Strange Impersonation

Silent Snow, Savage Snow: 'Nightfall'

“This is what they call the point of no return my friend.”

Nightfall is a work of striking juxtapositions and tones that by picture end, come off like a wonderfully disarming person—you’re charmed, even a bit disturbed, but you're not sure what to make of it all. It opens at night, in the neon lit, Los Angeles jungle shimmering with welcoming Hollywood haunts like Miceli’s, Firefly and Musso and Frank and ends within the blinding white snow of the more foreboding Wyoming Wilderness. It pits an older doctor and his much younger, artist friend against two thugs, one an over-eager, violence-lusting psychopath and the other a casual, smarter killer whose relaxed approach borders on the likable. It features a chic fashion show with a modern looking Anne Bancroft as a “mannequin” followed by a cuddly rural bus ride during which the lovers express their romantic feelings after waking up to (decidedly non chic) whiskers. There’s cruel violence committed against good Samaritans mixed with quippy one liners and a surprising amount of dark humor. And did I mention Anne Bancroft falls in love with Aldo Ray? They seem mismatched, but then, perfect together—and their moments are exceptionally romantic. In short, Nightfall is a trip. But a great trip, and a noteworthy addition to noir innovator Jacques Tourneur’s oeuvre (which includes, among other splendid pictures, the horror/noir classics Cat People and  I Walked With a Zombie and his key noir, Out of the Past).

Adapted by Stirling Silliphant from hard boiled writer David Goodis's 1947 novel and brilliantly shot by Burnett Guffey (who also shot Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece In a Lonely Place and Arthur Penn’s ingenious Bonnie and Clyde, as well as other magnificent movies),the picture is considered by some, a minor film noir, something that’s always baffled me. Made in the later cycle of the genre (released in 1957), the picture skillfully weaves a convoluted story, harsh violence, existential angst, naturalistic acting and sweet romanticism without ever feeling forced. And as stated earlier—it’s very funny—something Tourneur always intended.  And though the theme song seems a bit overheated (Al Hibler crooning “Nightfall…and you!”—a tune that really ought to grace a Ross Hunter production) even that works when looking at the film in its entirety. Akin to the startling laughs spiking the movie, it echoes Tourneur’s own sly sense of humor. 

The story is structured much like Out of the Past, with our hero (who's not guilty, unlike Mitchum), Rayburn Vanning (Ray) relating his complicated story to a woman. Only in this instance, the lovely lady, Marie Gardner (Bancroft), is a bit confused. Pulling a damsel in distress act for the benefit of two thugs waiting to jump Ray (she thought they were police officers after a wanted man), she sets up the poor lug.  Vanning is then accosted by Red (Rudy Bond) and John (Brian Keith) and taken to a deserted oil derrick (an unsettling yet weirdly amusing scene) where he’s set to be tortured. They want to know where that money’s hidden, something Vanning continually states he doesn’t know.  Vanning escapes, finds his way to Marie’s apartment and gives her the skinny. Or rather, the thick skinny. 

He explains the convoluted predicament that’s left him understandably paranoid.  While on a pleasant camping trip in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with best friend Dr. Edward Gurston (Frank Albertson) in which the two men will hunt, and in a more uncomfortable moment, near the sticky subject of Doc’s much younger wife (whom we learn later has a thing for Vanning and sent him letters saying so). The conversation is cut short when a car crashes off an embankment and two shady characters (Red and John), emerge. Doc fixes John’s arm but they soon realize they’re unlucky witnesses (the men just robbed a bank). Almost shockingly, Doc is shot dead and Vanning is left injured. The crooks blaze off, only, they make an enormous mistake—they grab the doctor’s bag instead of their own bag of money. Vanning is able to rise from his injury, hide the dough and take off. Moving from town to town under suspicion that he killed Doc, Vanning ends up in Los Angeles, where he’s being tailed by insurance investigator Ben Fraser (James Gregory) who confesses to his wife that Vanning just doesn’t seem the type.

