Kiss Me Del Rey

LtoR: Lana Del Rey, Gaby Rogers, Candace Hilligoss

Lana Del Rey's panned performance on SNL this past weekend wasn't all her fault -- the mixing was dreadful. I instantly imagined the sound tech guy had hit on her during rehearsal and decided to 'punish' her, as douche bags are wont to do, after she rebuffed his seedy offers.  See how protective I am regarding Lana? I feel like she's someone I once loved but couldn't protect as douche bags circled her every step like Kenneth Cole-clad vultures. I cringed and hid behind my book as she stood paralyzed against a white spider web of lights on stage, her legs locked together in a hippy white dress; her lyrics stuck on the endless repeat of a melody that fades on close audience scrutiny, that only works with clips of something else to break her up or as in her "Video Games" video, wherein she was only there for scattered moments, half drunkenly falling over or singing alone-ish, half America's Next Top Model entrant selling the brand, "haunted."

Once I heard how far down in the mix she sounded I was hoping for a  moment like the one in Road House (above) when Ida Lupino sings her first song at the lodge, the whole cast of regulars and staff eyeing her with concern as her frail voice, barely above a whisper and without a mic, clings like Grant on Lincoln's nose at the end of North by Northwest to the melody, a ghostly after-effect of pure will and brassy, nicotine-stained courage. Nope.

As I wrote earlier, I like Del Rey for her hand-crafted post-noir persona and its relation to American Horror Story, but that persona hinges on intimacy, which SNL lacks. Rey's a post-digital artist meant for late night headphones and tear-stained iPhone screens, not sound stages and fancy lighting rigs and an audience keyed up by comedy. Thus we're presented with the same conundrum that sinks Manhattan nightspots I visited in the 1990s, or real estate 'hot location,' the mainstream snapping at the lonesome artist gentrifier's heels and punking out our small good things into their oversize crap. Some stuff can't just automatically make the jump. I've seen the best bands of my generation destroyed by bottom line AOR guys who brought them up too fast, from Nightingales to the Meadowlands with no stops in between, and dropped them from the Humpty Dumpty wall when their 15 minute egg timer clicked crack time.

In the end the mainstream wants all the things it takes from us to be good, never considering whether or not we invited them to even taste a sample. Thus we make ourselves deliberately bad to scare away success, for success means having to be surrounded at all times by douche bag entourages and clingy fans and thus be unable to hone our craft in the isolated anguish cocoons. So our sophomore album is bloated, and the AOR guys throw us to the cut-out bins and now not even Nightingales wants us back.

Then there's the movies: I finally bought and saw Criterion's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) blu-ray. which lived beyond expectations. It's a whole different movie on blu-ray, like 3-D without the glasses and now Mike Hammer's jazzy bi-level apartment seems to stretch deep inside the screen at odd, skewed angles, and the sexy girl bare feet seem bigger than life, the treacherous west coast hills down which flimsy stairs carry tumbling thugs now recede deep down into the screen. The two blonde girls who bookend the film are now extra insane so that you can see the thin layer of sweat over their faces: when Gaby Rogers gets all glazed-eyed lunatic at the climax you can practically smell the laudanum coming out of her pores; before that you can smell the sexual heat and traces of sodium pentathol pouring off Cloris Leachman, and later the toe-tingling chlorine and perfume aura of Marian Karr as the gambling kingpin's nympho poolside sister.

Spreading its influence out to post-nuclear Japan and films like Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967),  and into Altman and the Coens, from its backwards credits to its doomsday ending, Deadly enfolds rather than unfolds, in that sacred timeless backwards space occupied by Jimmy Stewart's Vertigo fingernails and the electric chair-bound flashbacks of Edward G. Robinson in Two Seconds, or Lee Marvin's mysterious resurrection in Point Blank or Naomi Watts remembering her own parallel reality motherhood of Samara in The Ring, or those suddenly interminable songs Lana Del Rey sang on SNL Saturday. Nothing is by chance when death is sucking us up through the rear view mirror.

In the beginning/end of Kiss Me Deadly, Hammer is drugged, beaten, and driven off a cliff with his first lost blonde (Leachman), and maybe he's still dead at the bottom of a sandy ravine and the girls around him the delusional Candace Hilligoss Carnival of Souls gender equivalent of the weird white skinned zombie guy with the crazy hair. And maybe the big whatzit in the box is an atomic Skynet variation of the Hitchcockian mcguffin, suddenly aware of its abstract unimportance to the mise en scene and so deciding to change the game, to swallow the universe whole and run it backwards only in dreams.

Now it all finally makes sense: here it is 2012 and the film 2012 is coming to TNT (my take on it here). The snake, having swallowed its own tail first continues unkowingly along, its radius tightening, and only as it speeds up to the infinite point does it begin to digest itself, does memory finally catch up to its 'this is where we came in' crux apocalypse. Death is from here on out more a dawning awareness than a traumatizing finale, and a parting word to those who will be forced to watch the black hole close around us seems prudent. Thus, Christina Rosetti's (left) poem "Remember:"

  And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

         For if the darkness and corruption leave

         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

If we feel the darkness closing around us, is it at all possible that we'll remember it and thus are immortal after all? Maybe we who will die in the coming floods will not our deaths remember but rather still live in a landlocked world where no further burgees unfurl but for the brief cocktail steward span that bridges sleep and death--that fluttering spasm of alertness, the forgotten hand that clutches once and having clutched drops its eternal bong --and watch will we instead as the blackened water's through the carpet soaked and gone? Soaked...

