Film

Ulmer: Detour (1945)

2008-07-03T11:47:01Z

The strongest B-noir of the 1940s, Detour incorporates all the restrictions and setbacks of its shooting schedule into an extraordinary anti-aesthetic of sordidness, or impoverishment, in which the bourgeois self-hatred of classical noir is replaced by two, desperate journeys from New York to Los Angeles, in search of more promising employment. This divests the central 'crime' - nightclub pianist Al Roberts' (Tom Neal) manslaughter of the driver giving him a ride - of any exoticism, or voyeuristic thrill, while ensuring that the ensuing complication - another hitchhiker, Vera's (Ann Savage), discovery of the crime, and subsequent blackmail of Roberts - is similarly devoid of any sexual tension, or agenda: "If this were fiction, I would fall in love with her...or else she would make some supreme class-A sacrifice for me, and die..." The result is a profound, nihilistic banality, which finds most explicit expression in the gradual relocation of the antagonism between Al and Vera from a criminal, to a merely domestic, register, but is perhaps most poetically figured in the use of back-projections for virtually every sequence. This collapses New York, Los Angeles and, most strikingly, the miles of highway between them, into a single, blurry, gritty medium - as if to reinforce that, in the world that these protagonists (if they can even be called that) inhabit, all such distinctions are meaningless; or, rather, that the initial journey to Los Angeles, made by Al's lover (Sue Roberts), in search of Hollywood stardom, neglects the continuity between the studios and the gutter from which that journey is made.

Powell & Pressburger: 'I Know Where I'm Going!' (1945)

2008-07-03T10:18:47Z

'I Know Where I'm Going!' takes A Canterbury Tale's deflection of narrative into topography to its poetic conclusion, opening with headstrong Joan Webster's (Wendy Hiller) arrival at the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides. There, unfavourable weather prevents her sailing to her wealthy fiancee's lodgings on the (fictional) Isle of Killoran, forcing her to pass the time exploring her surrounds, under the guide of Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), the last of a small outfit of soldiers posted to the area. In another director's hands, this could descend to so much Scottish kitsch, but Powell and Pressburger manage to imbue the landscape with a mystical, or mythological, autonomy - most explicitly in the subsumption of Joan and Torquil into the romantic curse placed upon his family - and, more specifically, in his final, tentative entry into the ruined castle in which that curse is engraved - but most poetically in the subsumption of the film's arc into the twin, ever-widening gyres of a local falconer's latest achievement, and the spectacular use of the infamous whirlpool of Corryvreckan, in which the final sea voyage almost perishes. In the same way, the duo select their locations and subjects with such idiosyncratic precision as to transform them into a host of minor, charismatic characters - from the sole phone box, built on the edge of a steep waterfall, and so rendered redundant by the roar of the winter months, to the local seal colony, whose "song" merges with the Gaelic of their neighbours to evoke a romantic fusion of language and landscape, to which the wry, cultured script is a mere counterpoint.

Siodmak: The Spiral Staircase (1945)

2008-07-02T14:23:10Z

This superb film turns on roughly the same premise as And Then There Were None, but nuances it further in the direction of a proto-slasher aesthetic. Most generally, Siodmak suffuses the (largely housebound) action with a mild hyperbole that lends an ambiguously supernatural aura to the killer. More subtly, by debilitating most female members of that household - a mute chambermaid, a drunken cook, a dying matriarch - and specifying that the killer's modus operandi is a taste for such debilitation, screenwriter Mel Dinelli ensures that the voyeuristic pleasures of his crimes are raised to a sexual pitch, anticipating the masses of dead teenage bodies to come, and beautifully encapsulated in the opening murder, which takes place against a screening of Edison's The Kiss. However, the most impressive gesture is Siodmak's poetic subjectivisation of the house - and, more specifically, his transformation of it into an extension of the killer's giant, omnipresent, aqueous eye, which incorporates everything into its hallucinatory, vertiginous scheme, of which the eponymous staircase is the mere epitome, or culmination. For this reason, horror tends to stem either from the characters' isolated immersion in fluid, connective spaces (corridors, staircases, porches), all of which represent so many variations on the aquarium that preoccupies the master of the house, or from their concomitant failure to recognise the extent to which their 'safe' rooms and communal areas are couched in such liquidity; that is, the extent to which the plot-long storm pervades and infiltrates the house, explaining the profound terror generated by a perpetually, and mysteriously, opened upstairs window.