And as played by Aldo Ray—he doesn’t seem the type. One of the more striking aspects to Nightfall is its casting, and the barrel-chested, thick necked Ray, who was a natural born actor (watch his first and largely unschooled leading role in George Cukor’s The Marrying Kind and you’ll see how immediately gifted the man was. Also in Anthony Mann’s brilliant Men in War.) Ray is the perfect good guy in-over-his- head. With his raspy voice, yet boyish appeal (he looked like he literally walked off a football field, which is why Cukor made him take ballet before The Marrying Kind) Ray always exuded a different kind of mystery than say, Mitchum or Ryan or Widmark—men who rarely appeared “normal.” Ray, an ex Frogman who fought in Iwo Jima, was a brawny man’s man certainly, but he always looked to be hiding a secret. That inside he had the soul of a poet or artist—a man of depth beyond his tough exterior. And so, appropriately, in Nightfall, he’s an artist.

Brian Keith is another standout and like Ray, an actor I always wished was my father (and not merely for the TV show A Family Affair). He’s so agreeable here—and his delivery manages to be both distracted and pithy rather than rat-a-tat. When he humorously claims that Red’s homicidal kicks stem from his lack of childhood play (“When Red was a kid they didn’t have enough playgrounds. He’s sort of an adult delinquent.”) he’s both revelatory and teasing. And his banter towards Red is cleverly berating: “The top of your head never closed up when you were a kid. Neither did your mouth.”  Cracking wise with Red, the two spar like men who are ready to kill each other, but also who are simply getting on each other’s nerves (preceding some of Tarantino’s talky criminals). But talking aside, deadlier fates await them including a fatal gunshot and death by snowplow.

And wild, almost ridiculous fate was something Tourneur excelled at, not surprisingly. Based on the bizarre treatment at the hands of his filmmaker father, Tourneur developed a dark sense of the absurd. As written in John Wakemen’s “Film Directors Vol. 1 1890-1946,” Tourneur believed that the childhood he endured—one of “grotesque punishment” lied at the root of his cinematic obsessions. Relating that he was sent to a poor school and teased unmercifully for his square suspenders , Tourneau claimed: “I think this is what prompted me to introduce comic touches into the dramatic moments of my films…Mixing fear and the ridiculous can be very exciting.”

Indeed they can. As Red can’t wait to torture a terrified Vanning, he sinisterly and bizarrely sings: “The tougher they are the more fun they are tra-la.”

Re-published from my piece at Noir of the Week.

Also, read just how obsessed I am with Nightfall, like, breaking and entering obsessed.

Mean Streets Revisited

Since recently spending time in New York City, I thought of all kinds of New York movies (from Rosemary’s Baby to 42nd Street to The Naked City to Midnight Cowboy to After Hours to Broadway Danny Rose to The Lost Weekend and on and on and on). But after strolling through some beautiful areas and others much too cleaned up (Times Square), my mind was wandering to James Cagney and John Garfield growing up in Hell’s Kitchen (which isn’t so hellish anymore) and the Dead End Kids gaining advice from both of those stars as they, cinematically speaking, brawled and cracked wise on those streets that refer to the movie I really kept thinking about—Mean Streets.

And yes, yes, much has been written about Martin Scorsese’s masterwork and most of us love it. But it had been quite some time since I watched the picture, and upon returning, my love was re-ignited. As Woody Allen would say, I don’t just love the movie, I luurve it.

Let’s just start with the opening—an opening that ranks as one of the greatest title sequences of all time.  The screen is black. A faceless narrator exclaims: "You don't make up for your sins at church; you do it in the streets; you do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it." A young man wakes up in the middle of the night. The sounds of the city are outside. He walks over to his bedroom mirror, takes a look at himself and then returns to bed. As his head reclines toward his pillow, he is suddenly moving in slow motion. The thumping beat of the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" begins and the scene shifts to a screening of Super-8 films of the young man and his friends. Just as Ronnie Spector breaks into the beautifully sweet chorus of "Be my, be my baby," the film reveals its title in plain, typewritten letters: Mean Streets.

