Seven Keys to Baldpate

SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE                     C-                   

USA  (80 mi)  1935  d:  William Hamilton and Edward Killy

I’m not a reasonable person. I’m a woman and I’m tired and I’m nervous, and I want to cry.  —Mary Norton (Margaret Callahan)  

A fairly routine whodunit story about a writer seeking the quiet refuge of a hotel that is closed for the winter, urged on by a bet with the hotel owner that he can’t write a novel in 24 hours, that is interesting only because this is the origin of the real Baldpate Inn in Estes Park, Colorado (www.baldpateinn.com), which opened in 1917, an old-fashioned inn at the foot of the Rocky Mountains that is now home of the world’s largest key collection, the website claims over 20,000, where customers are urged to donate some of their own keys to add to the collection, which now takes up an entire room.  The mystery novel The Seven Keys to Baldpate was among the most popular novels of its day, written by Earl Derr Biggers in 1913 long before he invented his most famous character, Chinese detective Charlie Chan, which led subsequently to seven movies, and interestingly enough seven years before women were given the right to vote.  Almost the entire film takes place inside a 2-story hotel, with a centrally located staircase off the main lobby, but also a secret staircase as well, along with hidden rooms.  While supposedly given the “only key” to the hotel, mystery writer Billy Magee (Gene Raymond) discovers a host of mystery guests that secretly arrive with their own keys, each one adding to the intrigue and allure of an ongoing mystery, as all are interested in the $200,000 hidden in the hotel safe. 

One by one, Magee politely introduces himself to each of the new arrivals, supposedly seven in all, that range from gangsters, girl friends, ghostly groundskeepers, to women in distress, all seeking something and all suspicious of everyone else’s motives.  While there is never even a hint that this might all be a staged diversion by the publishers to guarantee they’ll win the bet, Magee appears to be the only one capable of maintaining any coherency about what’s going on, as otherwise clues are flying fast and furious.  Adapted from the George M. Cohan play, the dialogue is rapid and oftentimes comic, used mostly to advance the plot which includes shootings and people jumping out windows, while the characters are overly stereotyped, especially the dumb gangsters, and the acting is abhorrent, with Raymond, who seems to speak with a foreign accent, always tilting his head like a puppy dog whenever something important registers.  No one in the entire cast stands out except a brief early appearance by Walter Brennan as a desk clerk at the train station.  There’s absolutely no directional flair exhibited whatsoever in this fairly standard and mediocre rendition of a house detective mystery, as there’s no building of any suspense and no expression of any fear or terror.  It’s all too nonchalant, though one does appreciate the director’s love of characters peeking through ice frosted windows.  By the time the police actually arrive on the scene, more bumbling even than the gangsters, they have a hard time finding the supposed missing corpse, but everything wraps up quickly and cleanly in about two minutes time, showing little more complexity than if this was a Silent era film.    

Sleep Furiously

SLEEP FURIOUSLY                B                   

Great Britain  (94 mi)  2008  d:  Gideon Koppel

In Wales there are jewels
To gather, but with the eye
Only. A hill lights up
Suddenly; a field trembles
With colour and goes out
In its turn; in one day
You can witness the extent
Of the spectrum and grow rich
With looking. Have a care;
The wealth is for the few
And chosen. Those who crowd
A small window dirty it
With their breathing, though sublime
And inexhaustible the view.

—The Small Window, by R.S. Thomas, from Selected Poems, 1946-1968, published in 1973

It is only when I sense the end of things that I find the courage to speak, the courage, but not the words.    —anonymous

