Maxwell Shane's The Naked Street (1955)

 The Naked Street is the penultimate of the five films Shane directed after writing dozens of B films (none of which I have seen), starting in 1937.  It is an okay combination of family drama and gangster film and though it has dark elements I would not call it a film noir, though Eddie Muller showed it recently in his Noir Alley series on Turner Classic Movies.  It stars Anthony Quinn as gangster Phil Regal, Anne Bancroft as his sister Rosalie Regalzyk, Elsa Neft as their mother, and Farley Granger as Nicky Bravna.  When Phil finds out his sister is pregnant, that  Nicky is the father and is on death row for murder, Phil gets Nicky off by using his goons to make witnesses change their stories and when Nicky is free Phil gets him a job as a truck driver.  Nicky resents not becoming part of Phil's profitable organization and turns back to crime after Phil blames him for the death of Rosalie's baby.  Phil frames Nicky for another murder but before Nicky is executed he spills all the beans on Phil to journalist  Joe McFarland (Peter Graves).  Phil dies when he is chased by the cops and Joe and Rosalie end up together.  

Shane gets excellent performances from his actors, including Else Neft as Phil's mother, and Floyd Crosby's black-and-white cinamatography is crisp and beautiful (Crosby worked on everything from F.W. Murnau's Tabu in 1931 to Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace in 1963), with most of the film shot in the studio.  But Shane's direction is flat and lacking the fatalism that would make it a genuine film noir, a genre, if one can call it that, that more or less came to an end in 1955 with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. 

Edward Dmytryk's Obsession (1949)

It is safe to say that the HUAC trauma, if it did foster Dmytryk's neurotic dispositions, did not create them, as they can be traced almost to his earliest works.  Sado-masochism, for instance, which is rampant in The Hidden Room [the American title for Obsession] and The Sniper, was already a dominant feature in Murder, My Sweet and Cornered and even in some of his "B" movies.

Jean-Pierre Coursodon, American Directors Volume II (McGraw-Hill, 1983)

Dmytryk was one of the "Hollywood Ten" cited by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for Communist Party membership in 1947, at which time he fled to England, where he made Obsession, written by Alec Coppel from his novel A Man About a Dog.  The film has four main characters: Dr. Clive Riordan (Robert Newton), Storm Riordan (Sally Gray), Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) and Scotland Yard Superintendent  Finsbury (Naunton Wayne), as well as a dog, Monty, that has an important role in the plot.  Clive is tired of Storm's affairs so he kidnaps her lover Bill and holds him prisoner in a bombed-out building for months, planning to kill him eventually and destroy his body in a bath of acid; he enjoys telling Bill his plans.  But Storm's dog finds Clive so Monty is also imprisoned by Clive and Finsbury comes looking for the dog.

 Dmytryk is excellent with the actors:  Clive is effectively low-key in a James Mason way; the estimable Sally Gray fights back intensely; Bill handles his imprisonment sardonically; Naunton Wayne is persistent and intelligent; Monty is adorable and a quick learner.  The film is an interesting crime story but, like most of Dmytryk's films, lacks an appropriate visual style.  Most of Obsession takes place at night and is well filmed in black-and-white by C.M. Pennington-Richards but lacks the fatalism and psychological depth that would make this a film noir (and the somewhat sappy ending doesn't help).

Incidentally, Dmytryk's passport expired after he made Obsession and he returned to the United States, where he received a prison sentence of six months.  While serving his sentence he agreed to testify before HUAC and named names, the only one of The Hollywood Ten who testified as a friendly witness in order to work in Hollywood again.  Dmytryk made a couple of dozen more mostly mediocre movies until retiring in 1975; he died in 1999 at the age of 90.

It Walks by Night by John Dickson Carr

But the point is, as you know, Doctor, that we know our friends rather by their mannerisms than by their exact appearance; for if their mannerisms are not always the same, that is the thing that surprises us, and we say, 'Why don't you seem like the same person.'  The physical appearance, unless it bears to us a psychic signicicance, is vague.

