Crime Wave

CRIME WAVE          A-                   

USA  (73 mi)  1954  d:  André de Toth

You know, it isn’t what a man wants to do, Lacey, but what he has to do.  Now take me — I love to smoke cigarettes, but the doctors say I can’t have them.  So what do I do?  I chew toothpicks, tons of them.

—Detective Lieutenant Sims (Sterling Hayden)  Note – de Toth refused to allow Hayden to smoke on the set, hoping to contribute to an extra level of grumpiness and hostility from Hayden’s performance

A film that wastes no time getting into the heart of the action, becoming a fast-paced, hard-edged crime caper, an obscure, underrated low-budget noir thriller that unfolds in something approaching real time, a formulaic story driven by detail, shot with visual flair and a heavy dose of authenticity, highlighted by tough-as-nails Sterling Hayden as Detective Lieutenant Sims, an intimidating presence, always shot from a low angle by cameraman Bert Glennon, making sure he towers over everyone else, a cop on the case who wants to use ex-felons as stool pigeons, a model for CHINATOWN (1974) and L.A. Confidential (1997) in the stark realism and use of actual shooting locations, featuring an all-too-jaded Los Angeles landscape.  Directed by Hungarian émigré André de Toth, who lost his sight in one eye from a childhood accident, wearing a black eyepatch, which nearly cost him his life, according to his own personal memoirs entitled Fragments: Portraits from the Inside, as he was kidnapped while scouting for locations in Egypt shortly after the the Yom Kippur War of 1973, pistol-whipped and beaten to a pulp during a fierce interrogation session, mistaken for Moyshe Dayan, Israeli General and Defense Minister, released only after an examination of his genitalia revealed he wasn’t even Jewish.  After obtaining a law degree in Budapest, he wrote plays and worked in the theater before making the jump to movies, making seven Hungarian films before fleeing the country when he was forced to direct Nazi propaganda movies, eventually making his way to Hollywood where he directed the searingly intense war drama NONE SHALL ESCAPE (1944) before pivoting to making a series of grim, psychological westerns.  Marrying screen siren Veronica Lake, he retained a strong Hungarian accent, cut from the same mold as other hard-living men like John Ford or John Huston, where he was known in Hollywood as a cowboy, painter, and sculptor, developing a reputation as a thrill-seeker who piloted his own airplanes, drove race cars, and loved playing polo, marrying seven times with 19 children.  When offered the film, the studios wanted Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner to star, anticipating a 35 day shoot.  The director refused to use big named stars, preferring more autonomy on the set and the ability to select his own cast.  Jack Warner threw a fit, cutting the budget while reducing the film shoot to just 15 days, and then didn’t release the film until 2 years after it was completed, perhaps out of spite.  But this film, an intense psychological study of crime and punishment, caught the attention of not only Stanley Kubrick, using many of the same themes and actors in THE KILLING (1956), including its documentary visual style as well as the impossible notion of pulling off the “perfect crime,” but it was also one of the favorites of Jean-Pierre Melville, listed at #4 on a list compiled by crime writer James Ellroy, James Ellroy Selects His Ten Favourite Crime Films – July '98. 

Adapted from the short story Criminal Mark by John and Ward Hawkins, originally appearing in The Saturday Evening Post, the film opens from the back seat of a car, much like the heralded scene in Gun Crazy (1950), now standard Hollywood procedure as the car pulls into a gas station, where we hear the radio sounds of Doris Day singing George and Ira Gershwin’s Doris Day - S'Wonderful - YouTube (1:36), and right off the bat the lighthearted mood disappears when something goes terribly wrong during a heist, making off with only chump change, but shooting a cop, while one of the robbers takes a bullet to his gut, breaking up afterwards, with the injured man in a car while the other two exit on foot.  What sets this apart is the use of radio broadcasts, as immediately details go out over the police airwaves, identifying the location of the incident, a description of the robbers, and the make of the car, which repeats incessantly, adding the location of a stolen vehicle, as we see the woman speaking into the microphone relaying the messages, leading to the transmission inside the police station where Sims has been listening, setting up a perimeter around the stolen vehicle, including the names and addresses of former convicts.  With police roadblocks set up to block all avenues of escape, criminals routinely seek help and assistance from former convicts now on the outside, like their own version of the Underground Railroad, offering them protection and safety, though sometimes at the point of a gun, with suggestions that you can never outrun the mistakes of your past.  Rounding up the usual suspects and informers (actually borrowing footage from Gun Crazy), where routine police work is viewed as bullying reluctant witnesses, who appear as ordinary citizens, with the camera following Sims as he moves down a line of desks, one by one, each a revelation of harrowing backstories that feel as if they’ve been interrupted midstream, quickly realizing this is the work of a trio of convicts who recently escaped from San Quintin prison, doing a series of smalltime holdups on their way down the highway to Los Angeles.  Simultaneously, Morgan (Nedrick Young, blacklisted writer and actor), the wounded man, shows up at the doorstep of Steve Lacey (professional dancer Gene Nelson), a former convict trying to go straight, along with his assertive wife Ellen (model turned actress Phyllis Kirk), joined shortly afterwards by Otto Hessler (Jay Novello), another former convict, an alcoholic veterinarian who lost his medical license, summoned to patch up Morgan, but he dies before any work can be done to save him, with Hessler rifling through his pockets taking the money.  Sims hauls in Lacey, suspecting his involvement right from the outset, but he doesn’t squawk, so he learns little, letting him cool his heels in jail for 3 days before trying to enlist him to work a sting operation in San Diego, the most recent sighting of the convicts, but he refuses to play along, eventually releasing him. 