It’s hard to know why a film like this, which is obviously a well-made and seriously thought out documentary, takes 3 years or more to cross the Atlantic, as a British DVD has been available for over a year, yet it is just now finding an American theatrical audience.  While much of the intimate details may escape the initial viewer, as no one is introduced and nothing is ever explained, instead there’s simply a natural flow of events that are caught on camera, all centering around a small farming community in Wales called Trefeurig.  Here we witness the birth of several livestock animals, a woman walking her dog along the winding roads, sheep shearing and a sheep auction, or herder dogs bringing back home the sheep in the early evening, the barking of the dogs heard first before small forms can be seen coming over a faraway hill.  But lest anyone think this is a pastoral reverie, we also have kitchen scenes baking a cake, while there are also scenes requiring subtitles due to the Welsh language they’re speaking, of elderly people discussing their concerns now that the local school has closed, or views of a school bus converted to a traveling library on wheels that makes monthly visits to seniors, where the librarian picks out books he thinks they’d like, or takes notes about their collective interests.  What you don’t see here are computers or cell phones, no one is ever watching television, though there is one house where we see a TV, but it’s not turned on.  No one even listens to the radio.  There is simply no evidence of modernity anywhere to be seen, where what we see resembles the way life was lived going back half a century or more. 

The closest the film comes to a storyline is the recurring on-the-road motif of the library on wheels, as the elderly people he visits continually chatter away in small talk, absorbed in the minutia of their own lives, though it’s hard to say this holds much interest across the ocean, and this film is extremely chatty, where much of it isn’t even subtitled, but is just the sound of voices droning on.  But the film is also beautifully meditative, using a static camera, filling the screen with the green rolling hills, perhaps a solitary tree viewed through various seasons, or a carefully composed single line of sheep forming at the top of the screen, while slowly, another line forms on the bottom, where the viewer waits for them to intersect.  If you are a Kiarostami aficionado and recall the final shots of his Earthquake Trilogy which seemingly last forever, each one telling their own story, Koppel will likely disappoint, as he doesn’t hold his shots long enough.  The outstanding music used in the film is from Aphex Twin, an Irish born musician with two Welsh parents, the creator of extremely atmospheric piano or electronic music, often sounding hypnotizing, but in perfect harmony with the images onscreen.  Again, despite the haunting beauty of the music, this director is prone to making jarring edits, ensuring there are no seamless transitions here.  It’s only afterwards, if we’re curious enough to find out, that we discover these are shots of the director’s mother, though she is never named, but she’s the one walking the dog, and one of the familiar settings is his own family farm, where his parents found refuge escaping the Holocaust half a century ago.  The title of the film, a provocative phrase suggesting words with opposite energy, comes from a nonsensical phrase that also has perfect grammar from Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures:  “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”  Trefeurig apparently is a place where one should not have pre-conceived notions about how people are supposed to live.  They just do.    

The film was initially shot by the director on Super 16 mm without using artificial light, so the idea of darkness creeping in is a prevailing theme in nearly every shot.  Often the natural colors appear washed out from the mist or cloud cover, or even in sunlit shots people may appear to be standing in the shade.  There is simply an exquisite seasonal change when the entire hillside is snow covered, offering a kind of visual poetry in silhouettes, where only the branches can be seen in barren trees.  Not everything filmed is beautiful, where we may examine old rusted out objects sitting in a pile waiting to be auctioned, or a filthy window with old curtains and plenty of dust gathering on the windowsill.  What becomes clear after awhile is that this way of life is seasonal as well, where only four parishioners are seen at one point in a near empty church service, but they are still singing the hymns, where this picture of old world values will live out its course, replaced by something new.  Perhaps the sequence of the film is unlike the rest, a night shot where unseen spectators are shooting off fireworks and holding sparklers and dayglo wands in their hands, where the colors blur in fast speed motion, giving this a dizzyingly experimental feel, perhaps an expression of the unseen next generation.  Everything this film cherishes may be gone by the next generation, the quiet kindness between neighbors, the helpfulness offered in one another's personal struggles, the utter isolation from the rest of the world, where reading books may be the only social contact many of them have for weeks on end.  But there’s also the livestock continually replenishing itself at a much faster rate than humans, where except for a fast speed shot of a baby sleeping at night, few, if any, children are seen except in photos.  Instead it’s a portrait of the elderly living in a world that hasn’t changed at all during their lifetimes, but will likely be far different once they’re gone.  Not only are the people dying, but their community is dying as well.  In the end, families will be forced to sell their farms.  The film is an intensely personal time capsule of the director’s family, expressing a way of life where the ramifications beautifully unfold through mesmerizing music and images.  If viewed only as a travelogue, an essay without words, this beguiling film would still appear haunting.  After the final credits end, which contains perhaps the most sublime music in the entire film, there is a final still shot of the image of a recurring tree, stunning, now, in glorious color.