... and gone? As Mike Hammer says when giving up the key to the whatszit, "I didn't know... I didn't know..."

He didn't know he's been dead all along and the same girl twice has died him in a drag race (left). As J.J. put it in Sweet Smell of Success, "You're dead son, get yourself buried." Mike Hammer didn't know he really was pulling a Lazarus. Right. Thing is, no one ever does.

So remember to "forget and smile" when the waters are rising higher than any hit count and our apocalypse year begins endlessly over with one January after the other, never reaching the dreaded December 21, 2012; all time slowing down like a black hole's infinite approach. And remember what the fortune teller said when Lisa Simpson asked if there was any way to avoid her grim future, "No. Just try to look surprised." All else is... Silencio... and conqueror worms that just won't give it up... for Lana Del Rey!

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The War Against Normal: A STRAW DOGS remake and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

I just saw there's a remake of Sam Peckinpah's great misunderstood masterpiece STRAW DOGS. Take a look at this poster:

First of all, what is up with that reflection of a face when we can see clearly that the chunk of glasses where said reflection would be has broken off? Did this guy get a tattoo of a dude's face on his eye? Did only his reverse clip-on shades get broken? See the original poster below and wonder to yourself what kind of poster artist would think lenses that have broken off still reflect?

And of course, no crap remake poster would be the same without a meaningless tag line. Are they asking us or telling us about this breaking point? Have they tested every man for one? What about women?  Deconstructed, the tag intends to align the viewer with 'everyone' - indicating the sneering contempt the copywriter feels for their target demographic: "Don't worry, the hero of this movie is bland, easily led, normal and stupid, just like YOU!" Chances are the author of that tag didn't even see it, or the original, or any movie made before 1993, the year punk broke! 

The original poster was terrifying since if you look at Dustin's expression it's calm, even smiling, and compacted down to resemble Roman Polanski after a night of some energy expenditure. His eye behind the broken glass is dead like a shark's, or as if its been gouged out at the pre-photoshop art department, yet he's smiling.

Since Peckinpah considered Dustin's math professor 'everyman' to be the bad guy, a self-satisfied liberal who considers himself six cuts above the riff-raff of the icky rural England locale that he settles in with his hot young wife (Susan George), who was born there and left behind several strapping ex-boyfriends. Since he's long since been lumped by the literally-minded critics (how riff-raffish of them!) in the category of vengeful ass-kickers like Buford Pusser in WALKING TALL, and Cameron Mitchell in any AIP biker film, one can only assume the complex shadings of a self-righteous lefty nerd narcissist in Hoffman's everyman will be weeded out in the remake until he's American Average like "everyone" with their breaking points and whatnot.

I've been reading the new Pauline Kael collection, so forgive me if I sound self-righteously astringent, but apparently the idea that the one educated man who stands alone against the many armed yokels might actually be the bad guy in a film is beyond the average (petit-bourgeois) movie critic unless it's spelled out with ominous music cues and sudden outbursts of misogynistic violence. It hasn't been done to death so they don't believe it even exists. The fools! The bombastic ignoramuses! And then there's the reverse: sometimes the villain everyone presumes is evil is actually the only sane, sympathetic person around!

Kim Morgan and the Self-Styled Siren discuss one such film, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) across both Kim Morgan's site, Sunset Gun, and Siren's classic self-titled blog, and the realization that Gene Tierney's murderous bride is actually the complex heroine of the film, which is a kind of horror story about a beautiful bi-polar artist who gets trapped in a normal marriage with a husband who hides behind Norman Rockwell facades and close extended family sing-a-longs to avoid being intimate. It's most worthwhile to check out, here's a sample from Morgan's side: 

Gene/Ellen is a modern type of woman, a poetic, ingenious woman, and I always get the sense that her inner struggle to express whatever power or talent she has, well beyond her beauty, is pure torture. Many may look in her eyes and see cold orbs of hate, but I see… Wagner's entire Ring Cycle, and beautiful, damnable Richard W. seems especially appropriate since, for some crazy reason, he also managed to write, in 'Lohengrin,' 'Here Comes the Bride' amidst his Götterdämmerung. 