The other two convicts are identified as the smooth talking ‘Doc’ Penny (Ted de Corsia) and his muscle, Ben Hastings (Charles Buchinsky, aka Charles Bronson), who circled back to LA, thinking the cops would never suspect to look for them there, hiding out in Lacey’s apartment, surprising him upon his return home, enlisting him in their foolproof getaway after pulling off a bank heist Penny has been planning for seven years, right down to the last detail, arrogantly thinking he can outsmart the cops, embracing the idea of the “perfect crime.”  Using Lacey’s pilot skills, their getaway includes flying safely into Mexico, as Lacey works nearby at a small airport as an engineer, knowing the ins and outs of the operation, including the security rounds, pulling him into their heist, threatening to harm his wife if he doesn’t play along.  Having no options, basically kidnapped at gunpoint, he becomes the getaway driver, quickly moving to new quarters where a lecherous ex-con Johnny Haslett (Timothy Carey) will keep a close watch over the wife while the heist takes place, refusing to release her unless the police radio confirms a successful getaway.  Another backseat camera leads viewers to the bank, circling around the block after dropping off Penny and Hastings, who enter as typical customers, while a third man Zenner (James Hayward) is disguised as a meter reader, entering through the back, cutting off the bank’s electricity at a designated time, when all mayhem breaks loose, with Lacey hearing the gunshots.  Using a series of rapid edits, the scene erupts into utter chaos with everyone caught offguard.  As Sims approaches Lacey sitting in his car, he speeds off, with Sims following in hot pursuit, making a mad dash back to his wife, who is being manhandled by Haslett when he arrives, quickly pouncing on him.  By the time Sims gets there, the two have tumbled down an outdoor staircase with police standing by (among the most incredible stairway falls in film history).  While an All Points Bulletin has been announced over the airwaves with Lacey “Wanted for Murder,” it appears that his worst fears have been realized, that Sims has him dead to rights, following his lead right from the beginning, believing “once a crook, always a crook.”  Despite Lacey’s insistence that he had no choice, Sims cuts him off, revealing the bank clerks were all planted cops, laying in wait for the outlaws, offering a perfect counter defense, which is like rewinding the crime scene in our heads, putting a different spin on each face.  At 73-minutes, set in an ever expanding nocturnal cityscape, the meticulous precision of the shot selection reveals an economy of no wasted material, finishing under budget and under schedule, shot in just 13 days, tense and suspenseful throughout, and still full of surprises, where Sterling Hayden, in particular, is terrific as the brash toothpick-chewing cop, used by James Ellroy as the model for hard-boiled cop Bud White in L.A. Confidential (1997).    

The Blue Dahlia

THE BLUE DAHLIA               B                     

USA  (96 mi)  1946  d:  George Marshall

Bourbon straight with a bourbon chaser.       —Buzz Wanchek (William Bendix)

You've got the wrong lipstick on, Mister.       —Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd)

It’s funny, but practically all the people I know were strangers when I met them.     

—Joyce Harwood (Veronica Lake)