Among the Living

(Hollywood10.jpg‎  photo taken November 1947). Front row (from left):  Herbert Biberman, attorneys Martin Popper and Robert W. Kenny, Albert Maltz, and Lester Cole. Middle row: Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, and Samuel Ornitz. Back row:  Ring Lardner Jr., Edward Dmytryk, and Adrian Scott

AMONG THE LIVING           B                     

USA  (67 mi)  1941  d:  Stuart Heisler

This is a rarely screened, oddball hybrid of a movie that is a mixture of film noir and horror, that seems to have seeds of political subversiveness as well, where what’s especially memorable is the portrayal of mob hysteria, no doubt the influence of screenwriter Lester Cole, a writer who unashamedly joined the American Communist Party in 1934, later blacklisted, writing both the story and the script.  Cole wrote more than 40 screenplays that turned into movies, but after he refused to testify in 1947 about his political affiliations before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, one of the Hollywood Ten, he was sentenced to a year (serving 10 months) in federal prison for contempt of Congress.  After the blacklisting, only 3 screenplays were made into movies, the most successful of which was BORN FREE (1966), written under the pseudonym Gerald L.C. Copley, an adaptation of Joy Adamson's 1960 non-fictional book about raising orphaned lion cubs in Kenya.  This movie also features a scintillating early performance by actress Susan Hayward, something of a vivacious young vixen, eventually known as the Queen of Melodrama in the 1950’s, winning an Academy Award as Best Actress playing a tough, wise-cracking prostitute charged with murder and condemned to the gas chamber in the tearjerker I WANT TO LIVE (1958).  Seeing her so early in her career is a special delight, as she’s a joy to watch, stealing nearly every scene she is in.     

Shot in a Southern gothic setting, the film opens with a memorable shot peeking through an iron gate at the small funeral service for the industrialist owner of the town’s mill, while kept outside the gates are hoardes of striking or unemployed workers who can be seen taunting the deceased.  As a storm approaches, we soon learn the secret identity of a twin brother long thought dead, Paul Raden, the deranged identical twin of the more respectable John Raden (Albert Dekker in both roles), who lost his mind as a child when his father, the recently deceased, threw him against a wall when he tried to stop his father from beating his mother, where the last sounds he heard before going insane was his mother screaming, sounds that he has never gotten out of his head, constantly holding his hands to his ears whenever trouble sets in.  In our initial view of him he’s wearing a straightjacket, living in a secret room locked up in the basement of the old family plantation quarters, where Ernest Whitman as Pompey, a black family servant, has been looking after him for 25 years, assisted by Dr. Saunders (Harry Carey), who fabricated a death certificate for a fake funeral service that kept everyone from asking questions.  Following the camera down the stairs into the bowels of this dilapidated home resembles how we discover FRANKENSTEIN (1931), one of the original monster movies that co-screenwriter Garrett Fort helped script.  In each case, the monster breaks free from their imprisonment before wreaking havoc on the town.

The interesting twist is how Paul arrives in a rooming house in town with a wad of cash and is treated as a “respectable gentleman.”  The landlady’s daughter is Hayward, who is herself imprisoned by her mother, never allowed to escape from the claustrophobic confines of the rooming house.  So she’s a free spirited woman just waiting for someone to sweep her out of this dead end town, where she, and all the rest of the local folk, see no prospects for the future now that the mill has closed.  Hayward’s flashy and flirtatious behavior is the best thing in the film, an exaggerated expression of sexuality in contrast to the rather sexless behavior of the twin brothers, and the completely dull and lifeless appearance of Frances Farmer as John’s wife.  Hayward takes the unsuspecting Paul on a shopping spree, allowing him to buy her a giant bottle of perfume and a slinky new dress before he wanders into a happenin’ dance club where he engages in weird, completely inappropriate conversation with one of the hostesses, discovering an electrifying, foot-stomping jump joint where the swing dancer’s jitterbug energy is so frenetically wild that the world starts spinning out of control, beautifully photographed by Theodor Sparkuhl in what could easily have been a dry run for the sensational teen dances in John Waters’ HAIRSPRAY (1988).