Is this an excuse for her dastardly acts? No, but she does serve to symbolize every trapped, powerful woman flapping around her white picket fenced-in bird cage. That war raging inside her twists into a a full-scale blitzkrieg on the… normal people. Her revenge is her final work of art! Her masterpiece! (more here - Siren)

 And from la Siren:

I always wait for that staircase, for Gene hurling herself down it after carefully leaving one slipper on the top step, like a psychopathic Cinderella. It's a wicked act, but she tells Ruth just before she does it, "sometimes the truth IS wicked." Along with Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven dares to go down some dark maternal byways, into things some may feel, but no one wants to admit--in this case, pregnancy as a cage, one that's about to slam shut for oh, about 21 years. Ellen's on bedrest, its own kind of "Yellow Wallpaper" hell. (Those insipid posies on Ellen's dressing-room wallpaper could drive a lot of women to the brink.) Look at what she's doing beforehand. She's talking to her own sister about the stroll the girl just took with her husband. Couldn't Richard be upstairs talking to his wife? Making sure she isn't bored and terrified, instead of taking it for granted for that she's rubbing her belly and practicing lullabies? So she grabs her most beautiful robe, and re-applies her lipstick, and she even puts on perfume--because she's about to go back to Ellen, the beauty, and leave behind Ellen, the terrarium. (More here / Sunset Gun)

"Psychopath Cinderella" - awesome. And here's something I wrote (link here) on the same subject for Bright Lights in March of 2010 when Film Forum screened LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN for a special week-long revival screening:

Wilde's straight-edge kid brother gets killed first after he decides to hang around the lodge like a third wheel albatross on Ellen’s neck. The way Stahl frames this event in the peace and quiet of the lake makes a great ironic comment on the production code-approved craze for “discovering the great national parks” that was going on all over cinema in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I always root for Tierney in these scenes. I too know the frustration of having to run a cock-blocking gauntlet of resentfully undersexed friends and relatives every time you want to get your lover up to bed, or having to drag your urbane self out to buggy campsites to pacify your spouse’s yen for convention.

The drowning of the brother is nothing compared to the glorious moment when Gene throws herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage (Wilde must have waited until she was ovulating to slip her one). That's incredibly hard to do, and I think it's heroic, in its own twisted way, symbolic of her yen for flight and mastery over her own self-preservation instincts (I tried to throw myself down the stairs every week as a kid, to avoid soccer practice, and just physically couldn't--my body wouldn't let me).  Meanwhile if Wild had bothered to pay attention to her in bed and maybe even give her an orgasm, none of this mayhem may have been necessary.

If we, living as relatively relative free as we do today, were suddenly stuck in a post-code extended family Americana hell hole like Gene's in HEAVEN, would we act any different? Or would we just quietly disappear–like Lea Massari in L’AVENTURA (1960)– before the bores could catch us and smother us back into Stepfordville? Maybe I’m just unusually squirrelly when it comes to the sorts of color schemes at work in the film; as Village Voice scribe Melissa Anderson notes, the color scheme “redefines mauve.” I hate mauve. It's telling that  Gene, whom Anderson calls “one of cinema’s most chilling psychopaths,” grew up in a situation outside the claustrophobically chipmunk cheeked tedium of “sanitized” American family values, with an intellectual, adventurous father. No wonder she can't adapt, like those poor heroines who had to give up their jobs the moment, get married, and dutifully cook, clean, and obey, once the code took effect in 1934.

Where I’m going with all this is to analyze the ultimately corrupting nature of post-1934 cinema’s phony morals; the “as long as you feel bad about it, it’s okay to kill” sort of compromise with the censors. You can see this in two roles played by Winona Ryder: HEATHERS, with Winona's refusal to 'enjoy' the killing of the evil jocks and janes nonetheless orchestrated by herself and Slater; and SEX AND DEATH 101 (which I decried in "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise - Bright Lights 4/10/08), where she only drugs her sleazy would-be lovers into a restful coma from which they awake at the happy ending. We need more LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN-style sociopaths, by which I man girls with cajones enough kill those who would hobble and baby them with prefab beige rusticity, and critics with the cajones to applaud this, and to see the purveyors of mauve domesticity as just as deserving of death as cannibal rapists. We had THELMA AND LOUISE to inspire us in this way for awhile in the early 90s, but somehow the drippy third wave feminism of Sex and the City gourmet shopping swept over that fire like a flood of designer bottled water and bland has returned. 

Figures like Gene are essential because they blur the line of good and evil, and help us extoll revenge using art --a murder in the movies is not the same as real life, so let it be cathartic and wild. In this sense Ellen is an artist, a frustrated panther goddess trapped in the hell of some L.L. Bean adman’s pre-presentation nightmare and busting out through any means necessary. It’s just too bad she couldn’t take a few more of those little bastards out before the inevitable mauve ocean swallowed her.

*****
That may sound hardcore, but I embrace the Camille Paglia/ Nietzschean vantage point beyond good and evil. So how about a LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN remake, directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Vera Farmiga as Ellen/Gene Berent? And thank God that there are still women out there like Kim and la Siren who aren't scared to call a spade a spade, and then bury you with it; who aren't afraid to see beyond the 'chilling psychopath' to the artist and human within.  Sometimes when life gives you lemons it's far more noble--well, not noble, but certainly more exciting and cinematic--to put them in a pillowcase and beat someone up with them than to make lemonade... especially if you're all out of sugar. Ellen is all out of sugar, and so is America.