Man, oh man. This opening always gets me right in the gut and even at times, almost makes me cry. Well, not almost. It does make me cry. It’s just so fucking brilliant and wonderfully bittersweet. It's reminiscent of a past that isn't mine and yet, Scorsese makes me feel like it could be. It gets me the way Wes Anderson gets me. No wonder Scorsese loves him so much. 

Released in 1973, Mean Streets, a masterpiece of story, substance, music, camerawork and color, is one of the most influential movies of the last 30-odd years. Inspired by, among other influences, classic Hollywood cinema, the documentaries of David and Albert Maysles, the French New Wave, and of course, Scorsese’s own life growing up and observing life in New York City, Mean Streets' raw, blood-soaked power has still, in my mind, found no cinematic equal. Aesthetically and thematically honest, as well as experimental and purposeful, it’s a work of art that’s never faded through time. It still makes me revved up and emotional and depressed and happy and, yearning. There’s a yearning to Mean Streets that not only taps into creating something within your own personal life, but to create something, anything outside of it. As with all of Scorsese, there's a sensuality to it that's bloody and lovely and in moments, profoundly moving.

The story is noir bathed in red light. Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, an inhabitant of New York's Little Italy who is raggedly progressing toward manhood. His best friend is Johnny Boy (Robert DeNiro), a volatile, immature but ultimately lovable character who gets Charlie in more trouble than he needs. Charlie is trying his best to become something, but he is met with constant dilemmas. He works for his uncle (Cesare Danova), an old-school Mafioso who would like to move him up in the business. But Uncle disapproves of Charlie's friends, chiefly his epileptic lover, Teresa (Amy Robinson), and Johnny Boy, who is "touched in the head" and an instigator of unnecessary disorder. Uncle advises Charlie to remove them from his life. But this is not so easy. Nothing is easy for Charlie. Strongly Catholic, he is guilt-ridden by his every move. While he sits at the bar in his neighborhood hangout, questioning his penance, he watches Johnny Boy walk toward him and almost humorously asks: "You talk about penance and this is what walks through the door?"

Johnny Boy certainly walks through the door. His entrance is a tour de force of exciting visual and sonorous stimuli. Bathed in the bloody red light of the bar, shot in slow motion and accompanied by the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin Jack Flash," the joy and ambiguity of Johnny Boy is summed up in less than 30 seconds. He is the streets; he is exciting, nervous energy; he is trouble amidst trouble; he’s your future if you don’t watch out. And he’s also one hell of a fighter on a pool table—the way he kicks with such intent. In fact, that “Mook” fight tuned to “Please Mr. Postman” is one of my favorite fight scenes in a movie. It’s so sloppy and real yet funny and repugnant. This is how fights happen and sometimes, they are hilarious.

And Johnny Boy is kind of hilarious. The symbol of uncertainty that, like the streets, threatens the picture's world with kinetic violence, he’s an attractive force. But like many reckless forces, they burn out. Charlie attempts to ride this out with some semblance of control, but he can’t avoid the tumult that will engulf around his own life. What is so unequivocally brilliant about this film is that Charlie never has to tell us as much. Because of Scorsese's expert technique, we know the picture's nature instinctively. Scorsese displays the randomness of these people's lives with saturating experimentalism; his inventive style is not a glaring gimmick but a natural expression of street and conscience.

