Movie Review: The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

The Hitch-Hiker (1953) co-written and directed by Ida Lupino

This harrowing film noir based on actual events follows two friends (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) who are driving to Mexico for a fishing weekend. They pick up a hitch-hiker, Emmett Meyers (William Talman), who has been on a nation-wide crime spree. He kidnaps those he picks up, eventually killing them for their money. Meyers wants them to drive him to a certain town, though he plays some games with them on the way. The friends are caught in the moral quandary of trying to protect each other while also coming up with a way out that isn't what Meyers is planning.

This tightly-paced film (clocking in at only 71 minutes) keeps the tension high. Talman does a great job as the menacing and intelligent Meyers. He clearly has a lot of practice manipulating whoever he has kidnapped. The larger manhunt is shown through the police investigation and radio news, just enough to know how close the law is to getting them. Meyers also knows how close, which puts pressure on him, subsequently putting pressure on the friends as well. The Mexican countryside is expansive and bleak, leaving little hope to the friends and the viewers. It's an exciting story that goes quickly but stays with you.

Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Dark City (1998)

Dark City (1998) co-written and directed by Alex Proyas

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub with no memories of who he is or how he got there. He is in a hotel in a rundown city full of squalor and mysteries. John is embroiled in a problematic mystery, the killing of a string of call girls. He discovers that he left his wife (Jennifer Connelly) over an affair and maybe he has been committing the murders in revenge? If that wasn't bad enough, something much more sinister is going on. Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) has been his psychiatrist. The doctor has a much more important secret. He is in league with The Strangers, a race of beings who are studying humans to find out why they are unique. The Strangers can manipulate reality and have been rearranging the city and messing with people's lives as a scientific experiment to gain the knowledge they want.

The movie is initially a noir thriller, with the dark, squalid city and intriguing mysteries, including lurid murders. It quickly morphs into a science fiction nightmare with exploration of the nature of identity, individuality, and the nature of reality. The philosophical musings don't get too deep or too confusing. The slow reveal of The Strangers' plans and what is really going keeps viewers engaged and has some surprising moments. The visuals, often borrowed from movies like Metropolis and other dystopias, are striking. The dark style fits the theme well. The movie is intriguing and begs to be watched a second time.

Recommended.

Movie Review: Scarlet Street (1945)

Scarlet Street (1945) directed by Fritz Lang

Edward G. Robinson plays Christopher Cross, a man celebrating his twenty-fifth year as cashier at a financial institution. They have a big part with liquor and present him with a gold watch. The boss leaves early in his big car with a fabulous young woman. The guys all wonder who she is. Cross wonders if a woman like that would ever be interested in him. Not that such a woman is a possibility for him.

Cross is married to a widow (Rosalind Ivan). Her former husband was a police officer who disappeared in the line of duty trying to save a woman from drowning. Neither body was found. She got insurance money which she is hiding in a bottom drawer "for her old age." Cross is henpecked incessantly by her. He can't even have friends over without some subterfuge. He's main joy in life is painting even though he is not very good at it

Walking home late at night after the celebration, he stumbles upon a woman named Kitty (Joan Bennett) being hit by a guy. In a fit of chivalry, he rushes up and hits the guy with his umbrella several times. The guy goes down and the girl is astounded. Cross rushes off for a police officer. When the two get back to the girl, the guy has left. She points out where the bad guy went. The cop tells them to stay put while he hunts down the mugger. Once he's gone, she tells Cross they need to leave because she does not want to get involved in all the hassle of an investigation. Cross reluctantly walks her back to her apartment. She says she can't invite him up because she shares it with another woman. They go into the late night cafe below where he orders coffee and she orders a rum and coke. He switches over to alcohol as they chat about each other. He's evasive, hinting he's an artist and well to do. She is also evasive, saying she's an actress, having gone home after a show (she refuses to say which) and had the run-in. He's smitten with her and promises to write her a letter.