Paul unexpectedly turns into Jack the Ripper, the town’s serial killer, who can only silence the sound of women screaming by strangling them.  In typical noir fashion, the family’s shameful past has been uprooted, like opening Pandora’s Box, producing a secret so vile that it can only be viewed as a monster on the loose who can’t help himself.  The town is in an uproar, where their public frenzy is unleashed with the radio announcement of a $5000 reward for finding the killer, where the hysteria of a mob scene is so overwhelmingly over the top, it’s like the unleashing of panic in every direction, as if the world was invaded by aliens.  The lynch mob mentality is quite a spectacle, shown with a great deal of flair, where they want to string the guy up right then and there, dragging a judge out of his home to perform the public trial.  But the man they have caught is John, mistaken for his evil twin Paul, instantly condemned by the mob, despite John’s desperate pleas which fall on deaf ears.  Hayward herself leads the public condemnation of the man, where all are turned against him.  Fritz Lang’s M (1931) reveals a similar public trial, where the outlaws judge the criminal actions of a sexual pervert who preys on little girls, while FURY (1936) creates the same lynch mob hysteria, not to mention the psychological dread that accumulates throughout Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956).  At just over an hour, the film is brief but surprisingly complicated and far reaching for 1941, touching on the Nazi madness that was marching unchallenged throughout Europe while America sat on its hands in a position of neutrality until Pearl Harbor happened a year later.  This is a film seething with social discontent, public outrage, hysteria, as well as madness, all equally intense, bizarre, delightful, and terrifying at the same time, something rare and quite unique, easily one of the darkest depictions of American society on record.   

The Glass Key (1935)

THE GLASS KEY             C+            

USA  (80 mi)  1935  d:  Frank Tuttle

Not to be confused with the later version of this film, which was remade in 1942 with Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd (as the wrong film was shipped to the theater), this is basically the same story, adapted from a Dashiell Hammett novel, considered one of his best, but this rarer, earlier version omits the love interest, which was expanded to make room for a more noirish version, complete with Lake as a femme fatale.  George Raft grew up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York and hung out with professional gangsters, such as Owney Madden and Arnold Rothstein, learning to imitate their mannerisms before breaking into films, initially as a dancer during the Vaudeville era before landing a part in the gangster classic SCARFACE (1932), playing a coin-flipping gunman.  No one wore hats better, or wore better hats, than George Raft.  He was given the lead in this picture, though he plays Ed Beaumont, a man of dubious character who likes to spend his evenings drinking rye whiskey and winning money at rigged roulette wheels, whose relationship to political boss Paul Madvig (Edward Arnold) is never made clear, though he appears to be his protection, the muscle, the right hand man who is always at the boss’s side, showing little distinction between politics and the portrayal of mob bosses.  Raft was actually the first consideration as Sam Spade in THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), but he turned it down, opening the doors to a man named Bogart.  Set during or just after the Prohibition Era, when saloons appear to be nothing more than all-male speakeasy’s, Madvig tries to clean up the city and shuts down some illicit gambling joints, where the owner, Shad O’Rory (Robert Gleckler), along with his muscle, Jeff (Guinn “Big Boy” Williams), don’t take kindly to the action and swear to get even.  This sets the wheels in motion for a blood feud.

