He Ran All the Way

My Journey through French Cinema is a 3 1/2 hour documentary superintended by the great director, Bertrand Tavernier.  (Tavernier is one of the smartest men to ever direct a film and his pictures are intensely cerebral, acerbic, and, in many ways, as austerely instructional as some of Rosselini's late works.) Tavernier's guide to the cinema of his nation is extremely personal and idiosyncratic.  When I was little, movies were run continuously and people would often enter the theater in the middle of a feature, watch the movie to its end, and, then, leave when the loop had come full-circle for them -- then, they would announce "this is where we came in" and make their way to the exit.  Tavernier's documentary exemplifies this sensibility -- he begins the film where "he came in" with a 1943 picture by Jacques Becker that he saw as a pre-school child.  Tavernier, then, proceeds to explore films made in France in the late thirties through the decade of the 1980's.  His guided tour leads us mostly through very hard-boiled and grim crime dramas, the pictures of Becker, Carne, Gremillon, Renoir, Melville, and others.  He provides only a sideways glance at the French New Wave, mentioning Truffaut, Godard, Varda and Chabrol -- since Chabrol directed some estimable crime pictures, he is accorded more screen time than the other, more important, in my view, French filmmakers in the Nouvelle Vague.  It's a highly personal film, charming and informative and I took copious notes on pictures about which I knew nothing, but that seemed to me to be worth hunting down.  Apparently, Tavernier made a TV series that is much longer and more comprehensive.  The long documentary that I saw on Turner Classic Movies doesn't mention Abel Gance or Jacques Tati or, for that matter, Raymond Bertrand or Jacques Rivette, to name just a few -- there is nothing about French silent film at all.  My guess is that a more comprehensive picture of French film making is provided by the full TV show -- for instance, Jean Cocteau is mentioned only as the director of Les Enfants Terrible and that, only because one of Tavernier's heroes (with whom he actually worked), Melville co-directed that picture.  The documentary is maddening in some ways, but, extremely, interesting.

One of Tavernier's featured directors is a man named John Berry.  Berry was, in fact, an American film maker who spent the second half of his career under the Black List banned from Hollywood work due to his communist sympathies and, therefore, like Jules Dassin, forced to make pictures in France.  I had never heard of Berry -- one must acknowledge that to a dismaying extent the Blacklist was effective.  Although Berry made a fine noir in 1951 He Ran All the Way, he has been essentially erased from American film history.  Tavernier mentioned the picture as an excellent American crime film and, so, on that recommendation, I searched for the picture.

He Ran All the Way is a low-budget but impressively produced noir, clocking in at an economical 79 minutes.  The film has prestigious production values:  John Garfield stars (in his last picture) with Shelley Winters.  The tremendous black-and-white photography is by the great James Wong Howe.  The movie's writers are unknown to me -- and unknown to everyone else:  Dalton Trumbo, who was also blacklisted, wrote the picture under pseudonym.  The movie is modest, crisply written and directed, noteworthy mostly for its brilliant photography and the fine performances by the very young Winters and Garfield.

A penny-ante thug lives at home with his abusive and alcoholic mother -- there's a strong intimation that she has damaged her son beyond repair.  The apartment where they live, sweltering in a New York heat wave, is remarkably squalid.  Garfield's character is so lazy and useless that he can't quite get up in time to meet a mobster who plans a payroll heist -- this is the most important day of  his life, but he is almost missing in action.  The thug, Nick, tells his accomplice that he has had a nightmare about being pursued.  The nightmare comes true a few minutes later.  The payroll heist goes wrong and Nick kills a cop.  He flees to a  local swimming pool at an amusement park -- it's called "the Plunge" and there meets Peg (Shelley Winters).  Needing a place to hole-up, he gets Peg to take him home -- she's afraid of the criminal, but sexually excited by his brutish aggression.  (Winters does a great job showing timidity, fear, and lust all at the same time.)  Peg lives with her mother, father, who is a newspaper press operator, and her "kid brother."  Nick takes all of them hostage while the dragnet closes in around him.  The film's emotional center is Nick's tortured relationship with Peg -- Peg represents a kind of life that he can't achieve:  if he didn't have a gun pointed at her head, she would likely not have any interest in him.  Her bourgeois life contrasts with his wretched upbringing -- the film pointedly compares Peg's neat and orderly living quarters with Nick's nightmarish and filthy apartment presided over by his slatternly mother wearing lingerie and drinking straight from the bottle.  Nick tries to get his mother to help him but she says that as far as he's concerned the police can hunt him down and shoot him as "cop-killer."  There are extended violent clashes with Peg's father, who despises the thug, but can't figure out how to get rid of him.  One of Peg's co-workers (she doesn't know that Nick is holding people hostage at Peg's home), says that the girl should doll herself up, dress seductively, and, then, she can get men to do things for her.  Peg regards this as advice to apply to the hostage situation so she dresses herself in a low-cut gown, has her hair done, and comes home with the intent of seducing Nick.  Nick falls for her ploy and gives her $1500 dollars to buy a car so that they can escape together.  (He's carrying $10,000 from the payroll heist.)  Peg returns from buying the car and acts in an ambiguous way -- it's uncertain whether she really desires Nick and has bought the car or whether she has set him up to be killed by the cops.  The car is supposed to be delivered in an hour, but it doesn't show up.  Nick panics, punches out a window, and begins shouting defiantly at the dark corner below.  Peg's father is waiting in the shadows with a pistol in his hand.  There's a shoot-out and Nick is mortally wounded.  As he sits on the curb, bleeding to death, the car that Peg bought is delivered.

In truth to say, the film isn't much. It's entertaining and brilliantly made.  But, at least, half of the film noir made in this period were well-crafted and, almost, all of them stand up today as being eminently watchable -- they are all more or less alike and all pretty good.  But there are several memorable things about the film.  I have already commented on the performances, particularly Shelley Winters' intricate characterization of Peg as a good girl on the verge of turning very bad.  In one noteworthy scene, Nick has bought a turkey dinner with all the trimmings to feed the family he is holding hostage.  It's a poignant and disturbing sequence, a sort of reverse Stockholm-syndrome -- Nick is using his hostages to replace a happy family that he never had.  Perversely, he orders everyone to eat and, when the father proudly says that he will never eat this food, Nick takes a shot at him.  James Wong Howe's cinematography is extraordinary.  He achieves the blackest of black shadow by putting silhouettes of intense darkness next to glaring light.  When Nick literally dies in the gutter, the shadows on the sidewalk and the light coruscating in the puddles next to the curb, make this the most glamorous and beautiful gutter in the history of cinema.