Mean Streets contains so many influential techniques it would require pages to list them all, but some do bear mentioning--particularly for how they are abused in present cinema. As most of us know, Mean Streets, like other filmmakers of the period utilized the New Wave technique of a moving camera, now seen often in movies and TV commercials. It used Super-8 film stock to convey happy, jumpy memories, which is now an overused, trite standard á la The Wonder Years and countless other more recent examples. Mean Streets employed the character-introducing title sequence, where key figures are shown doing something (Johnny Boy blows up a mailbox), and then their names are typewritten on the screen. This was used in Trainspotting, a movie that has more than a few references to Scorsese. It was scored with pop music as an interesting counterpoint to violence (clearly, Scorsese's musicality has been imitated effectively in films like Blood Simple and Reservoir Dogs). Mean Streets' film references--Charlie watching John Ford's The Searchers and Uncle watching Fritz Lang's The Big Heat--contained a specific potency that plays differently than the reference-soaked movies of Quentin Tarantino. I love Tarantino's operatic movie mélange but with films now so readily available on DVD, Mean Streets snippet from The Searchers feels rarer, and in a way, more sacred.

I'm not one to downgrade the importance of Citizen Kane and its influences (and certainly Scorsese wouldn’t as well) but Mean Streets is at this point, just as influential. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas may make the AFI lists, but Mean Streets deserves high mention. So many films emulate Mean Streets, but very few have achieved its beautiful, ugly, vulnerable, violent and thrilling power.

MM's Hard Knocks: 'Don't Bother To Knock'

Oh Marilyn. I know, I know, we all love Marilyn Monroe (or are supposed to) but I’m not going to stray from her simply because she’s so damn popular. The tragic heroine princess to every aspiring starlet or little girl or grown woman is our coffee mugged goddess, so ubiquitous that, I think, we sometimes take her for granted. Especially in her early and later roles (my two favorite periods for Marilyn). From the fresh faced, sublimely natural starlet sporting jeans in Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night to the methody, tired, tragic and lonely lady of John Huston's The Misfits, I find Marilyn’s first and last hopes at proving herself on screen immensely powerful.

Such is the case in Monroe's first starring vehicle, 1952's Don't Bother to Knock. There’s a prophetic sadness permeating her nuanced, fascinating performance, and for a picture of this period, her delusional babysitter (freshly released from an insane asylum) is surprisingly sympathetic. Knowing all we do about the troubled star, it most likely wasn't a stretch for the then-relative newcomer to understand the pathology and despondency of her character Nell, a beautiful young woman burned by love who can't handle the breach between reality and fiction. A film noir of sorts, though not containing enough elements of that genre to be classically considered as such, director Roy Baker's part-thriller, part-character-study is a tense tale with plenty of pathos geared toward Marilyn, who wasn't the full-blown MM superstar yet. As Nell, a mysterious girl who takes on a babysitting job in a hotel where her creepy, sad-sack uncle (Elisha Cook Jr. — who else) works, Monroe enters the picture in plain clothes, dark blonde hair, and little makeup. Though she's no plain-Jane, she looks like a "nice girl" — nice enough for hotel guests the Joneses (played by Jim Backus and Lurene Tuttle) to allow a stranger to watch over their cute little daughter Bunny (Donna Corcoran). After quickly putting the girl to bed (clearly she's not interested in the kid), Nell plays dress-up in Mrs. Jones' fine silk robe, perfume, and diamond jewelry.

Meanwhile, cocky, self-absorbed airline pilot Jedd Towers (the always terrific and personal favorite Richard Widmark) is stinging from rejection after the hotel chanteuse (a young, gorgeous Anne Bancroft) dumps him.  Spying the beautiful Nell from his window to hers (which is damn sexy) he finds some new action when the lonely Nell signals him from her room. He comes over for a good time, likes what he sees, and basically puts up with her strange behavior until it gets a little too freaky. A man, even Richard Widmark, can only take so much, and when Nell hangs Bunny out of the hotel window, he starts thinking she might not be worth the tumble. But here’s the poignant part—Nell doesn't really mean any harm. She's just disturbed and frequently suicidal. And here’s a novel idea—she desires a man to take care of her without hitting or hollering at her desire to look gorgeous. She should be normal dammit!

