The Substance

 Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a formerly famous movie star, who is now working as the host and exercise leader on a calisthenics show called Sparkle Your Life.  She has just turned fifty and, when she uses the men's restroom (the women's is occupied), she hears the producer of the show, a vicious and grotesque TV executive, planning to replace her with a younger woman.  Brooding about this injustice, she's involved in a bad motor vehicle crash -- windows exploding and her vehicle rolling side over side -- from which she mysteriously walks away unscathed.  At the ER, a doctor checks her out and, then, an odd-looking young paramedic inspects her back, says that it is perfect, and slips a message wrapped in paper into her pocket.  The uncanny-looking paraprofessional has a sarcoma on the back of his hand.  

Sparkle lives alone is a picturesquely modernist and empty house cantilevered out over a canyon in the mountains.  (The house has eerie works of art and strange corridors filmed with lenses that make them seem to stretch out to infinity.)  The message she finds in her pocket encourages her to perfect herself by using a treatment involving something called "The Substance" -- a sort of Bo-Tox from Hell that she picks up in an alcove behind a graffiti-smeared metal door in a noisome alley.  "The Substance" works for seven days, restoring its user to her youthful perfected self -- it's a sort of "fountain of youth" drug that involves various injections (shown in gruesome close-ups), tube-feeding, and blood transfusions.  The stuff comes with strict instructions -- it's a Jekyll and Hyde formula:  you can only be young and beautiful for seven days without having to return to the decrepit shell of your aged body.  Of course, this being a horror movie, there are ghastly consequences for not playing according to the rules.

Horror films invariably evoke precursors.  In the case of the lavishly produced The Substance, the movie alludes to David Cronenberg's The Fly (as in that movie, at one point the protagonist's ear falls off) as well as Brian de Palma's Carrie with respect to the firehose of gore unleashed in the movie's last minutes.  The picture, as I have noted, also channels Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in that the fifty-year old Elisabeth Sparkle finds herself competing with her amoral younger avatar, a beautiful and profoundly selfish starlet called Sue.  Of course, the two women are one person whose appearance changes between the two personae.  There is also an aspect of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the film; as Sue prospers and becomes famous and universally desired, poor Elisabeth, reduced to a cadaverous shell lying on the bathroom floor, begins to spectacularly decompose,,literally falling apart.  The film's premise is ingenious but, of course, since this is a genre movie, the outcome is predictable, although things become so exuberantly horrific that the climax must be interpreted as a kind of black-comedy spectacle that is far funnier than it is frightening.  

Pictures involving this sort of Faustian bargain inevitably end in tears (or far worse).  Sue resents having to revert to Elisabeth every seven days and begins stealing Elisabeth's time, keeping herself young and beautiful, having sex with handsome men, and becoming famous on TV while her poor alter ego literally goes to pieces. This is a very glossy movie, with fashion magazine vibes -- it features immense, disturbing close-ups, vast amounts of nudity, and bizarre, surreal sets that seemed to have crawled into the present from German expressionist cinema.  The picture is full of outre effects:  an egg yolk injected with the substance immediately begins to clone itself into bright yellow embryonic cells.  Pustulant, necrotic wounds are injected with long needles in micro-close-ups.  At one point, while Sue is twerking, her buttock pops open and the gory abscess gives birth to a chicken drumstick that Elisabeth ingested before turning back into the glamorous sex-pot starlet.  The movie is entertaining enough in its gruesome way, but much too long -- there's just too many horrors particularly in the hyper-violent last quarter of the movie.  Furthermore, the picture cheats -- it establishes certain rules that are slavishly demonstrated and followed for the first two-thirds of the picture.  But, when the really spectacular grand guignol begins, the rules fall by the wayside and everything yields to the picture's excessively gruesome finalethat proceeds according to a certain pictorial logic, but violates the plot points earlier (and rather tediously) established.    

Someone once said that women's magazines show massive cognitive dissonance -- the periodicals feature mortifying diets and advice as to painful exercise regimens next to recipes for lavish and calory-rich desserts.  The Substance has this aspect; it features beauty advice of the nastiest sort:  reduce yourself to a living corpse while cooking tripe-soup and other incredibly rich recipes -- the film has its cake and eats it too, suggesting that the path to perfect beauty embodies deadly anorexia somehow yoked to insane amounts of consumption of ultra-rich (disgustingly rich) foods.  There are huge closeups of lips and mouths masticating gobbets of food, shrimp and pastry, shot with the comic delectation of a Monty Python picture.  At the climax, Sue and Elisabeth get somehow fused together in a single monstrous entity covered in tumors with a stray eye peeping out here and there and Sue's perfect face embedded in a web of scar tissue on the back of the hunchbacked, suppurating figure -- it's like the appearance of the Brindlefly in Cronenberg's movie The Fly, a hideous combination of both women, full of ugly sac-like fistulas, one of which gives birth by expelling a perfectly globular breast dangling on a sinew of gory tissue.  The critter shoots blood as if from a fire hose on the audience.  None of this makes any sense at all -- the last twenty minutes is completely bonkers, off-the-rails and implausible.  But the movie has the courage of its convictions -- when the Sueelismonstre, as it is called, takes the stage at a New Year's Eve celebration, the fawning audience and technical crew somehow don't notice that it's a hideous creature that has arrived on stage and not the beautiful Sue (the monster is hiding behind a cut-out of Sue's face but, of course, the creature is elephantine, hunch-backed with oozing naked legs like tree-trunks).  You ask yourself how can they not know that this is a monster clambering up onto the stage with the bare-breasted showgirls standing all in neat rows for the camera.  But, I suppose, one could argue that celebrity blinds people to the reality of those who become celebrities and that this explains, at least symbolically, why no one seems to notice that the leading lady has become a horrible lump of tumors and abscesses with, at least, two heads.  This is a very stylish movie.  In the opening scenes, we see workmen installing an inlaid star on a sort of Walk of Fame, presumably in Hollywood.  This is Elisabeth Sparkle's star.  The star endures on the pavement, gets tread upon, and, at last, in this opening sequence, someone drops pizza sauce or ketchup all over it.  At the end of the movie, in a scene that is a direct steal from John Carpenter's The Thing, Sue's face grimacing out of the back of the monster, gets detached and creeps on tentacle feet along the sidewalk to sit in the midst of gory polyps on the star in the Walk of Fame.  

People have saluted this movie as feminist.  I suppose it has lines and scenes that could be interpreted in that light but really this is just a very long, elaborately made, special effects movie.  It's stylish but this doesn't change the fact that the esthetic is that of a slasher movie combined with a Vogue or Cosmopolitan fashion-shoot.  If a half-hour were cut out of this thing and some of the more excessive scenes eliminated (I really didn't need to see Sue fight it out with the decomposing Elisabeth and, ultimately, beat her to death in big grisly close-ups), the movie might be a classic.  For what it is, The Substance is pretty good.  (The picture was made in France it seems, with French personnel; the director is Carolie Fargeat, a French filmmaker -- this is her second feature.)   

  

Happy-go-Lucky

 "To prattle" is to talk at length about trivial and inconsequential things, to speak childishly and repetitively.  In Mike Leigh's 2008 Happy-go-Lucky, the heroine, Poppy Cross prattles incessantly, maintaining a constant babbling stream of inane observations, half-reproaches, praise and encouragement.  She speaks incessantly and desperately as if to reassure herself that she exists, that she has agency, that she is present.  Poppy is baffling -- throughout Leigh's movie, she remains blithely optimistic and recklessly cheerful.  Something seems to be wrong with her, but we can't determine what it is and her strangely cheerful demeanor is, at once, intensely engaging and, even, endearing while also more than a bit uncanny.  In one scene, she goes to a doctor with serious  back pain; she tells the doctor her pain makes her laugh and she giggles continuously -- it may be that she has to keep up her cheerful patter in order to keep from collapsing into tears.  But this interpretation is too facile.  Poppy's optimistic and happy-go-luck temperament is a matter of her "humor" to use the 18th century concept -- this seems to be the way she was born, invested with an excess of ebullient high-spirits.  Happy-go-Lucky is that rare film that is about someone who is cheerful, kind, and, even, competent in her own way -- Leigh doesn't encourage us to speculate as to whether this demeanor is some kind of compensation.  The film insists on remaining on the surface; Poppy (as brilliantly played by Sally Hawkins) is happy because that is just the way she is.

Poppy is an elementary-age teacher.  At one point, we learn that she is widely traveled; she spent five years working as a teacher in Southeast Asia.  She lives with her practical roommate Zoe, also a teacher.  There is a very slight, delicate intimation that Poppy and Zoe may have been lovers once -- they seem intimate with one another, although this is possibly just the result of more than ten years close contact.  Poppy and Zoe go out to night clubs and dance until dawn.  They avoid romantic entanglements.  Both are committed and observant teachers who work on the weekends to make costumes and masks for their students.  When Poppy's bicycle is stolen, a theft that she takes in due course without much regret, she decides to learn to drive.  She hires a driving instructor named Sam to teach her behind-the-wheel.  Sam is one of Mike Leigh's typical badly damaged males -- he's a racist and conspiracy theorist, using occult theory developed by Aleistar Crowley to conduct his driving lessons:  the main rear view mirror, he calls Enraha, after the all-seeing eye at the pyramid of things.  Although he brow-beats and bullies Poppy, it's obvious that he is obsessed with her and would like to make her his girlfriend, although he's too strange, paranoid, and prickly to make any overt moves.  Poppy attends a Flamenco dance in which the exuberant, vehement teacher breaks down and flees the room in sorrow at her break-up with her boyfriend.  (In the world of Happy-go-Lucky, everyone has emotional problems and struggles except for Poppy who seems indifferent to the Sturm und Drang of life.)  One of Poppy's students is a bully.  Poppy infers that he is the victim in turn of cruelty at home.  A male social worker is recruited to interview the six or seven-year old boy and, indeed, it turns out that his mother's boyfriend is hitting him.  The handsome social worker is intrigued by the attractive, irrepressibly happy Poppy and makes a date with her.  She has sex with him and the relationship seems promising.  Meeting for the fourth or fifth driving session with Sam, Poppy brings along her new boyfriend.  (Sam has been glimpsed around Poppy's apartment, probably stalking her.)  Sam is outraged and stunned, prostrate with strangled jealousy, drives like a maniac, and almost crashes the car.  Poppy takes away his keys deciding that he is too upset to be behind-the-wheel.  This leads to an actual struggle in which Sam punches Poppy and pulls her hair.  She threatens to call the cops and, when Sam calms down, tells him that they aren't going to continue with the driving lessons.  Zoe and Poppy go rowing a boat on a small lagoon -- life is but a dream -- and as they coordinate their oar strokes, Poppy's boyfriend calls her to set up another date.  Poppy has said about Sam:  You can't make everyone happy but, at least, you can try."  There are several minor episodes that go nowhere  and seem to be improvised-- Poppy visits her married sister in suburb of London, Poppy has a back ache,  Poppy's sisters encourage her to make something of her life, in a bookstore, Poppy who is hungover tries to flirt with the clerk who rudely rebuffs her.  

