Part of the fun of having an interest in old movies is discovering an obscure title. Full Confession is so obscure that I could find only one frame and a lobby card on the Web, and no posters. It is not on DVD and while TCM has the movie in its catalog, it is not currently scheduled. I caught it on late night television over here.

While Full Confession is no lost gem, it deserves attention. Ostensibly a b-melodrama from the RKO factory, it is interesting for a number of reasons.

A compelling if contrived plot has a Catholic priest from an Irish parish connected in the fate of two men: a family man unjustly facing the chair for murder and the actual killer, who has been paroled from a stretch for robbery. The killer who had after a prison ‘accident’ confessed to the murder to the priest in a death-bed confession, survives after receiving a blood transfusion of the priest’s blood. The killer is not an evil man but tragically impulsive and this, together with his loving relationship with a modest and decent woman who is not aware of his guilt, evoke sympathy for his desire to ignore his conscience and make a new life. The dramatic tension of the priest being bound by the secrecy of the confessional and the imperative to save an innocent man drives the narrative once the killer is released.

A strong film crew and cast give the movie a certain patina. The director is John Farrow with cinematography by Roy Hunt, and original music by Roy Webb. An ensemble of veteran character actors complete the picture: Victor McLaglen plays the killer, Sally Eilers is the girl he loves, Joseph Calleia plays the priest, and Barry Fitzgerald the condemned man.

Farrow and Hunt while hobbled by some clunky expository sequences, which are largely the fault of the script, for the most part fashion impressive dramatically expressionistic scenes from, by necessity, darkly-lit studio sets, evoking the protagonist’s state of mind as he battles with his conscience and lashes out with desperate physical responses to his predicament. There are also well-constructed collages and voice-overs to portray his inner turmoil evocatively underscored by Roy Webb’s eerie orchestral accompaniment. Farrow uses the camera with panache and many scenes see the mise-en-scene explored with fluid elegant takes. Some scenes are overtly self-conscience, but are within the limitations imposed by the constraints of b film-making, and to be expected.

This expressionism and evident noir motifs I think fully qualify Full Confession as an early noir. We have the themes of fate dealing losing cards, physical entrapment and mental anguish, and redemption as a double-edged sword.

Essential if you are interested in the origins of the classic film noir cycle.

In this early Jean Renoir film with a magically delicious femme-noir and a brilliant car chase at night, were sewn the seeds of French poetic realism that flourished later in the 30s in the films of Marcel Carné and others.

La Nuit de Carrefour is a largely faithful adaption of Georges Simenon’s gloomy pulp policier ‘Maigret at the Crossroads’.  Renoir in a television introduction to the movie in the early 60s said the screenplay is deliberately episodic and the rough-edges exaggerate the obscurity of the story to create an atmosphere of mystery.  A review of the film in Time Out says the rough edges come from Renoir running out of cash before completion, while a story put about by Godard says that some footage is missing.  It is a moot point though as the picture is great as is.

The cinematography of Georges Asselin and Marcel Lucien is dark and brooding, with foggy rural night scenes infiltrating even interior shots.  An exhilarating car-chase at night filmed from the pursuing car in real-time uses only the car headlights, and is an exemplar of the creative fusion of director, camera, and editor.  The editor is Renoir’s wife, Marguerite.

Is placement of the off-kilter 'virginal' portrait deliberate?

In the film, a city detective investigates a murder in a small rural burg, with suspicion surrounding the strange foreign tenants of a mysterious house: a bizarre ménage comprising a stoned b-girl and her reclusive ‘brother’, who as a foreigner with a weak alibi is the immediate suspect.  The girl Else, played to delicious perfection by Danish actress, Winna Winifried, steals the picture. Renoir has aptly described Else as a ‘bizarre gamin’. You want Else to be in every scene – she is stunning and her turn is so lascivious. While in the book Else has more depth and is certainly less screwy, I think I prefer her screwy and sexy! Particularly memorable is the ambivalence of the relationship between Else and the detective, played by Renoir’s brother, Pierre, which is woven into the mis-en-scene with erotic abandon and casual elegance.  My poetic homage to Else is here.

The story plays as a classic who-done-it, but by the end the veneer of the bucolic ville is stripped away to reveal a rotten reality where almost all residents, both workers and bourgeois, are complicit in a drug-trafficking racket, that segued into murder over the loot from a jewel heist.  The irony is that the early suspect, Else’s brother, is innocent, while Else has been trapped by her past into a forced complicity that will see her released from jail early.

If you like your noir dark, sexy, mysterious and sharply witty, go for it!

