Noir City Notebook 4
Jul. 17th, 2007 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saavedra77My experience of the festival rounded out with three exceedingly dark features, including one that I'd argue is an out-and-out masterpiece:
Pushover (1954) reprises many of the themes of Double Indemnity a decade earlier, but with certain noteworthy changes of direction and sympathy. In the earlier (and better-known) film, young and ambitious insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) connives with the equally avaricious Phyllis Deitrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to kill the latter's husband to collect on his life insurance policy. But whereas Double Indemnity's Neff is a young man on the make, Pushover's bent cop Paul Sheridan (also played by MacMurray) acts more from midlife desperation than youthful heedlessness. And while Stanwyck's Dietrichson is every bit the femme fatale, Kim Novak's gun moll Lona McLane is more manipulated than manipulator. Ultimately, Pushover is about Sheridan's equation of love with money, and his fear that life is passing him by.
Nightmare Alley" (1947): Greed, ambition, infidelity, and fraud propel Nightmare Alley, too, which follows the rapid rise and fall of con man Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power). Carlisle's leverages a combination of clever fakery and charm to rise from carnival "mentalist" to nightclub performer and finally to the verge of L. Ron Hubbard-like success as a "spiritual" figure. (He even plans to have his own "tabernacle" built ...) But this is onscreen rather than offscreen Hollywood, so the fraud must be exposed and the fraudster brought low. Really, really, really low. It's not Tod Browning's Freaks, but there are echoes, there.
Scarlet Street (1945): Early on during the festival, "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller gave this counterintuitive definition of film noir--it's all about empathy. More specifically, this style of filmmaking is about ordinary people driven to do forbidden things for reasons that are all too easy for the audience to understand and relate to.
Whatever you think of that definition, Scarlet Street provides an excellent example of what Muller was talking about: Chris Cross (... let's just call him Edward G. Robinson ...) is a little man whose day-to-day life revolves around a meaningless bank job and an unhappy marriage. The one source of meaning in that life is his painting--which he doesn't even dare to imagine would interest anyone else.
Cross is thus ripe for manipulation when he meets prostitute Kitty March (Joan Bennett), whose demands for money lead him to embezzle from the bank. And when March's boyfriend/pimp, Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea) steals and tries to sell one of Cross' unsigned paintings, Prince discovers that the little man's artwork is potentially much more valuable than the cash March has been wheedling out of him. March and Prince exploit Cross ruthlessly, brazenly, encouraging him to believe that March loves him and passing his artwork off as hers, until they finally transcend their victims' needy gullibility.
As morally bankrupt as Bennett and Duryea's characters are, though, as much as Robinson's sad-sack calls for our pity, the film accomplishes a remarkable shift during its final hour, encouraging empathy (if not sympathy) for the ostensible heavies and transforming their victim into something else altogether.
This was, hands-down, the most impressive film of the festival.
Next (or soon, at any rate): Inevitably, something about Robert Altman and Raymond Chandler.
Pushover (1954) reprises many of the themes of Double Indemnity a decade earlier, but with certain noteworthy changes of direction and sympathy. In the earlier (and better-known) film, young and ambitious insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) connives with the equally avaricious Phyllis Deitrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) to kill the latter's husband to collect on his life insurance policy. But whereas Double Indemnity's Neff is a young man on the make, Pushover's bent cop Paul Sheridan (also played by MacMurray) acts more from midlife desperation than youthful heedlessness. And while Stanwyck's Dietrichson is every bit the femme fatale, Kim Novak's gun moll Lona McLane is more manipulated than manipulator. Ultimately, Pushover is about Sheridan's equation of love with money, and his fear that life is passing him by.
Nightmare Alley" (1947): Greed, ambition, infidelity, and fraud propel Nightmare Alley, too, which follows the rapid rise and fall of con man Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power). Carlisle's leverages a combination of clever fakery and charm to rise from carnival "mentalist" to nightclub performer and finally to the verge of L. Ron Hubbard-like success as a "spiritual" figure. (He even plans to have his own "tabernacle" built ...) But this is onscreen rather than offscreen Hollywood, so the fraud must be exposed and the fraudster brought low. Really, really, really low. It's not Tod Browning's Freaks, but there are echoes, there.
Scarlet Street (1945): Early on during the festival, "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller gave this counterintuitive definition of film noir--it's all about empathy. More specifically, this style of filmmaking is about ordinary people driven to do forbidden things for reasons that are all too easy for the audience to understand and relate to.
Whatever you think of that definition, Scarlet Street provides an excellent example of what Muller was talking about: Chris Cross (... let's just call him Edward G. Robinson ...) is a little man whose day-to-day life revolves around a meaningless bank job and an unhappy marriage. The one source of meaning in that life is his painting--which he doesn't even dare to imagine would interest anyone else.
Cross is thus ripe for manipulation when he meets prostitute Kitty March (Joan Bennett), whose demands for money lead him to embezzle from the bank. And when March's boyfriend/pimp, Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea) steals and tries to sell one of Cross' unsigned paintings, Prince discovers that the little man's artwork is potentially much more valuable than the cash March has been wheedling out of him. March and Prince exploit Cross ruthlessly, brazenly, encouraging him to believe that March loves him and passing his artwork off as hers, until they finally transcend their victims' needy gullibility.
As morally bankrupt as Bennett and Duryea's characters are, though, as much as Robinson's sad-sack calls for our pity, the film accomplishes a remarkable shift during its final hour, encouraging empathy (if not sympathy) for the ostensible heavies and transforming their victim into something else altogether.
This was, hands-down, the most impressive film of the festival.
Next (or soon, at any rate): Inevitably, something about Robert Altman and Raymond Chandler.