The pivotal scene in the movie is emblematic, not narrative.  While Poppy is walking alone at night, she hears guttural noises and cries.  She fearlessly enters a corroding industrial site, an abandoned factory or warehouse, in which she encounters a man who is very seriously, floridly mentally ill.  The man is large, bearded, and, sometimes, threatening.  Poppy however approaches him and tries to talk, continuing her cheerful prattle as he mutters nouns and verbs over and over again -- to insane to say anything that makes any sense at all.  On several occasions, he becomes even more agitated and we fear that he will attack the heroine.  In the end, he wanders off in a harsh, abstract geometry of rusting trestles and girders. The episode is anecdotal and quite frightening.  But, however, we view the threat, Poppy is not afraid, shows no fear at all, and seems genuinely compassionate in her efforts to console the man.  In this scene, Poppy's pervasive cheerfulness seems to verge on something pathological -- she becomes in our eyes, a kind of holy fool.

The movie is a pendant to Leigh's recent Hard Truths, another 'comedy of humors' that approaches the concept from its opposite pole.  In Hard Truths, the heroine is angry, suspicious, and vengeful; she's cruel to the point of ferocious madness to those closest to her.  Leigh makes no attempt to explicate this heroine's ferocity -- it's just the way she is.  Hard Truths (2024) shows us the other side of the coin embodied by Poppy's good-natured cheerfulness.  In both cases, there's a suggestion that the heroines are seriously maladjusted to the world in which they find themselves.  Sally Hawkins who plays Poppy looks like a young Roseanne Arquette and she's effortlessly brilliant in the part; Eddie Marsan who plays the mad driving instructor is scary, pathetic, and funny at the same time.  The acting and direction is beyond reproach.    

Walker Art Center (June 20, 2025)

 En route to Fargo, North Dakota, I stopped at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on June 20, 2025.  I didn't know what was on display and didn't have any expectations as to what I would see.  As it happened, there were a number of things that interested me and the little expedition was an unanticipated success, an example, I think, of a pleasing serendipity, an unexpected gift.

There are three large shows on exhibit:  Ways of Knowing, Kandis Williams:  A Surface, and a large installation called "Sudden Places" by Pan Daijing.  Ways of Knowing consists of several large groupings of art divided into more or less arbitrary categories -- the curation of the art doesn't make much sense and there really is no connection between the different experiences on offer here.  The initial gallery is arid and doesn't promise much -- it's some highly conceptual work that covers the walls with small placard-like images.  Rose Salane's "Confessions" consists of images of handwritten notes in English sent to the proprietors of Pompeii returning objects filched from the archaeological site -- the actual objects returned in this way are displayed next to facsimiles of the notes.  It's mildly interesting as an example of the "avenging conscience" -- the correspondents seem desperate to disabuse themselves of their souvenirs which are mostly nondescript pebbles and bits of ceramic and a nail; the installation vaguely suggests that the tourists may have suffered from the malevolence of the objects themselves, although this is a matter of imagination imposing some kind of order on the collection which is, in fact, more or less, random.  In nearby vitrines, there are fragments of coral plucked out of a dying reef and anatomized by mechanical drawings of the artifacts.  On another wall, there are forty feet of picture postcards of temples and statues in southeast Asia and India.  I have no idea what these installations were supposed to be about -- and they were devoid of any interest.  Things improve, however, in the next galleries.  A couple of darkened rooms display large HD video of industrial processes or abandoned buildings on an Alaskan island -- it's St. Paul Island in the Aleutians.  These things have considerable authority although they are fairly predictable, the sort of large-screen languorous tracking and zoom-effect images that are common in video displays in contemporary art museums.  The images on the Aleutian islands, at least, feature walruses and seals glimpsed as if through an aperture of a toilet paper role and, on the soundtrack, there are some vague remarks about the Aleut language by a soft-spoken elder.  In one niche, a group of pretty Congolese boys in a choir sing seraphically while on the neighboring wall videos show copper wire spun and processed by huge menacing machines.  The juxtaposition, I suppose, means something but I don't know what.  Nonetheless, it's striking particularly since the choirboys wear big, crude copper crosses on their chests.  A large room is full of colorful drawings, brilliantly executed, I thought, depicting gory scenes in Egyptian and European history. This work is called "Time of Change" by the Armenian- Egyptian artist Anna Borghiguian and I thought it was extremely interesting.  The cartoons vary from horrible scenes of mayhem and torture and lyric images of people conversing in coffee shops and walking in parks.  Monstrous figures bare their teeth at us -- one of the villainous critters, a Nazi concentration camp doctor named Aribut Heim seems to have three or four separate rows of teeth; he's drawn extracting people's organs, surgery without the benefit of anesthesia -- as far as I could ascertain, Dr. Heim fled Germany for Egypt where he seems to have prospered for a number of years before being discovered.  There are scenes of various revolutions, images of the French guillotine, and riots in the street.  The drawing is very expressive and, in many instances, impressively colored and the diagrammatic images (they seem to be made on butcher paper about 30 x 18 inches) are covered with scribbled handwriting annotating the pictures.  Obviously, this is a show that would require several hours to properly appreciate and admire.  However, I am convinced that this artist, born in 1946, is important, a talent of major proportions.  "Cloud Museum" by Eduardo Navarro is a collection of diaphanous-looking garments on silver hangers, white robes with metallic scarves drooping down from three similarly silver rings.  The garments look like a flock of angels dropped to earth and roosting in a gallery with kitschy pink walls.  The next gallery, a big darkened room,  features a retrato (portrait) of someone named Antonio do Erouso, also known as "Catalina, the lieutenant nun".  Erouso, shown in painting from around 1640 (she was born in 1585) was a woman who was a cross-dresser, a transvestite in the service of the Spanish or Portuguese military.  Another HD triptych of screens features modern homosexuals and trans people commenting on the woman whom they imagine to be a spiritual forebear, a sort of elder or ancestor figure.  The three interlocutors are eloquent but annoying.  They interrogate the picture and seek to imagine the story of this odd figure.  This exhibit isn't art as far as I can see, but more some kind of history with modern-day interlocutors (more or less "talking heads") in big glossy images seeking to connect the baroque painting to their own experience -- the installation's interest isn't esthetic but primarily socio-historic.  Petrit Halilay was a boy in Kosovo during the troubles in that place.  His work "Very Volcanic over the Green Feather" consists of truck-sized cut-outs vibrantly painted in a child's palette hanging from the ceiling like gaudy clouds.  If you walk among the colorful and cheerful mobiles, they stir a little, wafted here and there and, on their back sides, you can see more somber images, a crying child and a column of military vehicles -- the inverse of the bright fowl and rainbow-colored landscapes are, in some cases (but not all) disturbing memories of the violence that the artist endured a child.

Kandis Williams':  A Surface consists of huge collages and other objects -- it's a vast retrospective occupying four large galleries.  The collages are lurid and densely populated with horror movie imagery and mobs of black and brown figures.  This stuff is marginally interesting, mostly due to the extreme and violent pictorial content.  I don't know what the artist intends by these collages -- is she arguing that African-Americans in this country have been monstrously abused by White people?  This is my surmise although the point is certainly not made with any clarity.  The labels are full of paranoid and hysterical allegations phrased in academic jargon of the worst kind:  for instance, "ontology is a conjuration from gods and monsters that white people make up to kill us all."  ("Gods and monsters" is a campy citation from James Whale's very queer The Bride of Frankenstein -- in the film, a mad doctor proposes a toast to "a new world of gods and monsters.')  More interesting are some assemblages made from artificial plants, intertwined green leaves and stems and potted orchids that have all been spray-painted with a greenish-white pigment.  These things have a vaguely malevolent aspect; the simulated vegetal growth seems sinister, somehow toxic, and menacing in its abundance and density.  The most technically impressive images in the show are two large lenticular prints -- these are images made with raised particles and fins of colored plastic that have the effect of changing from one picture to another when viewed from different angles.  Seen from one vantage, the viewer sees an audience in a darkened theater; from another angle, only a few feet distant, the image of the auditorium transforms into a picture of a Black diva who seems anguished and tearful; from another angle, also only a couple feet farther along the axis of the picture, the image shows the artist self-assured and singing into her microphone -- it's fascinating to see how the image changes and morphs into different pictures as you walk by it.  The name of the picture is "From the joy of seeing them to the pain of being them" -- a literal representation of how the proud, competent performer turns into a weeping figure mediated by the indifferent audience.  A second lenticular image is even more complex -- I counted six or seven separate images somehow stacked on top of one another and visible seriatim as the gallerygoer walks by the 4 foot by five foot picture.  These images are spectacular technical achievements and it is interesting to speculate as to how they are made.  A large series of images of the young Michael Jackson, painted on silk-screen is accompanied by label gibberish that I cite exactly as written:  "But more fundamentally a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal..."  Exactly what we were all thinking as we encounter these images of the late lamented "king of pop."  (Almost every one of Willaim's images is accompanied by a daunting tablet of printed text, hundreds of words that are completely incoherent and opaque displayed next to the pictures.)  

