The lurid original posters for The Big Bluff are those rare cinematic documents, where the movie promoted is actually sleazier than the posters would have you believe.

A suave grifter latches on to a dying woman with dough, only he is impatient to see her gone.  His evil machinations are his undoing.  The sheer perversity of the scenario and its relentless immorality leave you stunned.  Don’t go figuring this is a cinematic experience. It has the bitter flavour of festering reality, and is played out in a fetid LA where evil ambition and a conniving race to the bottom suck you down into a putrid swamp.  The homme-fatale is tripped-up in a quintessential noir dénouement, twisted and out of left field.

A b-movie par-excellence that is so compelling it feels much longer than the economical 70 minutes it takes to go from melodrama to perdition.

Director W. Lee Wilder, Billy Wilder’s estranged brother, and DP Gordon Avil, keep the action up, with some crazy antics like what-the-heck low angle and point-of-view shots that keep you unsettled in flash noir style, not to mention some tawdry kissing that literally mists up the screen.

Check out the cheap cabaret act featuring a floozy so vulgar you are in no doubt of where you are headed.

Pre-code Hollywood was frank about sex, and women were more than appendages to male heroics.  Though the male gaze ensured these dames were hot and not just adventurous.

While the Warners Bros. adaptation of William Faulkner’s trash novel ‘Sanctuary’ took a while to get made, when it hit the screen the studio didn’t cut corners nor dolly things up. The Story of Temple Drake is all of 71 minutes and not surprisingly coherent story-telling is a casualty, yet the lurid plot is handled with a compelling economy and frankness, strongly abetted by the suitably dark lensing of Karl Struss, whose expressionist lighting of horrendous close-ups insinuates a decadent menace into the melodrama.

Wide-eyed and gorgeous, a not so young Miriam Hopkins brings a simmering sexuality to her portrayal of a woman whose lurid appetites are kept in check by a veneer of respectability – and a genuine awareness of her tendency to self-destruct.  For all her baseness, she has a moral centre that only needs to be coerced into action. Trouble is on both occasions she aids her own demise. First by killing, and then into making an admission of guilt that has severe consequences.

While Temple Drake is no femme-fatale and her actions are reactive, she cannily prefigures those hard dames that were let loose less than a decade later.

This notorious pre-coder is essential viewing.

PI’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are outsiders, loners, whose chivalry is not esteemed let alone recognised, and it is sure as hell doesn’t pay well. Men who eke out their existence on the periphery, up against the rank underbelly of that rapacious beast, the modern metropolis. For the purveyors of the American Dream they are losers. Yet they are mythic.

In a recently published essay on the myth of the cowboy, the late British historian and Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, draws a parallel between “Gary Cooper at high noon” and Sam Spade.  A worthy comparison.

“Individualist anarchism had two faces. For the rich and powerful it represents the superiority of profit over law and state. Not just because law and the state can be bought, but because even when they can’t, they have no moral legitimacy compared to selfishness and profit. For those who have neither wealth nor power, it represents independence, and the little man’s right to make himself respected and show what he can do. I don’t think it was an accident that the ideal-typical cowboy hero of the classic invented west was a loner, not beholden to anyone; nor, I think, that money was not important for him… In a way the loner lent himself to imaginary self-identification just because he was a loner. To be Gary Cooper at high noon or Sam Spade, you just have to imagine you are one man.”

- Source: An extract from Eric Hobsbawm’s final book Fractured Times published by The Guardian as ‘The Myth of the Cowboy‘

Though there were occasions when a dame pulled a gun and used it.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Murder My Sweet (1944)

Blues in the Night (1941)

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

Too Late for Tears (1949)

Out of the Past (1947)

Repeat Performance (1947)

Gun Crazy (1950)

Deception (1946)

PI Philip Marlowe has the poet’s eye for the softer edges of existence while enmeshed in the hard reality of greed, corruption, and criminal passions.  The smell of places, dirt and dust, smog, rain, the sun on baking asphalt, the twilight that has no sunlight lit by dull incandescent bulbs that throw shadows in bars where angst is held at bay for as long as a shot of  booze does its job. A respite from the desperate loneliness of men and women in big cities where ethical conduct and loyalty are not rewarded but ridiculed, and get you into trouble, and deep.  You give up on true relationships and, well, love, it just doesn’t bare thinking about.

