably. Mitchum was of his ilk.

  He’s so languid—almost dreamily so. Sometimes you want to reach out to the screen and shake him. Can’t he see—really see—the peril around him? He’s almost smug in his indifference. There is an all-American imperviousness about him that’s delicious at its best. Once I was shooting an interview with him for some TV show or other. It was in the early morning, and the director, a very bright young woman, was fussing over last-minute details. Mitchum was settled in his chair, a very large drink to hand. She thought to remove it from the camera’s sight. He pushed her gently away and murmured, “Stand up, Mr. Roosevelt, and we’ll get a few snaps.” He, of course, gave us a terrific interview, which included wicked impressions of studio bosses being both gangsterish and idiotic. At one point in the conversation he gave this opinion of the star actor’s life: “You don’t get to do better. You just get to do more.”