Pan Daijing's Sudden Places is another immense installation, occupying two large and very dark galleries, spaces that are about the size of a bowling alley.  It's unsettling -- the sound system creates an ambient rumbling and buzzing, a bit like the soundtrack of a David Lynch movie.  The floor is draped in some sort of rubbery fabric that smells strongly of chemicals and that rustles in a disconcerting way underfoot.  As you traverse the space, you feel unsteady, dizzy, as if about to topple over in the darkness.  In one corner of the big space, some five-foot long strips of tinsel, the sort of thing you might see on a Brobdingnian Christmas tree dangles from the ceiling.  Along one wall, there are blackboards entirely covered in illegible script, lit starkly from the side so that the chalk marks glow.  In the other room, there are huge video monitors playing something -- it must have been nondescript because I don't recall any of the images, just their grainy texture and the wan light cast from them.  In one corner, there's a slit in the wall through which you can look to see some construction debris, a sawhorse, concrete floors and a panel also marked with illegible chalk marks simulating some kind of writing.  This is an ambitious installation.  I have no idea what it is supposed to signify -- it's a kind of haunted house and I was happy to get away from it.  

These exhibits were so interesting and demanding that I spent almost two hours looking at them and didn't have time to really visit with the old friends in the permanent collection higher in the building.  I stood in front of Marc's Blue Horses and looked at the Edward Hopper painting of the secretary and businessman at night in an office that suggests a state of siege.  The blue horses snuffle at the landscape like overly excited dogs, blue harnessed to vivid blue.  Then, I was back on the highway, driving to Fargo.  

(Lenticular prints are, sometimes, called "Winkies" or "transforming prints".  They are made by printing different images on thin, raised strips that are interlaced so that several pictures are simultaneously present on the grooved surface.  The images as interlaced are installed beneath a lenticular lens which provides access to different aspects of the surface as the eye change position.  Lenticular prints fall into "transforming print", animated print, and stereoscopic 3D print categories.  They are similar to the so-called tabula scalata popular in the renaissance and baroque periods that also interlace disparate images on this surfaces.  The effect was discovered by paleolithic cave artists who cut grooves into images that they made so that, when viewed from different angles, horses seem to move their heads and tails and mammoths wiggle their trunks.

Pan Daijing is a Berlin artist born in China.  She is best-known for her musical compositions which are "noise" art and industrial techno in character.  She is queer and BDSM practitioner, often posing in leather with red highlights.  

 

Comments on The Long Goodbye and Dog Day Afternoon

 The Long Goodbye is a Robert Altman movie released in 1973.  It is famous for a violent scene in which a gangster breaks a coke bottle on his girlfriend's face, a woman who he has just praised for her perfect beauty, for the sole purpose of showing how mean he can be.  This is startling but the more surprising and shocking scene of violence in the film is when the tiny mannequin, Dr. Verringer (played by Laugh-Ins Henry Gibson), slaps the face of a raging brute of a man played by the volatile and frightening Sterling Hayden; Hayden is twice the size of Henry Gibson, a grizzled ancient mariner with hairy chest and a florid beard, but when the little doctor cracks him across the cheek, the big man is deflated, becomes disoriented (he is very drunk) and a few minutes later commits suicide in the surf pounding the shore at the Malibu Beach Colony where he lives.  Eliot Gould plays Philip Marlowe, muttering to himself and chain-smoking as he drives around 1970's LA in a sedan built thirty years earlier.  He's a living, walking, anachronism who doesn't fit into the scene at all. The cast is perverse:  Jim Bouton, the baseball player whose scandalous Ball Four was once a famous expose of professional sports, has the role of Terry Lennox, a sleazy Hollywood type accused of murdering his wife.  Mark Rydell plays Marty Augustine (and apparently imitates the mannerisms Robert Evans, a Hollywood mogul) -- Augustine is the gangster who wrecks the perfect profile of this girlfriend just because he can.  (An uncredited Arnold Schwartzenegger is used for comic effect -- he's ridiculously bulked up and doesn't look so much menacing as pillowy and inert.)  The film is also notable for an ear-worm score by John Williams, the smoky ballad "The Long Goodbye", a tune that obsessively occurs and reoccurs throughout the picture, performed by a lounge singer, a piano-bar pianist, full orchestra, as elevator Muzak, and, even, played by a Mexican marching band.  The effect of the music is to weld the disparate elements of the film into a hazy, languid whole -- an effect also achieved by the smoggy pastel photography of Vilmos Zsigmond; LA looks smoky, as if seen through the clouds of burning tobacco enveloping Marlowe and nothing is really clear; you keep waiting for the picture to come into focus, but it's an oblique, suggestive neo-Noir, elusive with nothing that you can really seize upon or grasp.  Zsigmond's blurry landscapes and pervasive haze is the seventies' equivalent of the baffling chiaroscuro that characterizes classic film noir, some of which featured the menacing and intimidating Sterling Hayden, here reduced to an impotent parody of Ernest Hemingway.  Gould is good, but indistinct in keeping with the film's nonchalant and casually dismissive attitude about its source material, the novel by Raymond Chandler which Altman admitted that he didn't read.  There's an elaborate scene in which the camera uses deep focus to exploit reflections on glass in the suicidal novelist's beach front house -- it's a sort of lazy dope-inflected homage to the mirror scene from Lady from Shanghai.  The notion is that we don't really know anything about anyone:  our best friends betray us and our wives are all unfaithful; everyone steals from everyone else.  Chandler's notion of Marlowe as a kind of knight (or holy fool), the only virtuous man in a world of iniquity, is convincingly demonstrated by the movie -- but the question for the audience is whether Marlowe's anachronistic virtue and loyalty is the result of dope-induced stupidity or, rather, strength of character.  I saw the movie in the heater when I was in college -- the scene that has come across the decades for me is the part of the movie in which Sterling Hayden's tough guy writer wanders out into the surf to kill himself; he has a vicious black Doberman that trots back and forth on the beach carrying his master's cane in his jaws:  the dog is pleased at performing for his master, but obviously distressed by the thundering surf and the black waves -- it's a superb canine performance.  In keeping with its dope-addled ambience, not much seems to be going on in the movie -- but, in fact, the picture's far better than it seems when you're watching it, a film that grows in your imagination.

Dog Day Afternoon is at the opposite end of the film spectrum to Altman's The Long Goodybe.  Everything in Lumet's  1975 film is crystal clear, energetically staged with ensembles of sweaty actors trapped in a bank building besieged by Al Pacino as the bisexual Sonny and his moronic sidekick, Sal (John Casale).  You can see everything; focus and editing are deployed to make things completely lucid and plausible. Pacino gets impressive harangues that he delivers in extreme close-up and everyone shouts at everyone else in overlapping cascades of insults and threats.  The plot, of course, involves Sonny's attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank to snatch money to finance his homosexual "wife's" sex change operation.  The robbery goes sideways and a hostage situation develops as Sonny holds the bank president and seven female tellers as prisoners at gunpoint while a volatile mob gathers on the street.  The writing is very good and the characters are portrayed in three-dimensions -- even the cops and FBI  boss are given distinctive personality traits.  The movie is a symphony of sweat -- it's a blazing hot day and, as the film progresses, everyone perspires in buckets, most notably Sal and Sonny whose foreheads ooze and drip with sweat.  Of course, there's no way out and the movie ends, more or less, as implied by the situation in the first 15 minutes.  Movies of this era channel Tennessee Williams and Sonny's character invokes one of the harried, working class heroes in something like a Streetcar Named Desire -- the roles are equally sweaty:  it's either New Orleans or the tropics of Brooklyn on a sweltering day. Pacino's style of  acting has always been hyperbolic and here he "outherod's Herod" or "tears a cat" to use Shakespearian parlance for this kind of exaggerated, narcissistic performance.  Pacino's overacting fits the part -- at times, he draws energy by stirring up the volatile crowd gathered to watch the hostage standoff at the Bank. In this film, we know exactly what's going on -- it's a strenuous, arduous exercise that exhausts the viewer. on its via dolorosa to the final, abbreviated shoot-out.  At its center, however, the film is like Altman's picture in that it features characters who are too complex to be readily understood, figures with a strange, compelling depth, a kind of filmmaking that, perhaps, doesn't exist in the big budget movies produced today.      

All is Lost

 All is Lost (2013) is an austere, minimalist survival picture.  Although it stars screen icon, Robert Redford, the film is a rigorous exercise that has an experimental aspect -- it has more in common with Robert Bresson than with a conventional Hollywood adventure movie.  The script, said to be only 32 pages long, explores a fatal accident at sea, without offering viewers any back-story, any dialogue, and any escape from the raw events depicted into "significance"; the movie bears no trace of allegory or symbolism.  The plight of the lone mariner is displayed with close attention to detail and there's no larger meaning to anything that we behold.  It seems that the movie must have been physically daunting to film; the movie is almost as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make.

Redford's character is called "Our Man" -- at least, this is how he is designated in the credits.  This unnamed man is piloting a large sailboat through the Pacific when he runs into deadly trouble.  We see him aroused from where he is sleeping on a couch under the deck -- a waterfall is pouring through a breach in the side of the sailboat.  The Man finds that he has run aground (presumably while sleeping) on a large, floating storage container.  The sharp corner of the freightcar-sized container has ripped open the side of his sailboat and flooded the living quarters.  The man is alone.  We never learn his name or where he is going or why he is piloting the big sailboat across the Pacific Ocean.  We are privy to a voice-over representing an apologetic last message that the Man puts in a mason jar -- but we don't know to whom "our Man" is apologizing.  Although,  the Man repairs the breach in boat's hull, he encounters a terrible storm.  The sail boat's masts are shattered and the vessel itself rolls over and over in the tremendous high seas.  The Man hits his head on a pipe and rips open his forehead. (Previously, he's fallen off the deck although latched to the ship by a cable and gets keel-hauled.)  Ultimately, the sailboat sinks and the Man has to abandon it for an inflatable life raft.  There's another squall and the life raft gets toppled over, rolling on the high seas.  The Man discovers that his water supply is contaminated with sea water and no longer potable.  (This calamity triggers one of the man's rare outbursts -- mostly, he is stoic and without expression during his travails.)  He has no food remaining and drifts helplessly across the ocean.  On one occasion when he catches a couple fish on his line, a shark lunges forward and seizes the fish, almost ripping them from the Man's hands.  The raft floats across a shipping lane and two huge container ships come within a few hundred yards of the shipwreck.  But despite our Man's efforts, the vast ships which dwarf the pinpoint of his raft pay him no heed.  At last, the man sees a small vessel approaching, lights a fire with his last matches on the raft -- the raft burns up and the man plunges into the sea, too exhausted and debilitated to even swim. As he sinks to the bottom of the ocean, he sees a light above and, perhaps, is saved.  (It's equally possible that this final vision is a flare in his dying brain and that, as in Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the man has merely fantasized his salvation.)