John Dickson Carr, It Walks by Night (Harper and Brothers, 1930)

Carr had no interest in writing realistically.  If his characters do not speak the way real Frenchmen do, what does that matter?  It Walks By Night is a puzzle story in the form of a Poe-esque fantasy, set in a Poe-esque France, colored by an imperially purple imagination.

Douglas G. Green, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles (Crippen and Landru 2019)

It Walks By Night is the first of Carr's eighty novels and the first of his many "locked room" mysteries, in which a murder takes place in a locked room where no one other than the victim has seemed able to get in. It Walks By Night is considerably influenced by Poe, with its nightmare of Paris, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle, as American Jeff Marle, in the role of Watson, narrates the grusome murders solved by detective Henri Bencolin, who is rather like the cerebral Sherlock Holmes.  I have to admit that I found Bencolin's solution to the two decapitations he is investigating quite ingenious, though somewhat strained in its reality and believability but beautifully imagined by Carr.   The film takes place almost entirely at night, in gambling dens, country houses and opium dens, all described in fascinating detail.

Stanley Donen's Royal Wedding (1951)

 The best thing about Royal Wedding is Fred Astaire, still spry at 52, but one of the worst things is the choreography by Nick Castle, which is mostly gimmicky in an attempt to cover up Astaire's aging:  Astaire dances with a coat rack, on the ceiling and on a rolling boat going across the Atlantic so Astaire as Tom Bowen can dance with his sister Ellen Bowen (Jane Powell) in a show in London during the 1947 celebration of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh.  This is perhaps an attempt to remind us of Astaire's original dance partner, his sister Adele, who retired from the stage in 1932 to marry a lord.  Of course this means that Tom has to have a romance with Anne Ashmond (Sarah Churchhill), who can dance a little, and Ellen has a romance with Lord Brindale (Peter Lawford), who apparently can only dance a bit of ballroom; this eliminates the sexual tension that was one of the reasons for the effectiveness of the Astaire relationship with Ginger Rogers in the 30's.

Not only does one miss the Hermes Pan choreograpy of Astaire's films with Ginger Rogers, one also misses the lovely black-and-white cinematography of those films; the garish color of Royal Wedding is another distraction from Astaire's dancing.  That Astaire's co-star Jane Powell is thirty years younger than Astaire doesn't bother me as much as her limited dancing ability and her Jeanette-MacDonald- operetta style of singing, though Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner's songs are hardly the equal of those by the Gershwins and Irving Berlin in the Astaire/Rogers RKO films.

Alan Jay Lerner also wrote the unamusing screenplay for this first directorial effort of Stanley Donen, after Donen co-directed On the Town with Gene Kelly in 1948.  I have to admit that I have never been a big fan of the dancing in the Donen and Kelly films, where athleticism is more important than subtlety and grace.

John Dahl's Joy Ride (2001)

 "Growing up in the West with all those big landscapes, that's a world I know really well.  I was drawn in by that, the isolation of it.  You're talking about the one place in America where you can still run your car off the road and people won't even find you if you crash in the right spot."

-- Director John Dahl on Joy Ride

John Dahl recently received the annual award of Modern Noir Master from the Film Noir Foundation.  His two best noir films are The Last Seduction (1994) and Red Rock West (1993) but all his movie and television work has significant noir elements.  Joy Ride is the kind of mixed genre film, a noir road trip with horror elements, that once was common during the studio era, incorporating a cb radio (not seen much in movies since Sam Peckinpah's Convoy in 1978) as an important plot element.   Three young people -- played effectively by Steve Zahn, Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski-- are traveling across the West by car when they decide to pull a prank on a truck driver with the handle Rusty Nail, with one of the men imitating a girl who offers to meet Rusty Nail at a motel.  This unfunny joke not surprisingly leads to violence, as Rusty Nail pursues the trio through a cornfield with an eighteen wheeler monster belching smoke while tracking them with spotlights.