No colors anymore I want them to turn black

Electric stars on main street
No moonlight
A desert wilderness of concrete and steel
Sphinx cars abandoned relics
of  broken dreams
gravestones for lost souls

For Else

Stoned, immaculate

Siren for a delicious purgatory
a wanton butterfly she flutters wings that beckon
to a bed of lurid bliss

She mopes she languishes she swoons
she formulates a trajectory to the stars
from the milky way of her bosom to the glistening ivory of her ice cold thighs

A gambit for a gentle trap so you can fall into a warm moist grotto
and shut her doe eyes with kisses four

She does not leave you by a cold hill side
but caresses your tongue in her luscious mouth
her lips labia that clasp a deep penetration
and hold you transfixed

She leaves you a broken wreck
panting for more

You beg for
just a glimpse

An insolent glare has you shuddering
you want her to incinerate you with those eyes
incendiary transports to a cosmic nirvana

Her anger and petulant pout
a delirium
a narcotic -
you will expire for a fix

Until she graces her enfolding embrace over you
and sighs deep ecstatic sighs

Agony
Until she turns you to her
and you drown in a dark languid pool

“I don’t do much business with preachers”

Ray Milland is Lucifer, alias Nick Beal ‘Agent’, who, with the help of b-girl Audrey Totter goes shopping for the soul of honest DA and aspiring governer Thomas Mitchell.  Add to the mix smart direction from John Farrow, a killer script from Jonathon Latimer, superb noir lensing by Lionel Lindon, and a haunting score from Franz Waxman. Garnish with a bespectacled George Macready cast against type as a reverend running a boy’s club, and you have a thoroughly entertaining melodrama. Milland dominates as Beelzebub in a sharp suit and rakish fedora. He slaps, ices, insinuates, and connives a swathe through the earnest life of Joseph Foster DA, after with his help Foster naively cuts a legal corner in nailing a hood.  The mis-en-scene is canny, and particularly inspired is the use of a seedy wharf-side bar as Nick’s ‘office.’ The only weakness is the bible-saves ending, though Nick is left free to disappear into a harbor fog to corrupt other souls.

The story offers an intriguing twist to the noir punishment and redemption motifs.  Nick has a written contract for the DA’s soul – vetted  as enforceable by his global legal team – which will only be triggered if when-push-comes-to-shove Foster does the right thing by a public mea-culpa and renouncing of his ill-gotten gains.  A wily trap indeed.   The jaws snap shut at the instant of redemption. But a noir ending would have had the hapless DA disappearing into the fog en-route to the Island of Almas Perdidas.

The noir city in all its desperate foreboding: a dancing sign flashes in an angel’s face.  An angel innocent and afraid yet ventures into the seething labyrinth with a stranger, her husband, running from capture into the city of entrapment.

You trust no-one, fear the worst, and blunder from one dead-end into another.  Dark faces and sharp dressers in sinister doorways.  Share a cab with a bawling waif, a dying woman on borrowed time, and a suspicious driver.  Stop! Get out!  Onto dark streets, smoke-filled dives, cafés on the edge of purgatory, and hellish rooms for rent.  A young girl in pig-tails as likely to betray you as the mother with arms folded in menace then her cold hand out for payment in advance.  Nowhere left to run.  The rented room a cell you can’t leave.

“I didn’t do it.” You believe him, why did he run?

They find you anyway, and take him away.

Where to now? The loyal ex, the nice guy you rejected with his pipe and his dog. He’ll know. Back to the hotel.  A letter sent too early, an echo of another to be sent, waiting for you.  What does it mean? Turn around fast. The street is a long way down. Run.  The beau doesn’t, it’s all cool. Packs his bag, stuffs an envelope, and mails it at the lift-well while the inquisitive cop isn’t looking.  He can’t sweat it though, he panics, it all falls down, and the new letter bursts open with the truth.

“the ‘meaning’ of the noir city is not to be found in the narrative’s surface
details but in its shadows, in the intangibles of tone and mood” *

The more I read about noir, the more I am convinced that few pundits, critics, academics, or film bloggers really know noir. Sure, there are many who write lyrically and compellingly, there are those who can mimic to perfection the hard-boiled lingo, and there are those who have a thorough knowledge of the history and the arcane, but most don’t understand noir.

Noir is a semiotic aesthetic. It is not about the surface, it is about the shadows. The noir narrative is only a framework for holding together a dark but deeply moral vision of life. Noir is not morally ambivalent: it is unforgiving and the transgressor pays for his transgressions. While the punishment of destiny is inescapable, there is the chance of redemption, and redemption comes from a deep compassion. A compassion that comes from the knowledge of the chaos and the utterly random contingency at the core of existence. Noir goes beyond the despair of the existentialists, it finds in the desperate and often violent failings of humanity, the soul. The soul that is not corporeal yet pervades physical reality by manifesting our sins and desires in the dark shadows of night, when the alienating mantel of awareness dissolves into those places where lost souls wander: the dives, the dark city streets, lonely desolate beaches, dust country roads, squalid tenements, and dank stairwells.

Forget all you have read about noir and look at noir with your own eyes and ears. Welcome to the shadows.

*Frank Krutnik, ‘Something More Than Night’, The Cinematic City (ed David B. Clarke), p 98-99

I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life… I stopped, frozen with ecstasy on the sidewalk. I looked down Market Street. I didn’t know whether it was that or Canal Street in New Orleans: it led to water, ambiguous, universal water, just as 42nd Street, New York, leads to water, and you never know where you are… And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotuslands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn’t die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back to Marylou’s hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up. I was too young to know what had happened.

On The Road, 1957