All of this is dispassionately presented.  There's some minimalist music but no commentary.  The man cries out a couple of times but, except for dictating his message in bottle (which he does in peculiarly stilted and uncommunicative way -- probably due to inanition), Redford's character never speaks.  With the exception of a couple high-angle shots and some underwater images from below the raft showing schools of fish and sharks, the camera never strays from Redford or from his perspective.  The movie eschews spectacle.  The sea is either a mirror -lat expanse or turbulent with big waves but there are no memorable shots of the ocean or its weather.  (An exception is a single shot showing the sun as a blob of molten metal sinking into the sea at sunset.)  Our Man isn't particularly heroic and, certainly, doesn't engage in any derring do.  At one point, he ascends a mast and has to rappel down as swiftly as possible because of an advancing storm -- he seems barely capable of the feats required of him by the desperate plight in which he finds himself.  For some reason, he has no reliable radio, no back-up electronics or communication, no real ingenuity nor, even, much in the way of maritime competence.  In order to reckon where he is located, he has to carefully read the instructions on a sextant in a box -- he clearly doesn't really know how to use the sextant and charting his position, in any event, is meaningless:  the raft is drifting on the open sea and he can't control where it goes.  There is nothing visionary in the movie -- no dream sequences nor fantasies until, perhaps, the last shot.  Redford, like all the greatest movie actors, doesn't seem to be doing anything at all -- he scarcely raises an eyebrow during the entire film.  The camera simply studies his aging, handsome features as he, in turn, looks at things with a patient, appraising eye -- there's one thirty second outburst but Redford is conspicuously stoic throughout the rest of the film.  (Obviously, the part is extremely demanding physically and I was impressed with Redford's willingness to clamber up and down ladders and rigging in soaking wet clothing.)  The director N. K. Chandor has made what David Bordwell used to call a "parametric film" -- that is, an avant garde picture strictly defined by the parameters of location and the camera's insistence on focusing exclusively on the leading (and only) character and his point of view.  I don't like pictures of this sort -- they seem pointless to me.  But Chandor and Redford must be granted the courage of their convictions -- they don't dramatize anything since it's their faith that the dire situation is intrinsically dramatic without any false histrionics or spectacle.  In this film, a great tempest at sea is rendered as a man being flung about helplessly in a claustrophobic cabin; he gets rumpled like clothing in a dryer.  

Imitation of Life

 Imitation of Life wallows in excess.  There's just "too much" of everything:  too much emotion, too much conflict, too much suffering, too much super-saturated color -- at times, the screen looks like an open wound.  The acting is hyperbolic and, in the last half hour, when there is a sort of morbid triumphal procession, a death bed scene, and garish night-club imagery coupled with huge, expressive close-ups the picture slips into a sort of excited delirium.  In the opening scenes in which a little girl is lost at Coney Island, the  establishing shots feature a hundred-thousand bathers crowded into the image with a thousand embedded in brilliantly blue ocean.  (The sequence is so grandiose that the director, Douglas Sirk, can't sustain it -- after these spectacular establishing shots, Sirk has to use rear-projection to isolate his characters from the throng.)  Shots are punctuated with flares of brilliant red and the leading lady wears elaborate garments with pearls and diamonds.  Even when she is supposed to be poor and struggling, the heroine's platinum blonde hair is done up in a metallic coiffure that makes her skull look like its wearing the Sydney Opera House.  The movie is relentless.  When a teenage boy angrily confronts his girlfriend about her racial identity, he doesn't just sneer and sulk, but, instead beats her bloody, slapping her so in hard that she ricochets across the street and, then, viciously hitting her again and again until she falls into a gruesome pool of slime underfoot.  Her face is hidden behind gouts of blood.  There are no quiet moments in the picture -- if the plot isn't spinning melodramatically out of control, the decor and set decoration bellow at you.  It' bullying, like being screamed-at for two hours.  I suppose it's an accomplishment to maintain this level of wild expressionistic hysteria.  The subject matter is fundamentally unpleasant and it's creepy to have this stuff howled in your face.  But this picture is a classic of its kind and worth seeing and the subject matter -- the film is largely about race relations in this country -- is by no means inconsequential.  

Imitation of Life in its 1959 version is an adaptation of bestseller by Fannie Hurst, previously made into an estimable movie in 1934.  The two adaptations differ markedly with racial themes predominating in the earlier picture (starring Claudette Colbert):  the theme of the young woman who can "pass" as White has always been alarming to Hollywood censors at Hayes Office -- such a character is said to imply miscegenation, something forbidden in the thirties and problematic when Sirk made his much more glamorous and upscale version of the story in 1959.  It is interesting that the 1934 picture casts an African-American actress, Fredi Washington, in the role of the girl who can pass for White; Hollywood was less bold in 1959 -- that role is played Susan Kohner, an actress with a Latino background.  In the later picture, Lana Turner plays Lora Meredith, an ambitious and, somewhat, haughty blonde, who yearns to become an actress.  Lora is a widow with a young daughter and an important element in the film is the suggestion that she is too old to play ingenue roles -- in fact, she admits to having "lost five years" raising her daughter.  At Coney Island, Lora's daughter Susie goes missing.  Susie has been playing with a slightly older child, Sarah, the daughter of a Black woman named Annie.  Lora and Annie meet, their encounter also including a "meet cute" with Lora's love interest throughout the film, the aspiring art-photographer, Steve Archer.  Lora and Annie are both struggling financially -- Lora is behind on her rent and payments to the milkman; Annie and her daughter are homeless.  After some initial reservations, the two women agree to pool their resources and live together in Lora's cramped flat.  Lora hikes around Manhattan trying to find modeling jobs.  After much hardship (which includes repelling the sexual advances of Lora's smarmy agent), she achieves success and becomes a famous Broadway actress.  At her school, Annie's daughter is "passing" as White; she is appalled and ashamed when her mother comes to school.  Little Sarah refuses to play with Black dolls and asserts that she is "White".  Annie doesn't think it is prudent to Sarah for pass as White but admits that it pains her to know that she gave birth to her daughter "only to have her hurt" -- obviously, she is ambivalent about her daughter's light complexion and the advantages it confers upon her.  

Lora pursues her career in theater aggressively, cuts off her relationship with the poor photographer, Steve, and, ultimately, marries a famous playwright.  After ten years or so, Lora breaks with the playwright -- he wants her to continue playing leading roles in his comedies; she wants to be recognized for serious theater.  She renews her relationship with Steve whom she has always loved.  Sarah has a love affair with a White boy.  When the boy learns that she has a Black mother, he calls her a "nigger" and beats her up.  Sarah, then, tells the noble and long-suffering Annie that if they ever meet on the street she is not to admit knowing her.  Then, she runs away from home.  (Annie tracks her to a dive bar where she is employed as a singer -- in fact, Sarah is very good and seems to have real talent.)  Lora's relationship with Steve is again hampered by her ambition.  She has to go to Italy to shoot a film with an Italian director who is clearly intended to be Federico Fellini.  Lora asks Steve to watch over Susie who is now a senior in High School.  Steve is kind and sophisticated and Susie falls in love with him.  When Lora gets back from Italy, mother and daughter clash over Steve.  Susie realizes that Steve loves her mother and, so, she plans to depart for college in Denver -- Lora lives in an elaborate modernist house, seemingly in Connecticut; she has stables and thoroughbred horses.  By this point, Annie is dying.  She flies to LA to see her daughter performing in an glitzy night-club act.  Again, Sarah repudiates her mother.  Annie returns to Connecticut where she dies.  Annie has planned an elaborate funeral and the final fifteen minutes or so of the film involve her obsequies -- a spectacular service in which Mahalia Jackson sings majestically, then, followed by a procession along the city streets in Manhattan with a marching band and four white horses pulling a Victorian hearse in which Annie's casket is displayed like a particularly luscious wedding cake.  Sarah appears on the street, throws herself through the police cordon, and cries out that the dead woman was her mother.  The family is reunited in a limousine with Steve and Lora together again and Sarah and Susie weeping in one another's arms.  

The movie is full of startling effects.  In the dive bar scene, hideous patrons (they look caricatures from a Goya or Bosch painting) occupy the foreground while the glamorous Sarah taunts them seductively.  In a later night club scene, Sarah, as a show girl, does an elaborate dance, half-naked and miming that she is opening champagne, on a huge gaudy turntable.  The house in Connecticut is full of angular white balustrades and austere,clinical-looking stairwells.  Characters are trapped in geometric cages.  Annie watches her daughter perform in the clubs from behind baroque scrolls of ornamental iron. Hallways and bed chambers are militant (and suggestive) with big phallic beams and posts. The funeral scene involving all the characters in film (including the milkman whom Annie has sweet-talked in any early scene) is disproportionately lavish -- it's like the funeral for a head-of-state with Mahalia Jackson operatically singing over dark-suited congregants and ranks of lodge members, dignified Black gents with dark shirts ornamented with metals and ribbons.  The funeral demonstrates that the most notable person in our society is the least appreciated -- the humble, kind, hardworking, and efficient colored maid.  The suggestion is that presidents and movie stars and captains of industry are all well and good, but that the true laurels for achievement must be awarded to people like Annie, good and loyal servants.  This is really the only way the spectacular funeral scenes can be interpreted.  The point, I think, is that we don't know who is truly important in our society -- there may be classes of persons in our world upon whom everything depends but we don't know anything about them.  At one point, Lora muses with Annie that, perhaps, no one will come to her funeral.  Annie replies that she knows hundreds of people  Lora can't believe this is possible.  "Who do you know?"  Annie replies:  "Members of my Baptist church and I'm a member of many lodges and societies."  Lora is surprised:  "I didn't know."  Annie replies:  "Well, you never asked."      