Clair: And Then There Were None (1945)

2008-07-02T04:31:44Z

And Then There Were None artfully translates the central innovation of Agatha Christie's crime writing - a late, abrupt transition from the third to the first person - into a fusion of the two modes, such that every character on the island upon which the narrative takes place seems to be both author and object of a series of murders sufficiently autonomous to consume everybody, including the perpetrator. To this end, Clair translates his taste for shared space into a visual, rather than aural, register, replacing the musical refrains of his Parisian films with an observation-network in which each character is simultaneously observer and observed, the house that they share becoming a mere synecdoche for the tools of observation - keyholes, windows, binoculars, telescopes - that contain and separate them. Despite the association of this gaze with paranoia, Clair nevertheless manages to suffuse the film with the wry humour of the original, as if to identify the camera with Hals' unsmiling, yet undoubtedly comical, cavalier, a portrait of whom appears in the living room that, along with the kitchen, represents the main space in which this comedy tends to manifest itself, insofar as it relates to the peculiar subversion of etiquette that the murder's anonymity and proximity brings. In the same way, the cast is almost entirely made up of character actors (including Walter Huston, Judith Anderson, Barry Fitzgerald, Roland Young and C. Aubrey Smith), creating a charismatic panorama that both reinforces this wry humour, as well as ensuring that the deaths have a less functional import than in the novel, and the modified conclusion is no more contrived than necessary.

Lewin: The Picture Of Dorian Gray (1945)

2008-07-02T03:55:56Z

This striking adaptation represents one of the few moments in the cinema at which an intrusive, omnipresent narration seems appropriate, since it increasingly coincides with Dorian's (Hurd Hatfield) actions in such a way as to rob him of any interiority, reducing him to the beautiful automaton that Wilde envisaged. That said, Hatfield's maintenance of the same chiselled expression for the duration of the film, combined with Harry Stradling's deep-focus cinematography, tends to construe Dorian as a statue, rather than a painting. Hence Cedric Gibbons' ingenious art direction, which ensures both that every scene has at least one statue or frieze in the background (and generally several), and that these gradually move from a classical (especially Grecian) to oriental (especially Egyptian) register. Not only does this imbue Dorian's beauty with an increasing uncanniness, but it suggests that the distinction between his aestheticism, and painter Basil Hallward's (Lowell Gilmore) Buddhism is a false one; or, alternatively, that aestheticism is merely honest, rather than indulgent. In the same way, the selective use of Technicolour sculpts the portrait itself into a lurid three-dimensionality, while satisfying the novel's deeper, more subversive implication that even the grotesque, or horrifying, represents an aesthetic pleasure - albeit a more difficult one - such that Dorian's moral discovery is ultimately subsumed into his contemplation of the superlative beauty of death, of his own death. The one weakness is George Sanders' portrayal of Lord Henry Wotton which, while occasionally achieving the camp ambiguity of his original, frequently feels like a mere catalogue of Wilde witticisms, as well as an explication of their more mechanical, predictable qualities.

Jennings: A Diary For Timothy (1945)

2008-06-30T13:28:24Z

A Diary For Timothy describes the first six months in the life of a child born on the fifth anniversary of Britain's entry into the war, baptising him in a font whose waters are variously described as those of the pronounced rainy season that struck England in the winter of 1944, the increasingly debarbed and demined coastline, and the pervasive, trickling notes of a lone piano player, which replace the orchestra of Listen To Britain, and are only partly offset by the predominance of Christmas carols in the second half of the film. As this might suggest, the propagandistic solidarity of Jennings' earlier works is replaced by a profound ambivalence that finds most immediate expression as a series of questions, or "things to think about", all of which culminate with the observation that "now that the danger's over for us, life is going to become more dangerous than before, oddly enough, because now we have the power to choose and the right to criticise, and even to grumble. A part of your bother, Tim, will be learning to grow up free." Concomitantly, the concluding remembrance of the aftermath of WWI produces a disorienting mixture of apprehension and melancholy ("Has all this really got to happen again") that finds its precedent in Hamlet's fixture on Yorick's skull, foregrounded in a local production, as well as, more generally, in Jennings' sensitivity to the surrealism, or strangeness, of technology - both military and non-military - most poetically encapsulated in his presentation of a rural family watching a grainy, amateur film of their farm as it stood at the beginning of the war.

Dmytryk: Murder, My Sweet (1944)

2008-06-28T15:30:51Z

As the first noir to fulfil Raymond Chandler's particular hard-boiled vision, Murder, My Sweet complicates narrative to the point of extraneity, explicating it as the mere pretext for a poetic topography of mid-century L.A., as well as an elaboration of its quintessential resident - private eye Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell). Although Bogart may perfect Marlowe's iconic one-liners, Powell's background in musical comedy provides him with the requisite awareness, or assumption, of audience to ensure that his delivery is less solipsistic, more generous and, ultimately, closer to the wry self-deprecation of Chandler's original ("If I always knew what I meant, I'd be a genius"), if not its more embittered overtones. This, in turn, opens up his vulnerabilities, explaining the curious frequency with which he loses consciousness or is physically debilitated, as well as the priority given to his sense of manipulation as the motivating factor in that persistant contemplation of an ostensibly straightforward case that propels the 'narrative'; that is, the pervasive characterisation of his entire trajectory as a mere attempt to forestall an insidious, coercive presence that is ultimately identified with the cityscape itself, necessitating a ceaseless movement between its increasingly amorphous co-ordinates. Hence the continuous sense of being watched, which even extends to the isolated canyon where the crucial murder takes place, confirming Marlowe's quest as one for an elusive omniscience, or objectivity, and his wise-cracking as the attempt to fill in the brooding, unreal silence that settles over his office with dusk, is merely clarified by the neon that illuminates it, and only admits of description, rather than competition: "I just found out, all over again, how big this city is."