 “I watched the cab out of sight. I went back up the steps and into the bedroom and pulled the bed to pieces and remade it. There was a long dark hair on one of the pillows. There was a lump of lead at the pit of my stomach. The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase a for everything and they are always right.  To say good-bye is to die a little.”

- [Raymond Chandler, 'The Long Goodbye']

Film Noir FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Hollywood’s Golden Age of Dames, Detectives, and Danger (Applause 2013) by David J. Hogan is a great new paperback book on Hollywood noir covering the classic cycle from the 40s and 50s.  A hefty tome it weighs in at 420 pages and covers around 200 movies.  Author Hogan’s prose is snappy and engaging. His down-to-earth Introduction gets you hooked from the get-go.  Noir icon Lizabeth Scott has provided a short but razor-sharp note on the contents page.

The book has seven chapters and a bonus section on neo-noir. Each chapter has a theme, with titles like ‘The War Between Men and Women’ and ‘The Best Laid-Plans’. Within each chapter Hogan reviews a selection of films illustrating the chosen theme, and includes sidebars titled ‘Case Files’ throughout that feature mini-bios of important names in the noir universe.

What I particularly like is the way Hogan approaches the films under discussion.  He avoids spoilers by eschewing laboured plot outlines.  His concerns are thematic, and his focus is on the cinematic experience, with due consideration to not only the stars and directors, but to the writers, cinematographers, and other artisans that were involved in a film’s production. Hogan also aptly quotes dialog from some of the movies, and shares a lot of background on the making of many of the films.

The book is sparingly illustrated in monochrome – what other color would you want for a book on film noir?  - but the chosen frames, stills, and posters are well-chosen and of excellent quality.

While Hogan has a narrower definition of the film noir cannon than some, all the motifs and the essential films are there.

The Film Noir FAQ is must for any film noir fan, and is a great primer for those who want a fast-track to a fuller appreciation of film noir. At US$22.99 the book is a ‘big steal’.

The book can be purchased on-line from Amazon and the publisher. Amazon at the time of writing has only three copies left at the special price of US$13.45.

The Locket (1946)

The producer-added ending to Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) merged the horrific scenario that went before into an hallucination of the protagonist’s disturbed mind. The savage critique of Germany’s emerging fascism was blunted, but a new dark expressionism survived. States of mind and dreams were irrevocably projected onto the cinema screen. Fetishism and fantastic scenarios ushered in the demonic and the surreal.

The deranged mind in Caligari was revealed through flashback.  Cinema moving backwards and forward in time, a quantum leap that thrust the oneiric engagement of the viewer within the frame of flickering images from passive observer to a participant who must engage actively in constructing a narrative.  The revealed unreliability of the narrative throwing the viewer into an abyss of incomprehension and confusion in movies like Un Chien Andolou.  A fractured kaleidoscope where meaning is continually undone and rewoven before the audience’s eyes.

Akira Kurosawa’s break-through movie Rashomon (1950), uses multiple flashbacks by different narrators to explore the nature of truth.  Truth not as fact, not as concrete events, but truth as competing and self-serving ‘stories’ about the narrator’s experience of a crime as recalled by different protagonists.  Kurosawa based his scenario on a short story by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa, which, unlike Kurosawa’s film, has the differing and conflicting re-tellings of the crime left hanging and unresolved.  Kurosawa on the other hand pursues a contrived moralism by adding a redemptive ending about the adoption of a foundling in swaddling clothes.