Silent Souls

 I watched the Russian film Silent Souls (2010) last night.  The film is a mainline injection into those veins through which dreams circulate.  I awoke before dawn arguing with a scene in the movie, something about a throng of Meryon people, an ethnic group in west-central Russia, gathered together in a sort of crater for some sinister reason.  I was convinced that this scene was a part of the movie, although I couldn't exactly grasp how it informed the picture's subject matter, broadly speaking an account of exotic mortuary practices in that community.  But since the scene doesn't exist in the movie, of course, the argument was fruitless.  Silent Souls affects you in such a way as to render it impossible to distinguish between what you saw in the movie, what you thought you saw and now remember, and what you may have only dreamed. Shot on a micro-budget and only 75 minutes long, the film is strangely memorable and, also, deeply disorienting.  It's a curious experience, so remote from everyday reality and concerns, that it, somehow, embeds itself in your imagination as a troubling foreign object, an irritant that can't quite be dislodged.

Silent Souls is the film's English title.  The Russian name for the picture is The Buntings, referring to a species of small, rather drab songbirds.  (The movie derives from a novel of that same name.)  The picture begins with a man named Aist riding his bicycle over a muddy lane in the woods.  Aist has bought two buntings that he carries in a cage suspended from his bike.  The camera either tracks behind him, shoots from his vantage rolling forward , or shows the lane receding behind the moving bicycle in long takes.  Throughout the film about a third of the shots show the buntings in their cage, generally at the center of the image.  Since the film is a kind of "road movie" about half of the images are shots from inside a moving car, unobtrusively composed to show the road from the vantage of the driver and passenger or, as with the introductory bicycle shots, watching the highway as it recedes behind the vehicle.  The landscape traversed is wooded and flat; there are enormous turgid-looking rivers.  The weather is perpetually drizzly and grey.  (We learn from the dialogue that it is an unseasonably warm November.)  Aist is a writer, the son of a "very odd man" (as he calls his father) who was also a notable regional poet.  Aist claims to be ethnically Meryon, explaining that these were Finnic tribes long since wholly absorbed into the local Slavic population.  Aist says that place names in this area are artifacts of Meryon words that have otherwise vanished.  Aist works as a photographer and has some sort of affiliation with a paper mill in the town of Neya, one of many villages that have Meryon roots.  We see him in the paper mill taking pictures of female workers -- perhaps, he has been commissioned to make a plant directory although this is pure speculation; the film is very focused, laconic and doesn't provide any real explanations for much of what we see. Aist flirts with one of the women.  We see him in his gloomy flat, trying to write on a laptop.  One wall is covered with a photo-montage that shows the nearby village and terrain pieced together from individual photographs.  This photo-montage rhymes with a huge photographic mural of the paper mill that covers a wall in the office of the plant manager, Miron, the picture's other protagonist.  The mural of paper-mill is strangely lit, surrealistically detailed, and imparts an aura of the uncanny to the scenes with Miron.

Miron calls Aist to his office and tells him that he needs his help.  Miron says that his wife Tanya has died.  The two men go to Miron's home where Tanya's naked corpse is lying on the bed.  Miron combs her hair and washes her body, apparently with vodka.  Then, the men tie colored threads into her pubic hair -- we are told that Meryon brides have their pubic hair adorned with threads of this sort that are removed by the groom, woven into a bracelet and, then, tied to an alder tree.  This is represented to be a Meryon wedding custom that is also used in burial ceremonies --  dead Meryon women are buried as brides.  The two men carry the corpse in a colorful blanket to Miron's car and, then. set out along empty highways, driving through the great, grim-looking forests.  The movie has almost no plot and there are no intriguing digressions or encounters along the way to the vast, shallow river where the two men set the dead woman on a funeral pyre, pour gallons of high-proof vodka on her and burn the corpse to ashes.  (The river is near the place where Miron and Tanya spent their honeymoon.)  Returning to Neya, they stop in a big city where they meet two prostitutes and spend the night with them.  The next morning, Miron and Aist are driving across an enormous bridge over a river when the buntings escape from their cage and "kiss" (as Aist, the narrator says) the eyes of the two men causing the driver to lose control of the car and crash it into the river.  In the depths of the mile-wide icy river, Miron merges with Tanya whose ashes were scattered in the water; Aist finds his father's lost typewriter and on which he types the novel The Buntings (the movie' source text) "on the side of a fish."  The old typewriter is at the bottom of the river due to an earlier death.  The film flashes back (although without immediate explanation) to Aist's childhood.  His mother died in childbirth and, with his father, the "odd poet", they row across one of the huge rivers with the corpse wrapped in a blanket.  Later, Aist's father, smitten with grief, cuts a hole in the ice of the river and "drowns" his typewriter --  it is this instrument that the Aist, who is himself drowned, later encounters.  (The scenes with the young Aist are heavily stylized:  we see the boy's saturnine face artificially lit while a rear-projection shows the landscape of the river over which Aist's father, like Charon, is conveying the corpse of his mother and dead infant sister.)

Although the movie purports to objectively portray the mortuary customs of the Meryon people, I suspect that many of those details are hallucinated.  The texture of the film suggests documentary realism, but what happens in the picture is uncanny and follows the logic of a dream.  Miron feels compelled to engage in what the Meryon's call "smoking" -- that is, recounting the sexual exploits of the deceased in graphic detail.  (The director Aleksei Fedorchenko provides us with a few sentences of these obscene reveries, but, then, discretely cuts away to an exterior shot of the car; we see Miron's lips moving but can't hear what he says.)  Tanya's pyre is comprised of 120 shovel handles, 80 long axe-handles and 20 short axe-handles -- all purchased in a hardware store somewhere.  Tanya is a plump, pink corpse -- she doesn't look even remotely dead and there is no hint of decomposition or any sign of the illness that has untimely killed her:  she seems to be about 45.  (Her body shows no rigor mortis and, when she is rolled over to be washed, there is no sign of blood pooling on the back of the corpse.)  The prostitutes are portrayed in a peculiar tracking shot that pans up over their naked bodies as they rest against what seems to be a wall of slatted timber, something that you might imagine in a building by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen.  There is a slight intimation that Aist may have had an affair with Tanya, but nothing overt is shown.  (There are some graphic sex scenes in flashback.)  The long bridge at the end of the movie rhymes with a very strange, crooked bridge crossing a more narrow river at the beginning of the film -- crossing water and bridges seems emblematic of death.  The men attempt to retrieve ancient Meryon customs but, in fact, everyone seems to acknowledge that nothing really is known about those people -- no words in the language (except the names for rivers) have survived.  The script equates love with poetry with drowning with death.  Death by drowning is said to be the best way to perish and large, shallow bodies of water fill enormous basins extending out to rims of pine at the horizon.  The towns through which the men pass are all wretched with decaying wooden houses and antique concrete and steel factories set in clearings in an endless green pine forest.  The bodies of women are said to be rivers in which men drown or wish to drown.  The film expresses the forbidden thought -- namely that there should be no death, that our loved ones should be immortal, and we should live in joy and peace with them forever.  But no sooner is the forbidden thought spoken than the buntings peck out the eyes of the men and send them careening into the bottom of the river.  Nothing is immortal; everything flows and ebbs and wanes and passes away.  The film argues that the ancient Meryon culture somehow persists in its customs and folkways.  But the movie argues with equal force that nothing at all remains of those people but their blood, the landscapes where they once lived, and a few fragmentary names for bodies of water.  (There is a German poet named Johannes Bobrowski who wrote, at length, about the lost tribes of the Baltic, particularly the Sarmatians -- although he invokes their ancestral spirits, he also must acknowledge that nothing remains except a few words for fish, birds, rivers.  Other antecedents to the film include Sokurov's The Second Circle in which someone has to manhandle the corpse of his father out of a cheerless high-rise apartment building in Moscow and Tarkovsky's great The Mirror.)  Although the picture seems to take place in a timeless realm of vast slow-moving rivers, muddy river banks and sand bars, and dark forests, some of the shots are made in what seem like the Russian equivalent of Walmart and, in the final scenes, heavy traffic crosses rivers into large, dark cities.  

 

Film note on Odd Man Out

 Odd Man Out

Via Dolorosa

The Canadian critic, Hugh Kenner, wrote that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot arises from the author’s experiences in the Maquis or French Resistance.  Two underground fighters are assigned a dangerous and lonely mission.  They are supposed to meet their anonymous contact at some rural crossroads to learn the final details for the operation.  But the Gestapo or SS have intervened.  The third fighter with logistical information has gone missing.  Either he is dead or being tortured in a cellar somewhere and no one will see him again.  Should resistance continue?  “I can’t go on. I will go on.”  Beckett, Kenner argues, has excised the circumstantial details of specific time, place, and person from his grim anecdote.  By omitting factual circumstances, Beckett has transformed a particular experience into something that is universal.

Carol Reed’s 1947 Odd Man Out demonstrates this process: the film depicts a manhunt for a wounded IRA gunman during the troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  But Reed’s ambition is that the wounded terrorist’s plight show us something universal about the human condition.  And, so, the action takes place after dark in an unnamed northern city; the dying gunman works for the “organization”, a shadowy enterprise that clearly represents the Irish Republican Army.  The masonry stake of a big clock tower looms over the gunman’s desperate plight. The snow that falls during the last quarter of the film reminds us of the final paragraph in James Joyce’s “The Dead”: “Snow was general all over Ireland...His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and falling faintly, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

By abstracting and making universal, the dying gunman’s sufferings, the film evokes the notion of the pilgrim’s progress, the way of suffering that leads through this vale of tears to death.  Everyone endures pain and despair.  Our great enterprise runs aground.  We are all betrayed.  The clock tower looms over the shadowy and cold labyrinth of the world.  The forces that will destroy us are knocking at the door.  Reed’s film noir becomes an allegory for the fate of all of us.  

Context

I have argued that Odd Man Out generalizes the fate of its passive and doomed protagonist.  An ugly technical term for this strategy is “decontextualizing.”  Sometimes, a film or other art object may seem “decontextualized” simply because we don’t know the historical matrix in which the work is embedded.  Arguably, a United Kingdom audience in 1947 would have known the exact historical circumstances to which Odd Man Out refers.  Therefore, Reed and his screenwriters didn’t need to supply information as to facts that would have widely known when the film premiered.  But in 2025, eighty years (and a continent) distant from the events depicted in the film, a little additional information may be helpful.