The next day, she's at home and is visited by Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea), the "mugger" who is actually her boyfriend. He's a bit rough with her but she's happy with that. He's also a con artist looking for more cash for his next scheme. He sees the letter from Cross and decides Kitty needs to con Cross out of money. The plot gets more complicated from there as Cross tries to satisfy her financial needs through less than upright means.

Watching this movie, I was a little puzzled at first, because it had potential to be a black comedy or a noir drama. It is definitely the later, as the complications come fast and furious, making things more bleak. At first, Robinson's character is very sympathetic. He's a put-upon man who everyone is trying to take advantage of. Then he starts making bad choices. Other bad decisions happening around him create a vortex that pulls him further and further down. By the end, the story takes a very dark turn. I found it interesting but the convolutions of the plot were occasionally too much of a stretch. Robinson gives a good performance. Bennett's performance is a mixed bag--she's both the femme fatale and damsel in distress. The combination could be very potent but the movie seems unsure of which she should be. I had a hard time finding her sympathetic as more of her character is revealed. Duryea is okay as a straight-up villain, though he goes over the top some times. Lang's visual style is excellent as always. I ended the film with as many mixed feelings as I started with.

Mildly recommended--be ready for some unlikely events and unpredictable twists.

Movie Review: Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Sunset Blvd. (1950) co-written and directed by Billy Wilder

Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a down-and-out screenwriter who is about to have his car repossessed. He wanders over Hollywood looking for someone to loan him a couple hundred dollars. His agent could but won't and nicely threatens to drop him as a client. His producer friend at Paramount could but won't and a script reader (Nancy Olson) comes in with some negative feedback on one of Gillis's earlier submissions. He gets a flat tire on Sunset Boulevard and pulls into one of the old movie star palaces. It looks rundown but has a big garage for hiding his jalopy. As he walks around, Joe is called into the house by a guy (Erich von Stroheim) who looks like he's the butler. Joe is taken up to the master bedroom where a distraught woman (Gloria Swanson) is ready to have her beloved put in a coffin and buried. That beloved is a dead chimpanzee. He's about ready to escape this looney bin when he recognizes the woman--Norma Desmond, the famous silent film star who hasn't worked since talkies came in. She's very full of herself but when she finds out he's a scriptwriter, she pitches him the script she has been working on for twenty years, "Salome." Who will play the young Biblical temptress? Norma of course. Joe is desperate enough to stay and work on the script, slowly turning into a kept man. Can he keep his own self as he enters Norma's cocooned life?

The prospects are bleak, especially considering the film starts with Joe Gillis floating dead in the palace's pool. Gillis provides a film-noir voiceover (presumably from the afterlife?) promising to tell the true story of what happened to him, not the phony sensationalism of all the press that's hot on the heels of the coroner's men. Norma starts out as a crazy, seemingly unstable and unsympathetic character, though as Joe learns more about her, the viewers find her pathos. Joe becomes a little less sympathetic as he falls into the trap and finds himself without the strength to get out when he darn well could. Joe runs into the script reader again. She's found a nugget of a really good story in one of his scripts and wants to develop it with him. He's interested but trapped; it's hard to get away from Norma's suffocating lifestyle and the reader is dating one of Joe's best friends. 

The acting is superb. Swanson was a happily-retired silent era star who makes the character both understandable and genuinely horrible when she needs to. Holden is great as the film-noir sap who can't escape his fate. Von Stroheim's loyal servant makes a lot of surprising revelations but still is believable. The script has a lot of dark humor and an unsentimental look at how people behave, especially people in Hollywood.

Highly recommended--this is top-tier film noir.

It's also the subject of A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast #282, with more fabulous commentary on the movie. Thanks for inspiring my re-watch of this classic.