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Somnolente Noir: THE GLASS KEY (1942)

Alan Ladd is "tired of hick town stuff" in a weird tale of brotherly love and deceit called THE GLASS KEY (1942). The "hick town" is run by racketeer Brian Donlevy as a kind of less comedic version of THE GREAT MCGINTY (1940). In fact, KEY and MCGINTY go well together, recalling a time in film when shady local politicians could still climb city hall ladders and backstab and make friends with slap-happy gangsters like Akim Tamiroff and William Bendix. Male friendship is what it's all about, as in the loosely post modern remake of KEY, the Coen Brothers' MILLER'S CROSSING (1990), but it's no-good scheming women that set the world tumbling in motion, to its knees and beyond.

There were enough rich femme fatale poor detective romances going on in the 1940s that there was even a word for it, "slumming." The detective could let go of his hardscrabble life and live like Nick Charles, presuming he didn't get double-crossed, or even worse- she loses interest in him now that he's not poor, and gets contemptuous of his sponging. Part of the appeal of THE GLASS KEY lies in Alan Ladd's stoic rejection of this destiny, via the much richer Veronica Lake. Like many film lovers, I've long been fascinated by the weird chemistry the pair exhibit, and how other similar pairs, such as Claire Trevor with Laurence Tierney (BORN TO KILL) or Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews (LAURA), lack that same chemistry, much as they may have chemistry on their own. Ladd and Lake seem to be born in a different time than those around them, a different projection speed, both blonde-haired, alcoholic and short (him 5'5" she 4'11"), isolated as a separate alien race, a pair of lost Nordic hybrids (which I've written of here) trapped in the sticky webs of human desire, villainy, and wretchedness... but never complaining or tolerating wrongness when they see it.

THE GLASS KEY is the perfect Lake-Ladd film second only to THIS GUN FOR HIRE (the same year as KEY, 1942) In GUN, they're just pals who come to trust each other in a world full of duplicitous poisonous snakes (which in a way makes it even sexier and sadder). But in KEY they have such a great sleepy chemistry, it's like they're dreaming while awake and whenever they're together they're packing or leaving or otherwise hanging out in empty rooms. You just get used to seeing one or the other's leaving trunks dead center in the room whenever they're together.  You don't have to read Wikipedia to know that both of them had hard childhoods. You can feel it in their shy delivery and wary glares. Ladd and Lake are two damaged souls recognizing each themselves in one another, and the aloof posturing, verbal attacks and avoidance strategies they used to keep the world at bay couldn't fool each other for a minute.

The normal 'sex appeal' of screen sirens is kind of transcended by Lake, a very heavy drinker who once noted "I wasn't a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie." Ladd seems a bit of a zombie himself, and together they stand as undead outsiders in a noir world never quite asleep enough to suit them.

Perhaps that's why Lake-Ladd films are, for me anyway, ideally seen when at home, sick with a cold, as I was all this past week. THE GLASS KEY goes down smooth and easy, with William Bendix's fists standing in for the effects of influenza, and Veronica Lake's smooth alcoholic tones as gentle as a shot of Tussinex Suspension.

The sadomasochistic pair bond between Alan Ladd and Bendix is also something very special, and an interesting echo of the rough and tough fight at the drop of a hat rapport between Donlevy and Tamiroff's mobster in the GREAT MCGINTY (directed by Preston Sturges who also directed Lake in the previous year's SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS). The willingness to fight and 'take' punishment is often decoded as being allusions to homosexuality, but I would disagree. I'd say it's more of a kind of code of masculine ethics ala FIGHT CLUB or A MAN CALLED HORSE. Taking a beating is what makes a man tough, fighting back until all that's left of you is fingernails. Bendix's sick excitement over 'bouncing' Alan Ladd around the room "like a ping pong ball" is contagious, and in one of the big climactic scenes it's hilarious and heartening to watch Ladd calmly, like a patient cobra, draw out the sadistic tough talk of Bendix in an upstairs barroom. Bendix hams it up, but is a delight, playing basically the same brute he'd ushered in with THE HAIRY APE (1944) and the later Lake-Ladd film, THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946). 

The Great McGinty (1940)

And Ladd's canny beating-taking for his dim-witted boss buddy is therefore a cool triumph. This, like Hammett's other novels mirrors later films like THE GODFATHER, where we're introduced to the machinations of power and feel lucky we're not involved: it's too dangerous grabbing at the big brass ring, and you have to presume your enemies have already planned six moves ahead, and you need to plan the seventh in advance or else take your face smashing-in stoic like a brave. It's not often either you see a movie where the good guys have the district attorney in their pocket, and people wage war via whole newspapers and elections the way we argue in chat rooms today.

Last interesting anecdote: I've always been upset there's really one or two films where Lake has her signature hair over the eye. According to Susan Kelly: By this time the peek-a-boo hairstyle had become a nationwide fad, so much so that government officials actually had to request that Ms. Lake stop wearing her signature style because women in war plants who were copying it were catching their hair in the machines!

