"Disassociated" is the word that best describes Arthur Ripley's "poverty row" thriller, The Chase. Ineptly shot and edited as well as poorly acted, the film has a peculiar structure and casts a sinister light on America in the wake of World War Two -- the wounds went deep, apparently, deeper than anyone was willing to admit. On two occasions, the film imagines a peculiar instrument in operation. The villain owns a limousine that has a speed control in its back seat; this means that the bad guy can control the speed from his position in the rear of the vehicle overriding the driver's ability to brake or use the gas to accelerate. (This device is used by the bad guy on two occasions to force his unwilling chauffeur steering the car to race a thundering locomotive to an intersection.) This mechanical attribute of the villain's car, an innovation that is, at once, wholly unnecessary and dangerous, signal the film's weirdly disassociative logic -- impulse (acceleration) is divided from the instinct that steers or guides. In effect, at the very outset of the era of film noir, Ripley and his writer Philip Yordan imagine a sociopathic division between the conscious steering mind (the ego) and the deadly urges of the id. This division is mirrored on various levels in The Chase. The villain in the film is divided into two characters, a sadistic well-dressed thug named Eddy Roman and the languid, almost somnolent Gino played by the great Peter Lorre. Lorre slinks around with a cigarette drooping from his lower lip. His role, it seems, is to sneer at the other characters -- for instance, he greets the hero, the earnest dim-witted ex-GI, Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) by calling him a "silly, law-abiding jerk". Roman has a wife, but she is, of course, wholly superfluous in light of the omnipresent Gino. In fact, Roman's blonde trophy wife exists only as an object of Gino's derision and as a punching bag for her vicious husband. (Roman has a mastiff and feeds his competitors to his dog.) Roman and Gino are inseparable and the film posits them as a kind of couple, not exactly husband and wife, but, like the accelerator and the steering wheel, a compound of prudent cynicism (represented by Lorre's world-weariness) and sadistic impulsiveness. And, indeed, at the film's climax, Roman is powering the car that Lorre drives into a fatal collision with the speeding locomotive -- a bizarre trope for suicide but by a byzantine means.
I've already revealed the movie's fiery climax, a mini-apocalypse shot with a toy car, a miniature set, and a toy locomotive engine. (This is an aspect of the film's surreal dream-logic -- the climactic crash doesn't look real, but nothing in this film seems exactly right and so this doesn't bother the viewer.) There's no way to discuss the movie without a spoiler of the most brutal kind and, so, if you intend to watch this picture (something I think unlikely) and want your narrative surprises unrevealed, stop reading here.
A modern audience is probably not good at reading the post-War clues. In the opening scene, the hero hungrily looks through a window at Black chef cooking eggs and bacon. The hero wears a suit and, so, of course, we think of him as well-to-do and stylish. But, I suppose, his suit is supposed to be threadbare and ill-fitting and, in fact, Robert Cummings, who provides a stilted, clumsy performance, is a kind a homeless war veteran, the kind of person we see stalking the streets of big cities and mumbling to himself. Apparently severely shell-shocked, the hero gobbles some kind of anti-psychotic medication and has been released much too early from treatment at a nearby military base. Outside the café, Chuck picks up a billfold dropped on the street, treats himself to breakfast using the money in the wallet, and, then, returns both billfold and money to its owner, the vicious Eddie Roman, even presenting the bad guy with a receipt for his humble breakfast. Chuck has established himself as a man of unimpeachable virtue and rectitude except that he immediately concocts a plot to rescue Roman's battered wife from the villain, planning to elope with her from Miami where the action takes place to Havana, Cuba. Chuck's virtue, apparently, doesn't include loyalty to his benefactor. (The film's surreal edge begins to become palpable when we see Roman's blonde wife, all dressed in white, standing at the edge of a wildly turbulent and, obviously, rear-projected sea. The film's "poverty row" deficits, in this case, read as surrealistic dream-images.) In Havana, things go wildly wrong and this is where the film becomes crazily inventive. The action simply slows to a halt. People bicker about going somewhere but can't seem to leave a seedy tavern called La Habana -- although they have to catch a boat to South America, neither the hero nor Roman's wife seem in any hurry to go anywhere. They sit around drinking and mooning into one another's eyes and, then, someone throws a dagger into the woman, killing her. The police appear and engage in a long, pointless interrogation of the hero -- all the evidence that he thinks exists to show that he is not the killer can't be found or eludes his grip. The action shifts to a Chinese curio shop stuffed with impassive Buddhas and dark shadows. Some more people are killed and, then, just as the hero is about to die, the action shifts to his seedy apartment in Miami. The escape to the chiaroscuro of Havana was just a fever-dream. Chuck goes to see his military psychiatrist, a suave officer, who incongruously suggests that they visit lavish nightclub for a drink, a strange form of psychotherapy. Chuck knows that he has forgotten something but can't remember what it is -- it turns out that he has forgotten that this is the night, he is going spring Mrs. Roman from her coop. Upon finding the tickets to Havana in his coat pocket, Chuck picks up Roman's wife and takes her to seaport. But mist has rolled into the harbor and, once again, the narrative screeches to a halt, totally becalmed. Nothing advances. Roman and Geno rush to the harbor, traversing a part of dusty and mountainous southern California apparently immediately contiguous to Dade County and Miami. But they don't make it to the seaport courtesy of the speeding locomotive and, in fact, probably never really wanted to get there since it's obvious that Roman and Geno were made for each other and that the woman is just a distraction. Sailing from Miami, the hero and Mrs. Roman end up at the same sinister La Habana nightclub with the same sinister hack driver muttering in incomprehensible Spanish and, perhaps, the nightmare is merely beginning again.
This all sounds like delirious fun but it isn't. The movie is so gracelessly edited and so poorly acted that it drags at 86 minutes. Nonetheless, the film is so crammed with subtexts and subtexts of subtexts that it induces a sort of retrospective interpretive hysteria in the viewer: what is the meaning of the strange porthole shots in which the side of the ship becomes becomes dark from top to bottom? Why does Roman live in a house chockfull of statues of all kinds? And so on. The movie is fun to think about and it is a pleasure to write this note, but, curiously, it's not very entertaining while you are watching it -- "staggeringly inept" as a film, one viewer told me.
No comments:
Post a Comment