The Fountainhead (1948)
The Breaking Point (1950)

The great Edward G. Robinson is the hard-boiled editor of a big-city tabloid. The owner of the paper comes up with the idea of boosting circulation by pursuing a lurid expose on the fate of a woman convicted of a crime of passion 10 years earlier, with tragic consequences.  Directed by the distinguished Mervyn LeRoy, Five Star Final is an early Warner ‘social protest’ movie, and the sort of movie that epitomises the pre-Code talkies: sharp dialog, sexual innuendo, irreverent satire, and social criticism.  While the picture is marred by the stagy treatment of the melodrama involving the family destroyed by the tragedy that ensues, the immensity of the tragedy and its putrid genesis sustain a powerful and still relevant narrative.  Boris Karloff is a hoot as an amoral ‘undercover’ reporter: Edward G. calls him “the most blasphemous thing I’ve ever seen”.

But is it a film noir? I think there are sufficient noir elements to sustain a strong case: the theme of the corrupt brutality of ‘business’, individual entrapment, the futility of trying to escape a dark past, and a downbeat ending.

The final three minutes are brilliant and can be savoured from this clip:

The final image of The Breaking Point (1950), a great John Garfield film directed by Michael Curtiz, and to my mind infinitely superior to a film it is often compared to,  Howard Kawk’s over-rated To Have and Have Not (1944), is the most poignant and subversive image in all of noir.  The death of a decent black man is of no consequence:  his despairing boy ignored and left to discover the fate of his father alone – completely alone.

“Renoir’s second talkie, La Nuit du carrefour (1932)— my all-time favorite French noir, and the sexiest movie he ever made…  his edgy adaptation of Georges Simenon’s Maigret at the Crossroads, filmed in a foggy suburb that vibrates with off-screen sounds and a mysterious Danish heroine (Winna Winifried), cries out for discovery.” - Jonathon Rosenbaum

In 1931 Georges Simenon’s crime novel La Nuit de Carrefour was published by the French pulp magazine Police Magazine:

In 1932 Jean Renoir in his second film adapted the story for the screen:

Featured this month at the Edinburgh International Film Festival: “Dishevelled private eye Nico Beamonte’s latest case comes from God himself – possibly. He wants Nico to find the mysterious Black Panther. But who, or what, is the Black Panther? And what has this got to do with a cryogenically frozen Mariachi singer and a 1950s flying saucer? Surrealism, Mexican-style – as if film noir had collided with props left over from a Ray Harryhausen film.”

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
- Bob Dylan – Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music

It was getting dark. I turned on the bed-side lamp and hit the bed a dead weight.  Closed my tired desparate eyes.  Or that’s how they looked in the fly-specked-mirror in the fetid washroom down the hall. I had splashed water on my face, but I was still bothered by the heat, which hung over me like a sordid blanket. Is this what death is like, or a cold clammy fog in which you are forever lost?

I must have slept or did I?  The slatted light from the flashing red neon sign outside was making crazy patterns on the ceiling.  Discordant jazz notes drifted in through the open window from a bar down in the street.  A woman was wailing now. Somewhere in this flophouse.  Her no-doubt bloated weeping eyes blackened by fear and habitual abuse.  A door slammed and not long after heavy footfalls lumbered down the stairs outside.  She stopped her lament.  The band was no longer playing.  It got quiet.  The silence broken occasionally by car-tyres swishing on the wet asphalt.

The bed was stale and hard, but it was kind of bracing, a distraction from the heat.  It was dark now and the room flashed in and out of a red glow adrift in some parallel universe.  Where was I?  Who was I?  Who cared?  I switched on the radio.  A long dead Jim Morrison was singing.  “When the music’s over, turn out the light”.  Dead 40 long years?  How old was I then? How alive?  How real?  Don’t ask where the years have gone.

I was scared. Always had been. What’s it like to be comfortable in your skin?  To never see the chaos and the terror just beyond.  As empty and lost as I feel?  Who cares?  Another futility to add to the deck.