Well, that explains a lot, but I still regret the abundance of skull-tightening headgear Lake wears, as it seems to all but castrate her for the bulk of KEY's running time. On the other hand, the film's really about the buddyhood of two men, and how one should never let a girl who doesn't even like you interfere with your 'bros before ho's' mentality, especially right before an election. Got that? On the other hand, I'm sick so don't listen to me, and Lake went on to drunken despair, getting kicked off pictures, and tending bar in women's hotels after the 1940s wore themselves out, but she still had her pilot's license, and I would like to know why I can't seem to find a good old-fashioned pulp-art covered paperback version of Hammett's original Glass Key anywhere and last I checked this 1944 version is not on R1 DVD. What gives... pally?

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Degenerate Drums of the Leopard Woman: PHANTOM LADY (1944)

One of the coolest frisson effects in film noir is the sense of collapsing time, the melting clock warp as an incriminating love letter is accidentally found by the heroine on a brutal killer's desk right as he quietly lets himself in downstairs, switchblade flicking from his trench coat; it only takes a few seconds to climb stairs or shut a drawer but noir time carries a heady, melted, drugged drink feeling, here 'drying out' facilities double as blackmail fronts with drug dens with cots full of people with half-lit opium pipes; cat houses are barely disguised as dance clubs; drugs and sex are fogged away by censorship to make the whole thing as coded and symbolically abstract as a Dali painting reproduced on cheap newspaer. Nothing ever means only one thing, but neither is it ever fully known, so bathed in shimmer and shadows it blurs the idea of 'known' until its indistinguishable from a fever dream.

The cult noir classic PHANTOM LADY (1944) shows director Robert Siodmak to be not only a master of this druggy slowed-down form, but of a weird side current of warm humanity that's reminiscent of Val Lewton's 1940s RKO horror films like THE SEVENTH VICTIM and THE LEOPARD MAN (here), wherein compassionate poetry and the iconography of B-list film noir/horror hybrid thriller are merged, creating an amplified feeling of being alone and in danger with nary but a clicking footstep and a few shadows. The trick of course is to have genuine human connection between characters, so when they're suddenly isolated along a lonely stretch of train platform, you feel it extra deep. We're so used to our horror victims being cardboard shooting gallery ducks that we're not prepared for the shock of seeing them suddenly turn human.

Like THE LEOPARD MAN, PHANTOM LADY comes from a source novel by Cornell Woolrich and contains a high-strung Latin cabaret singer (Aurora Miranda, Carmen's sister), and an unseen killer that moves through the scenes like an collective unconscious eruption of the death drive. Throughout both films a sense of feminine strength abounds, the heroine's ability to mix human warmth and compassion with icy resolve in both films shows that terror can be enhanced--rather than diluted--when compassion is revealed to enhance feminine power rather than detract.


I'd never really focused in on Robert Siodmak as a notable auteur (I got him mixed up with his brainy brother Curt) but after seeing PHANTOM, I looked him up in David Thomson's Biography of Film:

"He (Siodmak's) was never more than an assignment director but he never lost a mordant sense of humor, narrative economy, a relish for actors and actresses, a special care for interiors, and a readiness to extract the best from the system... He was an artist, and he deserves fuller retrospectives."

Man, now I agree. What I love about PHANTOM also is the linchpin it provides in better linking wartime noir to anti-Nazi propaganda. Like Siodmak himself, Weimar era artists had fled to Hollywood in droves in the mid thirties when the Nazi writing was on the wall. After they left, the German films under Goebbels were all sunlight, health, mountains, and music with shadows and urban blight reserved for negative depictions of Jews. Over in America the 'degenerate' German emigres used their intellect and surrealistic shadowplay to mock--via the 'film noir'--Goebbel's ideals, relishing the chance offered by the B-movie to throw logic and sanity to the wind and create funhouse opposites of Nazi sanctioned art. Aware of censorship's sticky hypocrisy, even in free speech America, Weimar-expats like Siodmak proved too smart for the morons at the ratings board: dangerous political statements were sewn into details as small as spotlights on strangling hands and sweat on bartenders' shirts. Even today, or last week when I saw it on TCM, the film still packed for me a surrealist sucker punch that would make a healthy Aryan buckle to its knees and a censor do a spit-take, if they knew how to read a leer.

Perhaps this is why noir films generally taunted the outdoors (as in the subversive anti-Abercrombe subtexts of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN), mocking health and sunlight, they reveled instead in shadows and sleaze, petty crime, and sexual deviance in dark deserted cities where no one had a job or anything resembling a strong Aryan ideal. In this mirrored route you can measure in black ink splashes the way calamity fuels creativity. Would we have modernism without WWI? Would we have noir without WWII? Would we have subversion without censorship? No. Before the war, men in movies were either rich saps in tuxes or suspicious train conductors but either way obliged to heed their elders and get married and obey all laws. Men came home from the war with American .45 automatics and German Luger souvenirs and were in no mood to starve on the street. Combat had eradicated their moral squeamishness; robbing a bank to make ends meet or buy a hot girl a bracelet. And if they came home to find their wife shacked up with some Laird Cregar-ish masher and holding cocktail hour in their honeymoon apartment, look out.