Like all the modern day era directors named Marshall, George Marshall was primarily a comic director before making this film, where he serves in a functional role, little more than moving the right pieces around, but hardly visionary or exemplary, where screenwriter Raymond Chandler may have actually directed several of the scenes.  This film is noted as being the only original Raymond Chandler script in Hollywood, though several of his books have been adapted, where the script was unfinished when filming began and production was about to be shut down as he developed writer’s block.  Already a hurried production, as actor Alan Ladd was being recalled for military service, so the terms Chandler demanded to finish the script on time was to start drinking again, as he felt he wrote better under the influence, also an in-home round the clock nurse to help moderate his alcohol intake, so as an alcoholic he wouldn’t drink himself into a stupor, and a car which drove his finished pages to the studio every day.  John Houseman, from the Orson Welles Mercury Theater group, was the producer on the Paramount film and he felt inclined to agree to these outlandish terms, offering in addition a $5000 incentive to finish on time, which he did, as otherwise everyone would simply be fired.  This is also the third of four films where Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake would work together.  While the two of them were never close, the diminutive Ladd at 5' 5” enjoyed working with her as she was just under 5 feet tall, and this is one of their better efforts.  The snappy and crisp Chandler dialogue, which was the film’s only Academy Award nomination, works to their benefit, as they have some terrific lines together, always keeping one another at arm’s length, but just barely.  After Lake died, it was revealed by her husband, director André de Toth, that she was a heroin addict and an alcoholic during her starring roles at Paramount, earning $4500 a week, which is why they never renewed her contract, eventually working as a barmaid near the end of her life, drifting from one cheap hotel to the next, where she had frequent arrests for public drunkenness. 

Like many of the war pictures in its day, the film opens with out of uniform soldiers returning home to Los Angeles on a bus, where they experienced a close camaraderie of serving together, but become anonymous figures upon returning home.  Alan Ladd as Johnny Morrison definitely fits that bill, even though he has a wife to come home to, while the other two, William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont, are envious.  But when Ladd arrives, his house has been taken over by a drunken crowd of perpetual party revelers, led by his wife, Doris Dowling, who is on the arm of a crooked nightclub owner Eddie Harwood, Howard Da Silva, whose career was blacklisted for the decade of the 1950's.  Da Silva, Dowling, and Frank Faylen (a small-time hood) all just finished working together on Billy Wilder’s THE LOST WEEKEND (1945).  Dowling is from the theatrical school of bold dramatic expressions, wearing lavish and spectacular gowns that might feel more appropriate in a highly decorative Josef von Sternberg film.  Her stand-offish behavior towards Johnny, not to mention being caught in a kiss with Harwood, sends Johnny back out the door, where in typical noirish fashion it has become an evening downpour of rain.  With all the hotels booked, he’s aimlessly roaming the streets, suitcase in hand, until a car pulls up and offers him a shelter from the storm, driven by Veronica Lake.  While exploring the entire Los Angeles vicinity together, from Hollywood, Santa Monica, to Malibu, they immediately hit it off, but with vague sarcasm and clever comebacks.  They are easily the glue that holds this picture together, but keep getting separated after a news report announces the murder of his wife, where Johnny is the lead suspect, spending the rest of the film on the run while the police are searching for him, leaving him little choice except to find the killer himself. 

While some of this does in fact resemble Howard Hawks’ THE BIG SLEEP (1946), another Chandler novel with Bogart and Bacall which may have borrowed liberally from this film, especially the scenes where the hero gets double crossed, beaten up and captured in an out of the way location, the claims that Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO (1961) and the Coen Brother’s MILLER’S CROSSING (1990) also drew wholesale from this film are less obvious, as Ladd is hardly in a position trying to keep two warring sides at bay and instead is a returning war hero who has to reestablish his heroicism back here on American soil.  While not officially a detective, Ladd is placed in the position of being a detective in having to solve the crime before the police make an arrest.  In this respect, the film has more in common with THE THIN MAN (1934), where the non-explicit, bordering on dysfunctional relationship between Ladd and Lake is a stark contrast to the cozy marital bliss of William Powell and Myrna Loy, who represent the security, peace and prosperity of the pre-War years.  After the war, a man’s got to settle his own affairs with little or no help, where Bendix returns with a serious war injury, with a metal plate placed in his head, where he is constantly growing mentally agitated at the least provocation, especially the sound of American jazz music, which causes headaches and mysterious blackouts, continually demanding that people “Turn off that monkey music!”  Bendix was Chandler’s inadvertent killer in the initial script, where in noir films a character suffering from temporary amnesia is as familiar as the common cold, and everything leads up to his odd yet plausible police confession, which was unacceptable by the U.S. Navy, refusing to allow the depiction of a wounded war veteran as the damaged killer in a high profile Hollywood production coming so close to the end of the war.  The Navy threatened to refuse to cooperate in any future Paramount production, causing a hastily altered Raymond Chandler rewrite, which is really just a stab in the dark and the film’s weakest link.  Like the much publicized OJ Simpson murder case which captivated all of Los Angeles for months, there were really no other suspects.