Unfortunately John Dahl has not directed a film since 2007; the kind of mid-budget genre film he does so well is not currently much in fashion. He is, however, thriving in televsion.  I recently watched the first episode of American Rust, which Dahl directed with a noir sensibility, though unfortunately the series was cancelled after one season.

Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw

 Answering the telephone was the least of what Howard did for Vidal.  In addition to handling hundreds of mundane chores, he had monitored Gore's drinking, curbed his excesses, scolded him when he crossed the line, and generally prevented him from going over the edge.  He hadn't just enabled Gore to create; he had enabled him to continue living when he declared that he wanted to die. 

--Michael Mewshaw, Sympathy for the Devil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

I have come across Gore Vidal several times in my life:  he ran for Congress from my district in upstate New York in 1960 (he lost but received more votes than any other Democrat who had previously run in the district); he gave a speech at Exeter when I was a student there in the sixties (he was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy); he was a frequent writer for The Nation when I worked there in the eighties.  I watched Vidal with fascination when he sparred with William F. Buckley, Jr. during the 1968 presidential conventions and I was quite impressed with his political insights, just as I have always found his essays more interesting than his didactic novels.  

Mewshaw knew Vidal during the last half of his life as Vidal gradually became a falling-down drunk, especially after the death of Howard Austen, who had been Vidal's companion for many years.  Vidal, who died at 86 in 2012, was probably the last public intellectual in this country and I miss his acerbic wit and his intelligent analyses of (mostly) what's wrong with our nation and what we can do about it. 

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym (1977)

 "I suppose I'm more likely to end my days in an old people's home," said Norman, taking up the large economy size of instant coffee.  "It says 'Family Size' here -- funny when it's mostly used by people in offices."  He spooned coffee powder into a mug.  "Of course you do save a bit -- that's what Marcia and I thought."                                                                                                                      

 -- Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn (Penguin, 1977)

Quartet in Autumn reminds me of Chaplin's Limelight (1952) in its presage of its author's death.  Four office mates -- Letty, Marcia, Edwin and Norman -- are all near retirement age and Marcia retires first and dies after having a mastectomy and neglecting her health.  Pym herself worked for years in the office of The International African Institute and wrote Quartet in Autumn as she was getting ready to retire after having a mastectomy and not having published a book in sixteen years; Quartet in Autumn was only published when when Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both cited Pym as an underrated writer of the 20th century in the Times Literary Supplement. Pym died in 1980.

Pym has a great deal of compassion for the officemates, each mostly alone in life and clinging to their individual eccentricities.  This late novel by Pym has little of the social comedy of her earlier novels and the church has only a small role relatively to her earlier work.  The focus is on the characters and the quotidian aspects of their lives, which mostly take place within the office and, to a lesser extent, in their solitary homes and some of which is familiar to one who has worked in an office, including the pettiness and crabbiness. 

Jean Vigo's Zero de conduite (1933)

 

All of Vigo's own wretched schooling was avenged in Zero de conduite, forty-four minutes of sustained, if roughly shot, anarchist crescendo.  The attempt by society to regiment raw childhood, and the failure of the attempt, are conveyed by the very tender high-angled photography.                                                                  -- David Thomson

Vigo's film brings back memories of one's childhood in school and all its arbitrary authority.  When I was in sixth grade our history teacher said she was going to leave us alone for a few minutes so she could prove to us the importance of authority.  We all erupted into chaos, wildly running around and throwing everything we could get our hands on.  I later regretted that I did not take upon myself the burden of organizing the class to prove the value of anarchy and self-government, as the teacher, Mrs. Shook, returned to point out how she was needed in the classroom to control things.  Vigo's film takes the approach of endorsing the fight against opression by the union of four students to lead the effective rebellion against the teachers who not only give out "zeros for conduct" but steal desserts from the students' lunches while the students are outside being marched around.  

Vigo unfortunately made only four films, including the lovely L'atalante, before dying at the age of 29, but his films were quite influential in Europe, especially on Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson, whose If.... (1968) was strongly influenced by Zero de conduite.