Joan Harrison (Hitchcock's former script doctor) produced PHANTOM LADY, leavening and increasing the suspense simultaneously by making villain more human and the detective (Thomas Gomez) a warm and compassionate human being. By the time the climax rolls around, all you need is a shadow falling over heroine Ella Raines' beautiful face to put the whole thing into 'go' mode, and Siodmak knows it, so that's all you get, 'cuz there's a war on, and props are scarce: Franchot Tone's bizarre sculptures draw odd associations to Pabst and Von Sternberg, but with a sparse empty-ish set B-film austerity that shows off the masterful and economic lighting, and I mean that as a compliment.

Best of all is the gorgeous Ella Raines who brings such a wealth of attitudes to her character that you fall in love with her badassedness. She spends an entire evening just staring dead-eyed at a bartender until he practically craps his pants. As in Lewton, sometimes the victimized heroine can chill the heart of the killer even more than vice versa.  Raines's supposed to be the atypical adoring wallflower secretary who needs to step up her game and free her man for a crime he didn't yadda yadda, but look a the way she rips chunks out of Elisha Cook with her eyes (below). That is fierce! She can out-fatale any femme fatale on a dime. And yet she's the good girl heroine!

The notorious bits of PHANTOM LADY are the justly celebrated sequences with Elisha Cook Jr. as a lascivious little jazzbo drummer. Personal anecdote: somewhere on the NJ shore around 1991 our band was playing and a pack of Jersey Shore-style girls were there, drinking and cheering, and one caught the eye of our Elisha Cook-ish keyboardist who then launched into one of the most blazing of solos--I mean, he was crushing it! Her friends were excited and she was turned on, for a second. Thrilled to finally win some female attention he sublimated the hell out of his excitement, wowed the crowd for awhile, then kept going, faster and crazier, and she gradually went from turned on, to thrilled, to a little creeped out, to wanting to leave, to leaving, all within the space of a solo. Elijah at the drums in PHANTOM reminds me instantly of that 20-year old moment! In short, Cook's insane Gene Krupa-dubbed solo in the basement bar is one of the most gloriously unseemly bits of sexual sublimation in sound cinema. And as I said, it happens! It's totally understandable, that's the genius! It's sexual sublimation gone horribly right and wrong at the same time. And though Ella Raines is basically cozying up to him to get information. she still turns into a kind of creepy jazz-loving libertine, conjuring up his ferocious solo like its a spirit borne wailing from her fallopian tubes to his drum sticks and back again. This one sequence seems to capture all that the jazz club basement finale of DEMENTIA (1955) was trying for.

 

In sum, PHANTOM LADY is awesome, and the print on TCM is crisp enough that the white lighting on the heroine burns your mind. What RAW DEAL was for Anthony Mann, or DETOUR for Ulmer, PHANTOM LADY is for Siodmak, with its tender, twisted foot planted just deep enough in B-movie minimalism to make every bizarre touch stand out. Can I suggest a Blu-ray Criterion Robert Siodmak boxed set with PHANTOM, COBRA WOMAN, and CRISS CROSS? There's a Siodmak set in region 4, meanwhile, proving once again Europe and South America are better at discerning our art than we are...Get it together, USA! Somewhere in Buenos Aires a short bald musician who can really swing is getting it on with a foxy jazz fan, and that's how it should be here, instead of that fox just running away. Mis Estatos Unidos, sometimes you're just a stinker.

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Drowned Phoenician Sailor and his Mermaid Muse: HE RAN ALL THE WAY (1951)

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Harke now I heare them, ding-dong, bell.

Sometimes a movie would slip right by you if not for the recommendation of some critic willing to stand up for it and urge you to look deeper, to look--as Godard once did--for Shakespeare in Monogram westerns. You may get disillusioned if you look for Shakespeare in all Monogram westerns, so you need a Cahiers du Cinema writer to give you a name, like Edgar G. Ulmer.  Hearing someone express unabashed love for certain actors, movies, or directors, is very gratifying in an age when journalistic guidelines stifle the path forward, like a herd of cattle being driven into the same narrow gate.  Good journalists and critics can "know their lines and so can forget them" they don't need fences. Such a glorious confessor and herald and thrower downer is Sunset Gun's own Kim Morgan. So naturally I was thrilled to see her featured on TCM's critic's choice this month, choosing two films, SOMETHING WILD (1961, starring Carrol Baker) and 1951's HE RAN ALL THE WAY, starring John Garflield. She writes on the latter:

Mr. Garfield. In my mind, one of the first method actors (he trained in the famed Group Theater and worked with Clifford Odets), he was also victim to one of cinema's darkest, most shameful moments when the left-wing, progressive actor (and patriotic actor, he helped created The Hollywood Canteen for heaven's sake) testified at the scabrous House Un-American Activities Committee, who suspected him and certain colleagues, Communist. Unlike many other actors, writers and directors (including one of his former directors, Elia Kazan), Garfield refused to name names. As both a once young street tough and a man of principle, Garfield would not rat. Not surprisingly, work was then harder to come by and at the young age of 39, Garfield died of coronary thrombosis. Many speculate an already present heart condition was worsened by the stress caused by the House's inquisition. I think this assumption is correct. His mislabeling and death is so tragic that it angers me to this day.