The creative influence of German expressionism on the dark Hollywood b-movies known as film noir through a generation of expatriate European directors is well-documented.  One such director is John Brahm, who in the 1946 b-movie The Locket made audacious use of flashbacks from different narrators in a story about a schizophrenic woman who is both a kleptomaniac and a murderer. The woman’s psychosis is revealed through not only a series of flashbacks from different narrators, but at one point, a flashback within a flashback.  I have previously reviewed The Locket here. In this discussion, a quote from  Borde’s & Chaumeton’s  seminal ‘A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 (1955) is sufficient:  “Never has the device of the flashback been taken so far.  Narratives are jumbled up, parentheses opened, exploits slot one inside the other like those Chinese toys sold in bazaars, and the figure of the heroine gradually comes into focus…”. Also, due credit should be given to Sheridan Gibney and Norma Barzman (uncredited), who wrote the original script. The ending is decidedly downbeat with a dark irony pointing not only to the uncertainty of the anti-hero’s fate, and an ambivalence about her culpability, but overarching doubts about the reliability of each and all the narrators of her story.

The Big Knife is labelled a film noir by some.  I don’t see it myself. Rather an overwrought pot-boiler.

A  melodrama about Hollywood that out-melodramas Hollywood.  Cloister an ensemble of A-list actors in a Hollywood bungalow with maverick-director Robert Aldrich, all singing from an operatic song-sheet courtesy of a play from Clifford Odets, with some snappy camera moves, amidst the hot-house boundaries of a posh living room, and the histrionics hit the roof.

Filmed with a flatness and harsh lighting that washes out any nuance or ambivalence, the players are left to strut their stuff with exaggerated gestures and contrived rhetoric.  The picture may just as well have played as a radio soap.  It is hard to conceive that the same director had just completed the great Kiss Me Deadly. One of the rare occasions I can agree with the NY Times’ Bosley Crowther, who on the film’s release saw “a group of sordid people jawing at one another violently”.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

Pantomime

She sleeps, lips round, see how at rest
how dark the hair, unstrung with all the world
see the desirable eyes, how still, how white, sealed
to all faces, locked against ruin, favor, and every
risk

Nothing behind them now but a pale mirage
through which the night-time ragman of the street
below moves in a stiff and slow ballet
rhythmic from door to door, hallway to curb and
gutter to stoop, bat’s eyes bright, ravenous,
ravenous for the carrion found and brought by
tireless fingers to unreal lips

Her hand relaxed beside the enchanted head, mouth red,
small
see how at peace the human form can be, whose
sister, whose sweetheart, daughter of whom,
and now the adorable ears, coral and pink
deaf to every footfall, every voice
midnight threats, the rancor stifled in rented bed-
rooms, appeals urged across kitchen tables and
the fury that shouts them down, gunfire,
screams, the sound of pursuit
all of these less than the thunderous wings of a moth
that circles here in the room where she sleeps

Sleeps, dreaming that she sleeps and dreams.

-From ‘Dead Reckoning’, A Book of Poetry by Kenneth Fearing (Random House, NY, 1938)

Jigsaw is a rollicking thriller so camp you forgive the preposterous plot and thank the heavens for bringing it your way. A weirder movie you could not imagine. Franchot Tone is a NY special prosecutor pursuing a murky underground hate group with tentacles in the highest echelons of the city’s elite government and business circles. Tone’s delicious turn has shades of his acerbically ironic portrayal of a PI in the excellent I Love Trouble from the year before.

But the dames steal the picture. Winifred Lenihan, an actress who only ever appeared in this movie and another obscure picture from 1931, is a delight as a middle-aged socialite with a hidden agenda, while another stringer Jean Wallace (Kiss Me Deadly) has you enthralled as a sexy – and intelligent – blonde cabaret singer with sinister connections.

To add to the puzzle, you have a bunch of A-listers in uncredited bit parts. Names like Marlene Dietrich, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Marsha Hunt, Burgess Meredith, and Everett Sloane.

It takes a while to get moving, but once it kicks in, look out. A must-see.