As early as 1169, English and Norman forces invaded Ireland, attempting to annex the territory to Great Britain.  What is now Northern Ireland was part of the kingdom of Ulster, an area of nine counties in the northeast part of the island.  A long series of uprisings and wars characterized the relations between England and Ireland, but the English maintained control over Ireland for more than 800 years.  After the Protestant Reformation, Ulster possessed a large population of Anglicans; of course, the remainder of Ireland was overwhelmingly Catholic.  By the late 19th century, progressives in the British parliament argued that English hegemony over Ireland was ultimately unsustainable and, so, preparations were made to establish “Home Rule”.  These efforts were stalled by World War One, a conflict in which Germany actively supported rebellion in Ireland and, indeed, provided munitions for that struggle.  Things came to a head during Easter Uprising of 1916 in which the Irish rose en masse to fight the British.  The Uprising was suppressed and many of its leaders publicly executed.  A guerilla war erupted between the Irish Republican Army and the British in 1919 and continued, a campaign of bombings, ambushes, and murders, through 1921.  Complicating the situation were the Unionists, pro-British enclaves located, primarily, in Ulster that opposed IRA (and Catholic) control over the country.  In order to end the fighting, England and the pro-Independence Sinn Fein agreed to partition the country.  Twenty-six predominantly Catholic counties were designated as the Republic of Ireland.  Six majority Protestant counties (“Unionist” counties), all of them in Ulster, remained part of the United Kingdom.  These six counties became known as Northern Ireland.

The partition that divided Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland was contentious and, ultimately, bloody.  Irish Republican Army fighters infiltrated Northern Ireland and embarked on campaign of terrorism in that place.  Communal sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants led to massacres, arson, and other atrocities.  Fighting continued throughout the later twenties and thirties with the IRA conducting guerrilla operations in Northern Ireland.  During World War Two, the Republic of Ireland was publicly neutral, although circumspectly supporting the Germans.  IRA sympathizers in Northern Ireland were rounded-up on suspicion of collaborating with the Germans and thrown into internment camps.  

The Republic of Ireland declared its neutrality in World War Two and maintained relations with Berlin; there was a German legation in Dublin.  Northern Ireland, however, as part of the United Kingdom was not spared German air raids.  In fact, during the Belfast Blitz (April and May 1941) hundreds of Luftwaffe planes dropped bombs in the capitol city.  Four separate aerial attacks occurred and a total of about 1100 people were killed in the bombardment – the Easter Tuesday raid on Belfast was the second most deadly air attack on British territory during the War.  Large sections of Belfast were bombed-out and not rebuilt until much later.  (In Odd Man Out, a critical scene occurs in an air raid shelter and Johnny McQueen is seen fleeing through desolate ruins remaining in 1947 from bombing six years earlier.)

After the War, the British released IRA fighters and their sympathizers from the camps where they had been detained in Northern Ireland.  This led to increased violence when the IRA men commenced another low-level guerrilla war in Belfast and its environs.  

At the outset of Odd Man Out, Johnny McQueen is hiding out in a safe-house in a Catholic neighborhood in Belfast.  We learn that he has been in jail for an extended period, probably interred during the War as a German sympathizer.  Contemporary audiences would have understood that McQueen is an IRA terrorist and that the “organization” is the Irish Republican Party.  Most British police don’t carry guns.  However, due to the sectarian violence in Belfast, police in that town were, in fact, armed as shown in many scenes in the film.  Johnny McQueen argues for a parliamentary solution to the “Troubles” in the opening scenes and seems prepared to relinquish violence – he is openly worried about the firearms that he and his comrades carry during the raid on the mill, apparently, an effort to rob the mill of payroll proceeds so as to finance IRA activities.  

A British audience in 1947 would recognize Belfast from the opening aerial shot of the city. (The city’s iconic landmark, the Albert Memorial Clock, is prominent throughout the movie.)  However, neither the clock tower nor Belfast itself are ever named in the movie.   The director Carol Reed created a replica of Belfast’s famous Crown Bar.   The replica, appearing in the film as the Four Winds Bar (with frescos by the mad painter Lukey), was built as a set at Denham Studios in London where some of the film was shot.  

Sources

Odd Man Out is based on F. L. Green’s 1945 novel of the same title.  Green’s novel was hostile to the IRA and contemptuous of their activities.  Carol Reed’s approach to this material is much more sympathetic to the “Organisation” as it is called in the film.  R.C. Sherriff worked as script doctor on the screenplay.  Sherriff was a prominent British playwright, best known for his World War One drama Journey’s End (1928) – a theater work that has been filmed several times (including a 1930 production starring Colin Clive made by James Whale) and often revived.  Sherriff was a successful screenwriter – he received a BAFTA award for The Dam Busters and wrote a number of important British films.  Both the novel and original screenplay end with Kathleen shooting Johnny and, then, killing herself. Depiction of suicide was verboten in the 1940's and the American Hayes’ Office demanded changes in the picture, eliminating Kathleen’s outright suicide by changing her death to “suicide by cop.”  

The movie is indebted to John Ford’s The Informer (1935), a movie about an IRA man doomed because he has informed on members of his cell. Much of the film’s night-time imagery imitates German expressionist films from the twenties but, also, derives from French poetic realism, particularly Julien Duvivier’s crime film Pepe le Moko (1937) in which the title character is hiding out in the Casbah and commits suicide as the dragnet closes around him in the final scenes.  Homages to pictures by Carne and Prevert are also evident to those who know how to look for such things. 

Odd Man Out, in turn, influenced many later films.  The ticking clock aspects of the movie appear in several films, most notably Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon.  Roman Polanski lauds Odd Man Out as his favorite film.  The great British director John Boorman also is a fan of the picture.  The last sequence in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the wounded “hooligan’s” escape from the city and his final death among the horses in Kentucky’s blue-grass country is clearly derived from Odd Man Out; a doctor recruited to treat Sterling Hayden’s doomed gunman says: “He won’t get far; he doesn’t have enough blood to keep a chicken alive.”  Carol Reed’s own 1949 picture The Third Man starring Orson Welles imitates many of the effects in Odd Man Out, most notably the low-key lighting and the nightmarish chiaroscuro scenes. 

Carol Reed

I have written at length about Carol Reed in my film note to Outcast of the Islands.  Reed won the Oscar for best director in 1969 for his film version of Dicken’s Oliver Twist.  Oliver! was well-reviewed and also won an Oscar for best picture, but Reed is famous today, primarily, for three pictures he made in quick succession: Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948 with script by Graham Greene who greatly admired Odd Man Out), and The Third Man (1949 starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime).  It is thought that Reed began to lose his way with his Conrad adaptation The Outcast of the IslandT (1952), although it’s my view that this picture is also mostly excellent.  The Man Between (1953), a thriller set in ravaged Berlin is said to be a “rehash” of The Third Man.  I haven’t seen the picture and can’t comment.  Reed worked in Hollywood with Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lolabrigida on the circus film Trapeze (1956), a big widescreen technicolor production that was well-received at the time of its initial release.  Reed worked again with Graham Greene on an adaptation of his novel, Our Man in Havana (1959), starring Alec Guinness.  Bad trouble in the form of Marlon Brando afflicted him on the project Mutiny on the Bounty from which he was fired.  Reed recovered with the large-scale production of The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965 with Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison).  This was followed by the musical Oliver! and a couple of inconsequential films.  Reed is the only British director (apart from producer-director Alexander Korda) to be knighted – this was in 1952 when Reed was acclaimed for having restored prestige to the British film industry.   

Production Notes

About 20% of Odd Man Out was filmed on location in Belfast – most of these shots were made during the day, that is, before the heist  Many of the atmospheric night cityscapes were shot in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London.  Reed hadn’t been able to afford night-shooting in his previous studio-bound films – he made so-called quota quickies in the thirties and war years (that is, films produced to be shown as “quota” with more popular American films as double features – the “quota quickies” were made to protect the British fim industry from being wholly colonized by the Americans.)  Odd Man Out was a prestige production with top-notch actors and expensive production values, including the lustrous and evocative night shots on location in Belfast or Shoreditch.  Robert Krasker, Reed’s director of photography, distinguished himself with ingenious ways to shoot sequences in the darkness.  

Many famous actors were recruited from Dublin’s famous Abbey Theater including Robert Newton who plays Lukey, Cyril Cusack, Denis O’Dea, F.J. McCormick who plays Shell, and W. G. Fay as Father Tom. However, none of the accents in the film are authentic to Belfast with one exception, the hackney driver Joseph Tomelty who plays ‘Gin’ Jimmy.  The rest of the speech is accented in a variety of ways, perhaps, intentionally, to emphasize the universal elements of the plot.  (This is a feature of the film inaudible to American audiences but much commented-on in Great Britain.) 

James Mason  

James Mason appeared in innumerable movies of every kind.  After Odd Man Out, he was continuously in demand until his death at 75 in 1984.  Born in Yorkshire (West Riding), he was a classically trained Shakespearian actor and began his career in the West End (London) theaters, playing roles in Shakespeare, Chekhov, and other repertoire works.  For a decade, he appeared on-screen in supporting roles, mostly silky, suave and sadistic villains.  He became famous for a part of this kind in 1945's The Seventh Veil, a psychological drama in which her torments a beautiful pianist (played by Ann Todd).  Odd Man Out was an enormous success both critically and at the box office, winning the first BAFTA award – England’s equivalent to the Oscar in 1947.  Mason won an Golden Globe for his leading role in A Star is Born (1954) with Judy Garland.  He was notably cast as Rommel in The Desert Fox (1951) and appeared as Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 adaptation of Lolita.  He reprised his suave villain persona in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and was in many other notable pictures – for instance, he played Brutus in Joseph Mankiewicz’ Julius Caesar (1953).  He worked with Sam Peckinpah in the war film Cross of Iron (1977) and is superb in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, a bizarre film about cortisone addiction released in 1956.  His final movie, The Shooting Party, features an excellent performance – Mason was hired to replace Paul Scofield who was badly injured in an accident on the first day of production.  Mason died before the movie, shot in 1984, but only shown a year later, was released.  I first saw him in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) – this movie is important to me because it is the first film that I ever saw in a theater; I attended the movie with my father in a movie palace on the amusement park pier at Asbury Park, New Jersey.  (I also recall seeing Mason as Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea first released in 1954, probably when that movie was broadcast on the TV show The Wonderful World of Disney.)  It suffices to say that I have been a fan of James Mason all my life. 