I needed Kim's guidance, because Garfield's work is so subtle and unshowy he's barely registered with me except as a short streetwise blowhard, a kind of grown-up Bowery Boy, reminding me of guys I didn't like in High School. Would I have ever noticed Montgomery Clift or James Dean if film history hadn't lionized them to the extreme? Would any of Clift's traits resonate in today's cinematic market, where sensitivity and subtlety and deeply-felt emotion are jettisoned in place of insincere tough guy detachment, whiny self-indulgence, ordinary hunk blandness, nerdy cliche, and larger-than-life hamminess?

Thanks to tons of books and documentaries, we know what to look for in a Dean or Clift performance. We know to stop and look deeper into a Clift's sensitive eyes than we might for a normal actor,  like slowing down to appreciate a bottle of really good vintage wine rather than just gulping it down like you do with your usual Saturday night box of zinfandel.

Garfield's last film-- and one written by Dalton Trumbo, also a blacklist victim--HE RAN ALL THE WAY operates from a standard 'hoodlum on the lam takes family hostage' plot that's a solid front for a sorrowful blacklist subtext. Within the first few minutes we've already learned that Garfield's character has a bossy, self-centered mother and one very bad-influence friend who drags him along as muscle on petty theft jobs. A payroll robbery at a garage goes sour, Garfield ends up shooting a cop, and his 'run' is on. Hiding out at the community pool, he runs into the perfect cover, Shelly Winters trying to learn how to swim, and eager to fall into the arms of a well muscled 'teacher.'

All gangster romances generally seem to involve a polarized split feminine, the glamorous femme fatale and the  virtuous, allegedly homely girl who wants to reform the antihero and is so pretty that even their plain makeup and ugly hair can't disguise her. But it's not often that we see the reverse of the typical noir equation, the homme fatale putting the moves on a genuinely homely girl, one who in this case is not even rich. It's a precious rarity to see these situations in any film --you can count them off in one hand: A PLACE IN THE SUN, LOLITA, SUSPICION, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION, THE HEIRESS, and maybe recently IN THE COMPANY OF MEN. Any guy who's ever dated someone they liked well enough but never wanted to be seen in public with, never wanted their guy friends to know about, has an investment in a film like this. After all, these situations happen a lot, especially around four AM in bars, or on the slicker internet dating sites like nerve.com. Lord knows... and he forgives you. We need more movies like this, movies that go the other direction. For the playas.

Of the less attractive stars in old Hollywood, Winters had it hardest but worked longest. She could never just blind you with DARK VICTORY wit and class like the similarly snaggle-toothed Bette Davis, or scare you into submission like the similarly coarse Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland could only ever meet plainness about halfway, despite her lavender drubbings by the Oliviers and Clifts. So, almost by default, Winters landed all the 'easy' lay /broad roles. Her characters knew they weren't beauty queens--or very bright, or graceful, or stylish--and though they had a bad case of the ugly tunnel vision that can result from being ignored by all the boys at every dance, Winters nonetheless infused them with a warm vulnerability that made you as a man kind of imagine-- well,  maybe not sleeping with her or flirting with her, but having already slept with her and now desperately trying to get back to the keg before you sober up any further, and yet wanting, despite your best judgments, to keep the bridge only half-burned.

Note the open eyes right on water level as Garfield clocks the cops. That's fucking acting!

A simple analysis of HE RAN could see it as the gangster version of getting to know your in-laws, an Italian or Jewish neighborhood kid moving in on a working class Irish-American family of limited but comparatively affluent means. The central family in HE RAN acts happy, but a Nicholas Ray-level streak of poison runs through them. This is a family that has to announce how happy they are, but they're also perfectly willing to leave their daughter alone in the apartment with a stranger while they go off to the movies, indicating this is the first man she's ever brought home so they don't know protocol. But more than 'happy' they're just Irish martyrs --eventually miserable, and unaccommodating to their doomed house guest, more out of fear and Catholic guilt rather than it being the 'right' thing to do. Their dour refusal to eat the chicken Garfield provides makes it seem less a matter of deep family pride and more that an angry censor is standing on the other side of the room, his clipboard and pen more threatening than Garfield's gun, demanding the family display their disgust at their guests' recent criminal past at least three times for every moment Shelly buckles under his heavy charisma. And even as all through the film Garfield tries his best to ingratiate himself, to be accepted, they still refuse him even basic courtesy. Haven't they ever heard of Stockholm syndrome? He's not a tenth as needy as Shelly. I'd be helping disguise him as a Hasidic rabbi within a few minutes of that tasty chicken dinner! Hmmm mmm!