Sjöberg: Hets (Torment) (1944)

2008-06-28T09:08:20Z

A late version of the cautionary tales of German Expressionism, Torment explicates their critique as one of the institution, rather than of those individuals who fall victim to its hypocrises and contradictions. As such, it reflects the presence of screenwriter Ingmar Bergman, who centres his narrative on Widgren (Alf Kjellin), a young student faced with two ostensibly different teachers - his girlfriend Pippi (Gösta Cederlund), who represents the same loose feminine virtue as Lulu or Lola-Lola, and his Latin master 'Caligula' (Stig Jarrel), whose sadistic methods inculcate an omniscient fear that finds its stylistic corollary in Sjöberg's taste for high-angle shots, around which the shifting power dynamics tend to arrange themselves. At a certain level, the film's originality lies in its incorporation of these stock figures into a narrative that resists their transparency and, more specifically, characterises female vice as the result of male vice, rather than an incentive to it - a reversal of the entire mythology of original sin that is in keeping with the classical, rather than biblical, register within which the school tends to couch itself, as well as Bergman's own profound religious scepticism. That said, a further subtext seems to reiterate Pippi's inferiority, albeit at an intellectual, rather than a sexual or moral level, as evinced in the troubling efficiency of Caligula's teaching methods, whose proximity to indoctrination, along with the pervasive atmosphere of surveillance, terror and conformity - all of which culminate with the final examination and graduation - subsumes this ambiguity into a surprisingly ambivalent characterisation of fascism, condemning its moral bankruptcy, while grudgingly crediting it with a certain intellectual rigour, and compelling internal logic.

McCarey: Going My Way (1944)

2008-06-28T08:19:08Z

Despite centring on Father Chuck O'Malley's (Bing Crosby) attempt to restore Father Fitzgibbon's (Barry Fitzgerald) New York parish, this sentimental classic artfully excludes religion; or, rather, takes a number of steps to universalise it, opening up the various sources of narrative charisma to a demographic beyond the Irish Catholicism around which they tend to dwell. Most explicitly, O'Malley rarely makes any doctrinal statement, nor gives any concrete indication of why he joined the priesthood - a decision that is consistently remarked upon by past and present friends for its incongruity. At the same time, he equates music with religion in such a way as to construe the various types of performance that occur throughout the film - culminating with his iconic rendition of the title tune - as a secularised liturgy, explaining their consistent proximity to the miraculous, as if the most perfect expression of his faith were a sung sermon. However, the most striking strategy is a reconfiguration of conversion around the distinction between the previous generation of priests - "old fussbudgets" - and those prepared to go out "on the golf- course...in the fresh air"; that is, a conversion away from the very doctrinal pedantry within which conversion usually tends to be couched. From this perspective, it feels as if the film is ultimately offering charismatic patriotism as religion, as evinced in the beatification of the neighbourhood, as well as the restriction of doctrinal sentiment to those business interests threatening it. That said, sufficient religiosity - if not religion - remains to both ensure that O'Malley only ever has a paternalistic, or vicarious, investment in romance, and induce Crosby to maintain an uncharacteristically restrained, thoughtful performance.

Sturges: Hail The Conquering Hero (1944)

2008-06-24T15:24:51Z

Hail The Conquering Hero fufils the military satire lurking around the margins of Morgan's Creek. As in the earlier film, Eddie Bracken plays a small-town boy - Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith - thwarted in his dreams of military service. In this case, however, a group of renegade Marines co-opt him into a scam that involves replacing mild asthma with battle wounds as the reason for his discharge, thereby launching his home town into a patriotic frenzy. Although Bracken is memorable, the film belongs to the head of the Marines, who culminates the persona played by William Demarest in Sturges' oeuvre, as well as clarifying it - and this later strand of that oeuvre - in terms of an identification of America with opportunism, rather than individualism; or, alternatively, an explication of individualism as opportunism, explaining Demarest's curious ability to imbue his duplicity with an endearing, demotic wholesomeness. The result is an artful subversion of militarism, which consists not so much in contradicting it as in raising it to a slightly hysterical pitch - Capra on speed - as evinced both in a continuation of the chaotic, violent subtext of Morgan's Creek, as well as a hyperbolic conflation of different rhetorical registers, of which Truesmith's name is the mere epitome. From this perspective, the central conflict - both military and romantic - occurs between Truesmith and the insatiable, frequently aggressive, patriotism of his neighbours, which ultimately supervenes his revelation of the truth, proving that "Politics is a very peculiar thing...if they want you, they want you. They don't need reasons any more. They find their own...it's just like when a girl wants a man."