Mason is buried in Vaud, Switzerland a few feet away from Charley Chaplin’s grave.  

On the passive protagonist

International film noir is arguably a reaction to the experiences of millions of soldiers and civilians in World War Two.  French film critics were the first to notice a new strain of pessimism in American crime films – these pictures portrayed characters caught in a web of fatality and doom.  Pre-war crime films featured tough-talking aggressive mobsters who built criminal empires and suffered as a result of arrogance and pride.  Post-war film noir focuses on ordinary men who are trapped by circumstance.  Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, both featuring the nebbish Edward G. Robinson, exemplify this trend: pre-war, Robinson played aggressive mob bosses; post-war, Robinson plays mild-mannered clerks, “salary-men” lured from the straight and narrow by femmes fatale and destroyed.  These scenarios arise from the characteristic experience of soldiers in a mechanized war: troops anxiously wait, helpless in the face of orders that will send them to their death.  The experiences of civilians wasn’t much better – people hiding like rats in subways and cellars powerless against the aerial bombardment destroying their city.  Far from encouraging heroic action, war induces a sense of helplessness and passivity in its victims. Johnny McQueen’s one attempt at action goes awry and he spends the last three-quarters of Odd Man Out laboriously dying.  He doesn’t act but is acted-upon.  (Of course, the character’s helplessness and quiescence poses a challenge to the film maker – it’s hard to maintain audience interest in a figure that is wholly passive; for this reason, Odd Man Out always seems to me to be about fifteen minutes too long – it’s the tedious proof of a theorem that we accepted as true before the film’s midway point.)

It is interesting to compare the post-war film noir with both pre- and post-war Westerns.  Westerns, of course, take place outdoors, action occurring across great expanses of beautiful, if desolate, landscape.  Film noir customarily are urban.  Westerns proceed under the glaring light of the sun; film noir are nocturnal.  The core of the Western, from Stagecoach to McCabe and Mrs. Miller, is action, a hero who takes arms against evil; film noir are about protagonists whose attempts at action are thwarted, helplessly waiting to be destroyed.  Consider 1950's The Asphalt Jungle in which a botched heist leads to everyone’s death versus Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in my Crown from the same year in which a corrupt town is redeemed by the heroic action of a reformed gunslinger.

Where is this dance-hall?

In Odd Man Out, Kathleen stumbles into a crowded dance hall.  The place is packed with people who swarm the dance floor.  As Kathleen makes her way across the floor, various dancers grope at her or try to seize her arm, hoping to enlist her in the orgiastic frenzy that is underway.  An orchestra blares a shrill four bar motif over and over again.  There is a big sign prominently displayed that says: “No Jitterbugging,” but every dancer that we can see is performing the jitter-bug, hurling their partners head-over-heels into the air.  Kathleen fights her way through the crazed mob and stumbles outdoors where the screaming motif sounding in the dance-hall pursues her.

This dance-hall is located in Hell.    

A post-war emblem

The cabdriver deposits Johnny McQueen in a zinc bathtub in a scrap yard.  The ground is black and muddy and the rain has turned into a cheerless, hostile snowstorm.  A white angel, perhaps funerary sculpture, beckons to the wounded man.  It’s an emblematic image of passivity and hopelessness worthy of Beckett: a man bleeding to death in a metal bathtub next to a pale, mutilated angel.  

 

Good Night and Good Luck

 Good Night and Good Luck is a Broadway play, presented on June 7, 2025 on CNN.  It's a vanity project for George Clooney who directs and stars as Edward R. Murrow.  Clooney presents Murrow as a saint, an unambiguously virtuous crusader for truth and justice.  The ostensible subject of the play is Murrow's clash with Senator Joe McCarthy around 1954 in the context of the HUAC hearings on Communist infiltration of American institutions.  The play shows Murrow, an anchorman and reporter for CBS, attacking McCarthy as a proto-fascist demagogue notwithstanding resistance from the head of the network, Bill Paley.  In the end, Paley does the right thing, supporting Murrow's advocacy of the rule of law, although he does exile Murrow from prime-time to a Saturday afternoon slot.  A married couple -- the wife has a questionable background with Leftist causes -- has to pretend that they are not married; the wife reminds her husband to remove his wedding ring before going to work.  Everyone, however, knows that the couple are married and, when McCarthy is somehow vanquished at the end of the two-hour play, they can admit their relationship.  One journalist persecuted by McCarthy kills himself -- exactly why this fellow resorted to suicide is not explained.  McCarthy's demise is also never really explained. Clooney as Murrow makes a speech that constitutes a ringing endorsement of the free press and the show ends with a montage of events covered by news services from '54 to yesterday that doesn't really make sense -- I think Clooney means the montage to show that broadcast journalism has broken and reported-on many important stories to the benefit of our Republic, but the exact gist of the montage is unclear and mainly intended to enforce parallels between Joe McCarthy's reign of terror and our current plight during the second Trump administration.  (This is an elliptical way of making a point about the fact that Joe McCarthy's depredations should educate us as to President Trump's evil intentions -- in fact, I think that the montage is a cowardly way of drawing parallels that could be much more explicitly made.  In other words, Clooney's play evidences the exact sort of self-censorship that the show otherwise decries).  The show features musical interludes, a female jazz singer performing tunes that are only vaguely relevant to the story -- I think these interludes are intended to provide cover for scene changes.  

There are a number of things wrong with the production.  First, the over-declamatory and exuberant sort of delivery favored by Broadway actors (and people on the so-called "legitimate" stage) doesn't work well on TV.  Lines are spoken in a way intended to play to the back rows of the 1200 seat Winter Garden theater on Broadway where the play is running.  This means that the TV audience first has to acclimate themselves to a style of acting that makes perfect sense in a theater but no sense at all when filmed from a variety of angles in close-up -- it took me a half-hour to get used to the prosody and diction.  Second, the show is heavily dependent on newsreel footage of the HUAC committee hearings and TV interviews with the sinister and bullying McCarthy.  By contrast, Murrow is never shown in documentary footage, although, of course, he was a famous broadcast journalist and well-known to everyone.  Since much of the dialogue and speechifying in the play comes directly from Edward Murrow's interviews and broadcasts, this begs the question as to why not just show Murrow in contemporary footage as well and dispense entirely with Clooney's very good, but tendentious, impersonation of the man.  Third, the HUAC footage is often strangely undramatic -- in the climactic moment a questioner (Joseph Welch, counsel for the Army) denounces McCarthy for having no shame:  "Senator, have you no decency?"  You might imagine this as a thunderous moment, an epic climax to the battle in the Senate, and a highlight in American history.  But the interlocutor who pronounces those famous words has a high nasal voice, speaks in a sort of whine, and, appears on camera, as a stooped, wizened old man.  (Welch was, in fact, something of a performer -- he later was in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder in which he played the Trial Judge.)  In other words, the transcript of this confrontation is better than the actual footage.  Finally, the show is completely lacking in any real tension, suspense, or conflict.  Murrow never doubts himself; his side-kick Fred Friendly doesn't doubt the integrity of their stance against McCarthy.  Everything proceeds to a climax that is never in doubt and a fait accompli. Murrow is a plaster saint, a TV news Jesus who can do no wrong and Clooney plays the part in a smug, sanctimonious way.

The most dispiriting aspect of the show, however, relates to the parallels between the McCarthy era and Trump's kleptomaniacal and lawless regime.  McCarthy was a creature of the institutions that formed him and relatively easily discredited.  Trump controls all the levers of power and is infinitely more dangerous -- he is backed by an entire political party that has formed as a cult around him.  Further, he advances a culture war that doesn't seem to have been part of McCarthy's agenda.  Until this week, Trump enjoyed the support of the world's richest man. Simply stated, Trump is vastly more dangerous than McCarthy, poses a much more serious risk of damage to the United States, and enjoys far more support than the Junior Senator from Wisconsin.  On the evidence of Good night and Good Luck we are in a far more desperate moment right now than anything involving Joe McCarthy.  In fact, there are almost no parallels to much of what Trump is doing -- McCarthy didn't control the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, didn't have a private army of pardoned thugs to do his bidding, wasn't deporting people to foreign concentration camps, and didn't enjoy the support of a majority of the Supreme Court and much of House of Representatives and Senate. If, in this perilous moment, we must place our trust in resistance mounted by George Clooney and his like in the form of a mildly controversial Broadway play, we are in desperate straits indeed.  

(Good Night and Good Luck is a revival of a 2005 movie written and directed by Clooney.  Clearly, it's resemblance to events of today are purely coincidental.)

Rosemary's Baby

 I must have seen Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby at a drive-in movie theater around 1970 or 1971.  (The movie based on a big bestseller by Ira Levin was released in 1968).  I recall a single shot from the film, a languorous tilt down into the sepulchral cradle in which Rosemary's baby is apparently resting -- the shot dissolves before the infant can be seen, melting into an image of labyrinthine dormers, pointy roofs and the gloomy chimneys of the Dakota apartments.  That image must have made a deep impression on me because I have remembered it for more than 50 years -- the rest of the film, like that shot, had dissolved in my imagination without leaving a trace. 

Rosemary's Baby is very well-scripted, brilliantly acted, and, rather, slow.  It isn't frightening in any way.  Contemporary audiences have been damaged, and their attention span eroded, by the popular cinema spearheaded by Steven Spielberg, thrill a minute movies with bravura set pieces every fifteen minutes and periodic explosions of gore.  Rosemary's Baby is leisurely paced, brooding and ominous, but not particularly horrible -- in fact, viewed in a certain light, the picture has aspects of campy comedy.  It's a serious endeavor as witness the superb acting that Polanski wrests from his cast, an ensemble mostly comprised of very experienced and accomplished Hollywood and Broadway character actors. Hollywood now attempts to gross you out or thrill you every few minutes -- Polanski develops his effects over the entire running time of the movie; it's all of a piece and, ultimately, quite disturbing, but, nonetheless, a civilized entertainment.  