Day of the Outlaw

DAY OF THE OUTLAW                     B+

USA  (92 mi)  1959  d:  André de Toth

You won't find much mercy anywhere in Wyoming.          
—Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan)

A spared down, low budget, mercilessly bleak, Black and White American “B” western from the late 50’s, adapted from a Lee E. Wells novel, the last western made by this director known for his grim psychological dramas, this one defined by the tough as nails intractability of the lead characters, none of whom can stand up to the barren ruggedness of the natural outdoor landscape, which kicks human butt in this movie.  Shot on location in the Oregon Cascades during the winter, featuring the visibly identifiable Three Sisters Mountains as well as Mt. Bachelor, a lone peak that stands alone.  When one thinks of winter movies set in the snow, THE THING (1951) and again in (1982), DR. ZHIVAGO (1965), MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971), QUINTET (1979), THE SHINING (1980), FARGO (1996), THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997), and WINTER SLEEPERS (1997) come to mind, most all shot in color, but this movie is set at the end of the road, where “the trail ends in this town. There's no place to go but back.”  Of course, in this film, back is not an option.  One must defy death. 

Taking place in a small isolated settlement of only twenty people in Wyoming, the ire of cattle rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan) is raised when farmers begin to place barbed wire fences around their property, which violates the original credo of the free and expansive American West.  This is no small disagreement, as men’s livelihoods are at stake, where everything depends on protecting what’s theirs, and if neither side backs down, something’s got to give.  Femme fatale Tina Louise as Helen Crane is married to one of those farmers, but as women are scarce in this neck of the woods, she’d been carrying on an affair with Starrett before she married her husband.  Yet when a shootout looms, she’s willing to throw herself at Starrett if it means he’ll spare her husband’s life.  Not so easy.  This is the West where men are used to having their way and not letting anyone interfere, especially a “pig-belly farmer.”  Just as a bottle is about to drop off a bar spelling the sign for the bullets to fly, they are quickly interrupted by a rag tag group of cutthroat outlaws who grab the men’s guns and immediately take over the town in a psychologically unsettling siege, completely shifting the balance of power. 

Led by Burl Ives as deserting Army Captain Jack Bruhn, carrying sacks of stolen gold, they are just ahead of the tracking cavalry but need to ride out the night in a safe and warm place, where Bruhn needs a bullet extracted from his chest, but despite his men’s preference for women and whisky, Bruhn tells the local folk to hide their liquor and protect their women, as both are hands off to his men, claiming he needs them all sober when they leave at dawn.  With his men itching to get what they want, knowing there’s a long ride ahead, they continually press the boundaries and tempt fate.  Bruhn always seems to magically appear just as his men are about to stray, bullying them into backing off.  But they do convince him that there’d be no harm if he’d allow a social dance with the town’s four women.  “We only want to borrow them - - we'll give them back.”  Diametrically opposite to the grace and sweep of most dance sequences, think of the opulence of Max Ophuls or the legendary grandeur of Visconti’s THE LEOPARD (1963), this one is painfully difficult to watch, as the endless barroom piano music never ceases, growing more and more physically aggressive as the men try to catch a kiss as the women continually back away in disgust.  This is as raw and primitive as it gets, but in some strange and delirious way an antecedent to Béla Tarr’s hypnotic but mind numbingly repetitious dance in SÁTÁNTANGO (1994).

When morning comes, Bruhn is barely alive, but he’s too stubborn to recognize it, commandeering Starrett to lead them safely through the mountains, though the snow has made them completely impassable at this time of year, a fact Bruhn comes to realize but withholds from his men, but that doesn’t stop them from what feels like a suicide march, telling Starrett:  “I guess every fool has his reason.”  If Bruhn’s deteriorating condition is not enough, the elements have turned so hostile, where frozen breath can be seen coming from both the men and their horses, with snow up to their bellies, completely covering the landscape, the horses can barely find a way to take one step after another, yet they’re forced to push on.  Rarely are animals seen exerting themselves in this level of difficulty where there are no CGI special effects, they are simply staggering to keep their feet in the brutally harsh conditions.  Beautifully shot by Russell Harlan, knowing what’s inevitable only adds to the pounding psychological dread of this death march, as the men soon start to turn on one another in an insatiable display of greed and avarice, where the music by Alexander Courage is heavy handed and amped up to the max.  Imprisoned by the snow around them, it’s apparent there is no escape, as first horses and then men do start to die in the blistering winter cold where the wind is too ferocious to even light a fire.  It’s telling that in this exceedingly concise rendering, there are no shots of the cavalry, and by the end, no one is pointing a gun at these men’s heads, yet they feel a compulsive desire to follow this mythical trail to that elusive freedom that never arrives, to make that last great escape.  Instead they ride into their own trap.  The story isn’t entirely bleak, as de Toth even adds an element of dark humor to show the demise of one of the last holdouts.  By the end, however, none of the original issues that were worth dying for at the time hardly seem to matter any more.