But, why? Why must women have to be so normal? Though suffering from deep seated psychological problems, I sense that it’s this type of "normal" pressure making her crack (the punishing and smarmy Cook Jr. doesn't help either). Monroe portrays these ideas beautifully, so much so, that I wondered how much of her real life was seeping into her performance, it plays so real. I kept wishing that she could just get out of that hotel, doll herself up and have some fun with a man who might understand her. Widmark isn't really the one, even though underneath his smirk and swagger, he’s essentially a good heart.  Interestingly, however, the moral of the story comes at Nell's expense — Widmark’s Jedd becomes a better person by not giving into temptation with a supposed psycho. Poor Nell, and poor Marilyn. In real life, most men wouldn't so sensitively resist.

Summertime Blues

Because it’s summer and summer isn’t always happy days, beach frolics and picnics in the park. It's also, often, claustrophobic sunlight and heat, free time to overthink your life (or no free time to think at all), annoying, chipper people playing volleyball or worse, frisbee and my favorite, existential meltdown. But before you think I'm getting way too dramatic here, trust that summer can roll along like (and metaphorically speaking) one of my favorite movies, Arthur Penn’s Night Moves.

Though most 70s film fans regard this picture as a classic of the era, it’s a movie that oddly, took far too long for rediscovery (and a DVD release—finally two years ago, but I’m still keeping my worn VHS copy, for sentimental reasons). But this is a bit curious. The picture was directed by Arthur Penn, the auteur behind a movie that arguably kick-started the changing face of cinema--Bonnie and Clyde. It features both a teenage Melanie Griffith (in all her wild child glory) and a very young James Woods. And it stars my beloved Gene Hackman in one of his greatest, most poignant and naturally moody performances. It's also a brilliant movie, a complex, thoughtful and powerfully melancholic neo-noir.

Like Bill L. Norton's masterful Cisco Pike, Jerry Schatzberg's moving Scarecrow and Michael Ritchie's great, tough Prime Cut (the latter two also featuring Hackman) Night Moves (1975) is a distinctly 70s picture, a movie that showcases exactly why so many consider that era a golden period of filmmaking. Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a private detective and former pro football player whose glory days are behind him (one of the picture's most touching moments is simply catching Harry beam while walking into a football stadium). His marriage isn't working out, his wife (Susan Clark) is having an affair (she also likes going to Eric Rohmer films, something Harry famously says is like “watching paint dry.”), and he seems somewhat lost. Hackman plays this melancholia with subtlety and intelligence and his existential dread hangs over the picture with an almost bittersweet pessimism.

Hired by a washed up Hollywood glamour-puss (Janet Ward) to find her teenage daughter (the nubile Griffith), Moseby takes the job and tracks down the girl who is crashing with her stepfather (John Crawford) in the Florida Keys. The unusual relationship sees the rebellious daughter in an extremely permissive and disturbingly close situation with her father whose mistress (Jennifer Warren) seems to coolly take it in some kind of stride. Harry falls for the woman, who's unusual herself, with an intelligence and seen-it-all veneer and, yet, interestingly sunny good looks that catches the viewer somewhat off guard. She’s a blonde healthy woman who looks like she smokes about two packs a day—she's got angst, but keeps it in cynical check. In short, she's a mysterious female character one rarely experiences in movies. She's truly interesting and off.

But as the plot thickens (and boy does it thicken) we realize just how interesting and off everyone and everything is, how very real to life they are. And with this, everyone and everything is not surprisingly, frustratingly impossible to crack. A revelation does not necessarily lead to closure because a revelation isn't always what it seems in the first place. And then there's Moseby's own mysteries which are really, a lot more interesting and complex. This doggedness of not tying up its mysteries in one tidy bow makes Penn's Night Moves all the more meaningful, its pessimism (and amidst all the oppressive sunlight) all the more complicated. Cruising in this beautiful "paradise" Hackman's boat doesn't crash, it goes round and round (if you’ve seen the movie, you know exactly what I’m talking about), literally making the picture's moral ambiguities open ended and curiously, painfully elegant.

And again, that boat. In any kind of existential crisis, I often think of Gene Hackman and that damn boat. I don't know if it helps me, but it's nice to relate to, even if that boat only exists in one's mind.