A young couple move into a sinister haunted house of a cooperative, the Dakota although called the "Bramford" in the film.  Their next door neighbors are a much older couple, portrayed as wacky eccentrics, although, in fact, they turn out to be the leaders of a coven of Satanists.  There's an inexplicable suicide -- a happy-go-lucky former drug addict (now in recovery) hurls herself out of a seventh story window.  She is a protegee of the Satanist couple who are, at first, presented like sit-com comic relief.  Ruth Gordon plays the neighbor, Minnie Castevets (she won an Oscar for the role) and she is probably the best thing in the movie, although all the performances are very good.  She seems to be a good-natured, officious ding-bat (to use Archie Bunker's locution) and, although there are sinister aspects to her character she retains that aspect up to the end of the movie -- she is obviously upset when Rosemary drops a knife that mars the hardwood surface of one of her floors and, while the coven are admiring the infant Satan, she serves the heroine a steaming cup -- "what's in it?" Rosemary demands; "it's just Lipton tea," the old woman replies.  Dressed like a flower-child, Minnie is weirdly helpful and accommodating but, of course, this is part of the coven's plot to have Rosemary impregnated by the devil and, then, bear his spawn.  Minnie's husband, Roman, is played by an accomplished Broadway actor with a deep mellifluous voice, a performer named Sydney Blackmer, and he's a suave, courtly old gent who happens to be a sort of traveling agent for the devil.  The coven, in general, are comprised of professional people and their dour wives; they're nondescript appearance and, generally, inoffensive manners are similar to the rather bourgeois satanists in the great Val Lewton horror film, The Seventh Victim -- this is a group of devil-worshipers who also have the mildly irritating aspect of overly intrusive and bitchy next door neighbors.  Evil is, indeed, wholly banal as portrayed in Polanski's film.  Mostly, the picture is about acting -- John Cassavetes is also very effective as a struggling theatrical actor who has done a few commercials and is willing to make a Faustian bargain to advance his career -- his rival goes blind after being cast in a role for which Cassavetes' character, Guy, was vying.  Of course, it's sorcery and Rosemary's baby is the quid pro quo.  Cassavetes is sinister in a darkly handsome manner -- like many actors, he is obviously highly self-centered and ruthless with respect to his thespian ambitions.  Mia Farrow plays Rosemary.  She is also excellent.  She embodies three aspects of the character's pregnancy:  anxiety as to the conception of her child (as a result of a rape by the devil), haggard misery during the first trimester while she endures terrible pain (Polanski, who knows about these things, cuts off her hair and films her like a gaunt concentration camp inmate), and, at last, a frenzy of vigorous paranoia at the climax of the film in which she tries to save her unborn child from the coven's clutches.  This section of the movie is very effective -- Rosemary is surrounded by a conspiracy of witches and those who are not part of the cabal interpret her pleas for help as evidence of mental illness.  The picture resembles Polanski's 1965 horror movie, Repulsion, in which Catherine Deneuve descends into murderous insanity -- Polanski uses the same devices and ambiguity to keep his audience guessing whether Rosemary and her pregnancy are, in fact, at the center of a vast, lethal conspiracy or whether she has simply lost her mind.  The movie is at its best when it is most suggestive -- for instance, many of the aspects of the cabal are not really spelled-out, the motives of the Satanists are generally left obscure, and we never see the devil baby.  As with Val Lewton, whose spirit inhabits this movie, things that are unsaid or unseen are scarier in their implications than anything that is baldly and directly depicted.  This is a very good movie, but too slow for modern audiences -- you have to attend to the implications of the action and dialogue and the film's focus is on the fine performances that it showcases.  There's no gore, no jump-scares, no bloody confrontations.  The horror is metaphysical in nature, anxiety about sex and reproduction and how our bodies trick us into doing things that we would never rationally attempt.  There's a cameo by Tony Curtis, but he never appears before the camera -- he plays the part of Cassavetes' acting rival who goes blind, a voice on the phone speaking with Mia Farrow.  (Apparently, the actress recognized the voice but couldn't quite place it when the scene was shot-- hence, her bemused appearance and demeanor.)

The Asphalt Jungle

 There's no asphalt visible in the opening shot of John Huston's 1950 heist movie, The Asphalt Jungle.  Curiously, the first thing that we see is a low-angle expanse of what seems to be cobblestones tilting gently up to a curving promenade where a couple of taxi-cabs are moving.  The cobblestones are pointillist, little units each similar but independent from the other -- this field of cobbles represents the film's narrative strategy, small differentiated units of story each assigned to a various characters and assembled into a mosaic.  Huston's film has many characters and the directors take great care to delineate each of them individually, to give them salient features and a rationale for their behavior.  The film's crooks are all sympathetically observed, given quirks and character traits, and, therefore, lifted above the cliches and stereotypes that film noir of this era customarily employs.  It's a beautiful movie, impressively shot in documentary style black and white, although with some images heightened with a faint trace of German expressionist shadow and fog -- the frames are composed with angular geometric shapes, profiles arrayed against characters in full frontal appearance and interesting contrasts between fore- and background, deep focus in which different planes of action can take place.  With the exception of the last two minutes, the entire film takes place at night, in the grim solitude of vacant lots, empty warehouses, and dark mean streets.  It's an unnamed nightmare city, the city of dreadful night, swarming with armies of belligerent cops suddenly intruding on thoroughfares that are otherwise curiously deserted and desolate.  Some of the action centers around a cafe next to a hulking slum tenement labeled PILGRIM -- perhaps it's a Salvation Army outpost in the poor part of town; the cafe, run by a criminal fixer and hunchback named Gus, is so disheveled and rundown that it seems amazing that such a place even exists or could have customers.  A cab laps up milk from a bowl on the counter as the criminals, who haunt this place conspire.

A renowned professional jewel thief, called "the Doc" has just been released from jail.  The "Doc" speaks with a heavy German accent, but has continental good manners and a courtly demeanor.  Evidently, his eight years in jail didn't rehabilitate him -- his first act on the outside is to contact the local mobster and start raising funds for an epic jewel heist.  Doc says he needs a "box man", a driver, and "hooligan" (that is muscle).  The box man is a safecracker, ethnically Italian, who lives with his wife and small infant son in a squalid, dismal apartment -- he's a lower middle-class crook who is looking for a way to a better house and a little more money for his growing family.  (All the crooks are supplied with details as to the economies and their place in the local criminal ecosystem.)  The "hooligan" played by Sterling Hayden is a country boy whose "Rosebud" is the bankruptcy of his family farm in old Kentucky and the loss of a particularly fine black colt with whom the boy had bonded.  Embittered and, probably, homosexual, the hooligan lives alone, now and then, employed as a collection agent to make desultory threats against deadbeats.  Gus, the hunchback and cafe proprietor (who is a cat lover) will drive the car used for the heist.  A local mobster who runs gambling rackets puts the team in touch with a corrupt lawyer.  The lawyer's role is to finance the robbery and arrange for the hot merchandise, diamonds and other gems, to be sold to a fence.  Unfortunately, the lawyer is underwater with debt himself, probably due to his expensive moll, a glamorous blonde played by the very young Marilyn Monroe -- even at this stage in her career, she's iconic. The lawyer also has an elegant bedridden wife with whom he plays cards in bed -- she pathetically spruces herself up with earrings and a lissome negligee to revive the wretched lawyer's interest in her.  (He's obsessed with blonde who he's keeping on the side, a little girl who calls him "Uncle Lon.")  The lawyer is so crooked that he can't be trusted even by his fellow criminals and, ultimately, he betrays the enterprise out of his own panicked greed.  

Huston is anxious to give everyone on screen their "reasons' for both their criminality and their various loyalties.  (It was Renoir who said that the tragedy in life arises because everyone, even the most vicious, "have their reasons.")  The heist goes wrong -- the poor family-man, the "box man" gets shot in a scuffle in which a dropped gun fires; it's a pure accident, the first of several in the film.  The movie insists that accident prevails over planning -- men are at the mercy of malign coincidence and mishap.  For some reason, a burglar alarm, apparently in a nearby building, sounds and the grim streets with their classical colonnaded facades of banks and big empty avenues are suddenly aswarm with cops.  The police are corrupt -- in fact, one cop is in cahoots with the mobster running the gambling dives and it's cheerfully assumed that the police will beat confessions out of anyone that they catch.  The police commissioner views the robbery as an affront to his conception of law-and-order and he mobilizes an army of cops to hunt down the burglars.  Crime doesn't pay and the criminals, who are far more sympathetic than the relentless Kafkaesque police, are all arrested or gunned down.  The picture is episodic and the narrative has to dart from one character to another to make its melancholy points -- there's not much of a through line since all the crooks have different motivations and traits.  Several sequences stand out:  a small-time hooker who goes by the moniker of "Doll" loses her place to live and has to bunk with the hooligan -- he seems absolutely terrified of her, a very odd reaction for such a big bruiser and there is some implication that the woman's sexuality alarms him; she obviously likes him and remains loyal to the end although we don't ever see them touch and they sleep in chaste twin beds.  In a huge close-up, she peels off her fake eyelashes, an image that is strangely repellent.  The final scene with the hooligan bleeding to death in a field with several beautiful horses is memorable -- I saw this movie on TV fifty years ago and the concluding scene in the Kentucky pasture has always stayed with me.  There's a bizarre McCarthey-esque scene in which the police commissioner is confronted about the corrupt cop; in a political savvy move, the commissioner deflects the criticism away from his agency, switching on a police radio with various channels in which dispatchers are sending cars to crime-scenes.  "All of these are calls for help," he says.  Then, he melodramatically shuts off the radio -- "what would happen if the channels all went dead?" he says.  It's an example of Huston's "just the facts" approach to this film -- we don't know if we are to read the Commissioner's ploy as a serious endorsement of law and order or as a cynical non sequitur.  Another scene in which the German jewel thief, a character right out of an Erich Kaestner novel, delays his escape to watch a girl dance to juke-box music is also extraordinarily memorable -- the police apprehend him because of this little indulgence, either an indictment of a moment of weakness or folly that is to be praised; we have to make up our own mind about this.