So even though after the incredibly suspenseful first 1/4,  HE RAN ALL THE WAY wanders away from its noir connections and into the sparsely furnished blue-collar method-acting Chayefsky-Kazan-Schulberg-Fink chamber drama, Garfield's eye view reigns over. He's complex! We're allowed to see him through Shelly's eyes: one minute we want to fix this wild bird's broken wing, then he snaps at us and we know he's still far from house-trained.  He's sensitive yet cold-blooded; a terrified kid trying to joke and make friends on his first day of school, and getting the airs and high hat for his trouble, so then Columbining them all the next day.

Maybe that's all just my reading too deep into it, due to the fact that I never much cottoned to Wallace Ford (he plays the dad) especially in corned beef cliche's like his snarky reporters and his John Fordian Irish-American working stiffs. It's like he's the poor man's Jimmy Cagney, and he mistook Cagney's punchy energy for rote 'snappiness' and know-it-all smarm. Nothing personal against Ford, but I wanted Garfield to shoot him.At the same time, Wallace does very well here, acting-wise. Every heroic decision he makes is second-guessed by the women in the family, and he's so roped in by 'the right thing to do' and 'family above all' that he practically chokes to death, like the gangster from THE COOK, THIEF WIFE AND THE LOVER was force feeding him all 24 pages of the production code.

Would this family's cold shoulder be warmed-up if Garfield was Irish and his mother went to their same church? I doubt it. Any sensible middle class New York family would just charge Garfield a 1/3 of his stolen money, in exchange for food and shelter, ala THIEVES LIKE US. I say screw them and their banal 'common folk' decency (1). I'd like to get that Ford's dad enrolled in a Cultural Studies course with Naom Chomsky or Howard Zinn and let him get wise to how all that 'good honest folks' prattle was invented by rich fat cats to keep him and his blue collar Irish brethren docile and productive! And you know that commie Trumbo had just such an education in mind!

So though all the ingredients are in place for a confirmation of 'American family values,' count on Trumbo to take the censor-approved ingredients of a nutritious but tasteless leftover stew and deliver instead a chicken dinner with a cookie full of arsenic for desert. Even though  the 'old-time' extended Norman Rockwell style family (dad wearing suspenders and reading the paper, mom in the kitchen, junior with freckles)--once mocked by wits like Ben Hecht, Charles Brackett, and Charles Lederer--is in the end made to win, Trumbo makes sure we're allowed to at least come away still rooting for our disillusioned wild pterodactyl of an anti-hero, John Garfield.

Garfield's performance here is so good that it accumulates in power as the movie progresses: Garfield doesn't just push Shelly and her dad around in the haphazard way Warner Brothers used to have with gangster violence (2), he grapples with them like a man trying to claw his way out of a prison of soft Irish working class flesh. Imagine James Dean's anguish mixed with Jimmy Cagney's boxer grace and Brando's stray bullet ricochet savagery (ala his table clearing or radio tossing scenes in STREETCAR), and then use all that to reverse the stairway trajectory of Jimmy Stewart pushing around Kim Novak for the final VERTIGO freakout... right? That's fucking awesome? Genius!! You don't even worry for Shelly's safety, for she is not frail.

I think its not unnatural to compare Wallace Ford's righteous Irish father with Joseph McCarthy, and read the whole thing as a stealth razzing of an uncaring, terrified 1950s conformist landscape. So damn you, Joe McCarthy. It's you who should have been shot down like a rabid foaming dog in the gutter, not this angel of poetic realism and punchy gravitas named John Garfield.

I recently moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn, and my new address happens to be 203 Garfield Place! No one can tell me it's not named after you, Johnny! Johnny, they shot you down in the street because you wouldn't rat on your friends. But thanks to Kim Morgan, and TCM, you do yet live! Now we can savor scenes like the one above, where Garfield thinks his stolen money's been re-stolen from his locker and he spasms out in a panic attack so wrenching its like he wraps all the panic of THE BICYCLE THIEF up in five seconds.

The way Garfield hides in that pool, and tries to wrestle with his lack of worldly smarts as the clock ticks out made me think of those lines from Shakespeare's Tempest, that Eliot used in The Wasteland which I reprinted up top of this post.

Translated - Kim Morgan is the sea nymph, and the sea-change suffered is not into coral and pearls, but the pearly stuff of celluloid. The something rich and strange is the new perspective over time that film history can provide us with. Uniquely modern, world-class and ahead of his time, Garfield's art is so pure it can seem to rest full fathom five, can be hard to see without sea nymphs and fairies to point out where it lies. But like that coral, Garfield's films aren't going anywhere, and if anyone's soul can be said to endure eternally anew in the briny nitrate depths of Hollywood film, it's his.

NOTES: 
(1) The production code had strict views about glorifying gangsters, or inferring anyone could ever shelter them and be anything but a louse, unless of course they sulked like little bitches, and gangsters were all but required to die in the gutter or in a fireball explosion by the end.
(2) Bogart, for example, God love him, never really threw a convincing blow (i.e. that kick he gives Geiger's shadow in THE BIG SLEEP), or even tried, to, not that it mattered, because he was such a good actor you still shuddered in fear every time he moved, his energy and malevolence before and after a punch were so intense the punch itself barely needed to happen, i.e. as the  abusive screenwriter IN A LONELY PLACE.,

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