Adding to the mystery is Madvig’s support of Senator John T. Henry (Charles Richman), whose daughter Janet (Claire Dodd) he’d like to marry (the role expanded for Veronica Lake), and whose son, Taylor Henry (Ray Milland), is something of a family embarrassment, as he owes plenty of money to loan sharks like O’Rory, putting his father in a precarious predicament.  When Madvig’s daughter Opal (Rosalind Keith) expresses a romantic interest in Taylor, who happens to be standing in the way of Madvig’s desires for Janet, Madvig in a rage decides to set matters straight.  When Taylor Henry ends up dead, Madvig is immediately implicated, as he was the last one seen with Taylor in an angry public dispute on the street.  With the election coming up, the newspapers have a field day at Madvig’s expense, where much of the story is advanced through developing headlines, with O’Rory continuing to feed the paper anonymous tips.  Only when it appears the tide has turned against Madvig, who has been publicly convicted by the press, does Beaumont spring into action masterminding a crafty, behind-the-scenes operation to uncover what evidence O’Rory actually has, which isn’t much except a witness to the arguing.  But that’s plenty with just a few days before the election.  O’Rory, however, is not satisfied, and when he can’t pay off Beaumont to rat on his friend, he sicks his dog and his muscle on him, repeatedly beating him to a pulp, trying to manufacture a witness to the murder.  When he somehow manages to slip away and is treated in the hospital, Ann Sheridan shows some sass with some terrific lines as his nurse.  After rounding up all the available suspects and witnesses having any knowledge in the murder, it all comes together in an Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot style interrogation with Beaumont inventively taking the lead. 

This particular version has little inventiveness or star power, but Raft is convincing as a guy who would feel right at home in Scorsese’s GOODFELLAS (1990), while major elements of this film can be detected in the Coen Brothers highly stylized gangster flick MILLERS CROSSING (1990), also set in the Prohibition era, where one guy lays it all on the line, switching loyalties to the other side, attempting to bring peace to a long standing blood feud between warring gangs, also sounding like the blueprint to Kurosawa's YOJIMBO (1961).

Angel Face

ANGEL FACE                   C+                   

USA  (91 mi)  1952  d:  Otto Preminger

Otto Preminger is a heralded director, known as much for his bald, Austro-Hungarian profile, where he specialized in playing brutal Nazi SS officers in various WWII movies, like Billy Wilder's STALAG 17 (1953), as for his dictatorial reputation of being rude and bullying on the set, where he was also renowned for his efficiency and work ethic.  He is one of the last of the studio directors, where in this feature he was on loan from 20th Century Fox to do one picture for Howard Hughes and RKO Pictures.  British actress Jean Simmons was unhappy with the direction of her career, which never took off in America, and was looking for a way to get out of her contract with Hughes, still fuming from his earlier romantic gestures in persuading her to sign a long term contract even while she was married to Stewart Granger.  Taking desperate measures to the extreme, in one argument she grabbed a pair of scissors and cut her hair short, knowing his predilection for women onscreen with long, flowing hair.  With only 18 days left in her RKO contract, Hughes convinced Preminger, who initially hated the script, that he could get one more picture out of her and forced Simmons to wear a wig while giving Preminger complete control of the script, allegedly telling him: “I'm going to get even with that little bitch and you're going to help me.”  The picture turned out to be ANGEL FACE, which was never a critical or box office success, seen as a kind of noir B-movie, but ironically contains one of Jean Simmons’s better performances, perhaps channeling her inner anger and fragile instability.  Paired with Robert Mitchum, the two make unlikely lovers, especially considering he’s a blue collar ambulance driver with a penchant for bowling and race cars while she’s a rich, pampered, and spoiled heiress, not exactly traveling in the same social circles.          