Movie Review: Ministry of Fear (1944)

Ministry of Fear (1944) directed by Fritz Lang

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is released from two years at a psychiatric asylum in rural England during World War II. He wants to live a quiet life but amid the bustle of war-time London. Before his train leaves, he visits the local fete where, through an odd visit with the fortune teller, he wins a cake by guessing the correct weight (which the fortune teller told him). The next guy goes to the fortune teller and clearly he was meant to get the cake because they have a very awkward scene. Neale takes the cake and gets on the train. He's joined by a blind man with whom he shares the cake. The blind man crumbles it up as if he's looking for something (and the audience sees that he isn't really blind). The train stops during a German bombing. The blind man breaks his cane over Neale's head and steals the cake. Neale chases him down but one of the bombs gets the blind man. Neale continues on to London where he investigates the fortune teller to try and find out what's going on. The situation only get more complicated from there.

This paranoid thriller is based on a book by Graham Greene, with the typical complications and ambiguities. Neale has stumbled into a Nazi spy ring, or so he thinks. He doesn't know who to trust and the audience is left guessing too. Director Lang's noir sensibilities only add to the atmosphere of unease and dread. The film is a very satisfying thriller.

Recommended.

Book Review: Horror Noir by Paul Meehan

Horror Noir: Where Cinema's Dark Sisters Meet by Paul Meehan

Author Paul Meehan draws an uncontroversial but fascinating connection between horror films and film noir. The noir genre grew up in America with the pre-World War II departure of many German film makers (like Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger, among others) who were steeped in the German Expressionist movement. Expressionism used high contrast and often surreal images to create a feeling of uneasiness or dread. The style fit naturally to horror films and was used to great effect in Universal's series of classic monster films--Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, et al. The supernatural elements (vampires, curses, magic) slowly diminished, especially with the series of low-budget but highly influential B-movies produced by Val Lewton, many directed by French emigre Jacques Tourneur. Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie clearly have supernatural elements but Tourneur would go on to more great acclaim with Out of the Past, which has no supernatural elements whatsoever.

Film noir emerged as a distinct genre especially in the post-WWII era, when an air of cynicism, dread, and despair filtered into the gangster and crime drama films, first seen in WWII-era films like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. The genre's style was well suited to Gothic stories like Jane Eyre or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and modern versions like Rebecca. Alfred Hitchcock is mentioned early and often, even getting his own chapter that looks more deeply at Vertigo and Psycho.

Noir saw a demise in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The style still came out in the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes using supernatural elements, as in Rosemary's Baby or Eyes of Laura Mars, sometimes not, as in Chinatown or Peeping Tom. Horror went its own way after Psycho, with many slasher films. A serial killer craze was started in the 1990s by The Silence of the Lambs, mixing the police procedural elements of noir with seemingly superhuman killers who can barely be stopped.

The book provides an interesting history of the two genres and how they cross over. The Hitchcock and Lewton chapters were favorites. A very interesting chapter details the relationship between detective and supernatural thriller radio shows from the 1930s and 1940s and the movies they inspired that fit the horror-noir bill. The book is a very enjoyable read if you are interested in either or both genres.

Recommended.

Book Review: Doctor Radar by N. Simsolo et al.

Doctor Radar written by Noel Simsolo and art by Bezian

In 1920's Paris, a series of deaths has only one common thread--the dead men are all scientists working on space travel. The famous detective and World War I flying ace Ferdinand Straus (who is French despite his name) makes the connection and assumes they are all murders. The French police aren't interested until another victim turns up. The perpetrator is Doctor Radar, a mysterious figure with his own motivations. The battle of wits between Radar and Straus is on.

This graphic novel owes a lot to the film noir tradition. Space travel is a MacGuffin, because the story has no other science fiction element. The characters use a lot of disguises and chases and fights, with no real resolution at the end. There's probably a volume two coming.

Unfortunately, the art is too stylish, making it hard to tell some characters apart. The plot is interesting enough but not outstanding. The characters are not very well developed. I am not interested in reading volume two.

Not recommended.