They meet when an ambulance is called to the scene of a palatial estate in Beverly Hills where Mrs. Tremayne (Barbara O’Neil) nearly dies under mysterious circumstances from gas asphyxiation, eventually determined to be an accident, where Frank (Mitchum) is intrigued by the lovely step-daughter Diane (Simmons) sitting alone playing the piano, usually a cue in noir films for interior psychological distress.  When she follows him secretly afterwards in her convertible race car, the wheels are set in motion where she can accidentally re-introduce herself and make the most of coincidence.  The odd woman out is Frank’s girlfriend Mary (Mona Freeman), who is stood up so Frank could paint the town with Diane.  What’s worse, he’s caught lying about it the next day when in one of the more unusual scenes of the film, Diane is seen brazenly having lunch with Mary, basically spreading the dirt about her boyfriend, but then masking her real intentions by offering her a sizeable sum of money to help realize Frank’s dream to own a garage that specializes in fixing racing cars.  Mitchum is excellent as the casual swine who’s caught lying but pretends it’s nothing, where the audience knows he’s a repeat offender and it won’t be the last time.  When Diane suggests Frank come live in the mansion and become the family chauffeur, taking care of their fleet of cars, most would think twice, but Mitchum drops everything like a chump and jumps at the chance, which is simply not in character with the Robert Mitchum the audience is familiar with, a guy who flies solo whenever he gets the chance.  When Diane reveals the utter contempt she feels for her step-mother, Frank has sense enough to tell her:  “You hate that woman and someday you're gonna hate her enough to kill her.” 

This is known as foreshadowing.  And therein lies one of the major problems in this film, as the over-explanative dialogue continually reveals too much, always making sure the audience knows exactly what’s going to happen before it happens, which actually takes some of the pleasure away from this film.  Some directors simply try to do too much, as if the audience is incapable of figuring anything out themselves.  Unfortunately in this film, where the less you know ahead of time the better, none of the so-called surprises come as a surprise, as all the evil deeds are telegraphed ahead of time.  Frank sees through Diane instantly, but she continues to use her feminine charms to lure him off his game, where eventually the two get mixed up in a bit of foul play, where the story turns on a dime into a lengthy courtroom sequence that slows the film down and adds little to the drama.  See ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959) for Preminger’s take on an excellent courtroom drama.  But if truth be told, this film works best when she is charming the pants off of him and he continually resists, but then becomes intoxicated with her hare-brained schemes, as if the thought of their dreams together can somehow weaken ordinary human beings into committing unethical acts.  When Diane is continually pulling Frank into the dark mysteries of her delusional soul, everyone in the audience has enough sense to know better, everyone except Frank.  So while they are an improbable couple, they have a way of flirting with disaster, tempting fate, continually going against better judgment, but unlike Hitchcock, for instance, there’s not a hint of suspense, in fact most of this is told in a very matter of fact manner.  This couple could be deliciously malicious, but instead they’re portrayed as bland and empty, both devious opportunists who are in over their heads, each trying to use the other, a sleight of hand on the Beauty and the Beast story, where no one is willing to see the beast in such a beauty, as everyone continually looks away from the truth that’s staring them straight in the face.  

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.

Side Street

SIDE STREET             B                     

USA  (83 mi)  1950  d:  Anthony Mann

This is New York, where two persons living twenty feet apart may never meet.  

Fear, confusion, and panic are setting in.  Reason and judgment are going.             

— Police Captain Walter Anderson (Paul Kelly)   

Mann is known for his tense, psychological westerns, many starring Jimmy Stewart in roles that went against type, playing men whose obsessions nearly got the better of him, becoming slightly unhinged for the first time in his career, also for his penchant of shooting on location in order to enhance the element of realism of his stories.  Mann’s earlier works are known for their tough, highly stylized noir component, also for his tightly compacted brevity, as one could easily use excerpts of his earlier films like DESPERATE (1947) or RAW DEAL (1948) to teach the fundamental basics of cinema, much like a master class of film construction from Robert Bresson, where A MAN ESCAPED (1956) and PICKPOCKET (1959), for instance, are legendary examples of minimizing the technique down to only the essential ingredients.  SIDE STREET is another take on Jules Dassin’s NAKED CITY (1948), where “There are eight million stories in the naked city,” and this, apparently, is another one of them.  Centering on the city of New York itself, perhaps the most significant character in the film, there are masterful shots highlighting the city from every possible angle, including opening aerial shots, which are used again later in a spectacular climaxing car chase.  Mann also captures the bustling energy of street scenes, using a near documentary style to show construction workers at their jackhammers, cops on the beat spending idle time chatting with residents, dreaming of the day when they can retire, neighbors sticking their heads out of walk up apartment windows, or mailmen who hand deliver the mail directly to the intended whenever possible instead of sticking it in the designated slots.   

Teaming together the doomed lovers from Nicholas Ray’s THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1949), Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell play young newlyweds for the second and final time in their careers.  Mann offers them just the briefest window of hope, which makes all the difference in the world, leaving the cynical element to the seedy characters who are career criminals.  Told from the perspective of the city’s police inspector, who actually narrates the film, calling New York City “an architectural jungle where fabulous wealth and the deepest squalor live side by side. New York is the busiest, the loneliest, the kindest, and the cruelest of cities—a murder a day, every day of the year, and each murder will wind up on my desk.”  Suggesting it would help if he could get inside the minds of the public citizens, weaning out the good from the bad, the film proceeds to do exactly that, choosing Granger as Joe, a part-time mail carrier, a guy down on his luck still living with his in-laws while his pregnant wife (O’Donnell) is expecting any day.  Seemingly an ordinary, everyday kind of guy who dreams of giving his wife more, he falls victim to the lure of temptation and immediately gets mixed up in foul play.  Thinking he’s stealing $200 dollars from the file cabinet of a corrupt attorney’s office, a place he visits regularly on his mail rounds, he’s stunned to discover he’s stolen $30,000, far and away much more than he knows what to do with, where his dreaded, panic-stricken thoughts start spinning out of control, setting the wheels in motion for a man-on-the-run police procedural.  Here the bad guys feel surprisingly standard and underdeveloped, as compared to their fallen women who couldn’t be more intriguing, for instance, and there are occasional hysterical moments, especially from the overacting O’Donnell that feel strangely out of place.  But perhaps the inevitable mystery is observing the tenuous ethical line of human conduct that allows some to cross while others refuse to ever be enticed.  This is a film about a man who makes a misstep and straddles both sides.   

Quickly disappearing from sight, falling into a deep, existential gloom, living in the shadows, afraid of his own existence, becoming a stranger even to his own wife, Joe decides he needs to set things right, but unbeknownst to him, the money is stolen right back out from underneath him, which sets off a murderous killing spree of any and all people connected to the original extortion.  Newspaper headlines charging him with the murders send Joe back into the teeth of the squalid underworld, where he finds Harriet (Jean Hagen), a lonely and downhearted nightclub singer with a fondness for a drink singing “Easy to Love,” describing her lug of a boyfriend:  “He hit me when I recited Robert Burns.”  Joe’s plans immediately go awry, becoming even more deeply ensnared than he could ever possibly imagine, where he’s soon looking down the barrel of a gun  instructing him to drive a getaway car.  A brilliantly composed high speed chase ensues through the tight alleyways and nearly empty streets of an early New York City Sunday morning, past the Washington Street Market on their way to the East River where Joe’s supposed eventual fate lies, trapped like a mercilessly hounded prey attempting to claw its way back out of a life-threatening situation with the hunter steadily closing in.  The tense, oppressive atmosphere is beautifully captured by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, making excellent use of the city’s towering skyscrapers, continually changing the angle from the quiet space high above to the more frantic pace below, where the pulse of the city matches Joe’s growing sense of desperation and horror.  Mann has always used his landscapes to reflect the interior psychological turmoil of his characters, where nothing could feel more helpless than getting sucked directly into a den of evil, the supposed side street of this film.  Laying in the wreckage of his mistakes, the audience may feel cheated when things wrap up all too neat and clean.  Granger’s pleasant opening demeanor is reduced to a dark shadow of his former self, his face roughed up with bruises and an everpresent layer of sweat and grime, where the Dostoevskian guilt-laden Crime and Punishment angle is barely touched upon, providing little insight into what drove the man in the first place and what lies in the emptiness of his now damaged soul. 

O’Donnell, by the way, worked with Mann again in THE MAN FROM LARAMIE (1955), the last of the James Stewart collaborations with this director as well.