I had drifted somewhere and woke with a start. The pillow was soaked and my collar awash with a cold sweat. I needed a drink. I grabbed the half-empty Tequila bottle and took a shot.  It burned with a fragrance sweet as my mother’s smile.  I was tired of waiting. Why didn’t they come now and put an end to it.  My hands shook as I lit a cigarette.  My last?  I watched the lingering smoke snake towards the window.  Is this how your soul finally escapes? Slowly and reluctantly before it dissolves into the big night?  I turned off the lamp.

Follow Me Quietly is a an RKO b-noir directed by Richard Fleischer from a story by Anthony Mann, who legend has it was also involved in the direction.  Fliescher directed a number of b’s for RKO, including Bodyguard (1948),  Trapped (1949),  The Clay Pigeon (1949),  Armored Car Robbery (1950), His Kind of Woman (1951uncredited), and  The Narrow Margin (1952).

At 60 minutes Follow Me Quietly packs a powerful punch. In an unusual story, an obsessed cop chases down a serial killer, who in notes left at the murder scene refers to himself  as ‘the judge’.  Sharp dialog  peppered with irony and sardonic humor adds significantly to the entertainment quotient.  A solid b-cast does well and the story is deftly propelled by the screenplay to a climactic shoot-out on an industrial site.  With the able assistance of DP Robert De Grasse (Crack-Up (1946), Bodyguard (1948), and The Clay Pigeon (1949)), Fliescher fashions wonderfully expressionistic expository scenes that are quintessentially noir. Highlights are scenes where the obsessed cop ‘talks’ to a facsimile dummy of the suspect,  and the interrogation of a suspect in a dark police station.  The tight editing by Oscar-winning editor Elmo Williams adds to the pace and the effectiveness of the shoot-out sequence.

I have chosen Follow Me Quietly to illustrate the aesthetics of the b-movie, as the essential features of the category are clearly evident and skilfully executed. The essential features of a b-movie are a small budget and a tight production schedule.  These constraints necessitated second-string players and real demands on the director to deliver on time and on budget.  For these reasons b-movies were used as a training ground for the film-making team.  The renowned French director, Jean Renoir, who spent time in Hollywood in the 1940s – his last Hollywood picture was the cerebral noir The Woman On the Beach (1947) – in a 1954  interview said: “Don’t go thinking that I despise “B” pictures; in general I like them better than big, pretentious psychological films, they’re much more fun. When I happen to go to the movies in America, I go see “B” pictures. First of all, they are an expression of the great technical quality of Hollywood. Because, to make a good western in a week, the way they do at Monogram, starting Monday and finishing Saturday, believe me, that requires extraordinary technical ability; and detective stories are done with the same speed. I also think that “B” pictures are often better than important films because they are made so fast that the filmmaker obviously has total freedom; they don’t have time to watch over him”.

What then are the the aesthetics of  a b-movie?  With the assistance of the Schirmer Encyclopedia Of Film (2007), we can identify these traits as being determined by two essential constraints:

1. A low budget, and
2. A short shooting schedule

which meant the length of the picture did not usually exceed 60-70 minutes, and this in turn imposed a further constraint.

These constraints dictated the film-making techniques the director of a b-movie routinely used to deliver a picture:

• Overt exposition: through (overwrought) dialog and voice-over; montage; collages of newspaper headlines; radio broadcasts and news
• Production efficiencies: cheap sets; day-for-night shooting; use of stock footage; repeated shots; rear-screen projection
• Shooting techniques: dialog scenes filmed by framing all players; tracking shots kept to a minimum (giving a static quality); avoidance of retakes (with the risk of wooden performances, and in thrillers, poor choreography of fight scenes).

In Follow Me Quietly we can see these constraints and techniques exemplified.

For economy, the opening credits are displayed over the opening scene, which is highly expressionistic. The legs of a young  woman in high heels are seen pacing the pavement in the rain at night – she is wearing a transparent raincoat.  After the credits have finished the camera moves up to show her in full profile: she is smoking and it is revealed she is pacing in front of a bar.  She flicks the cigarette away with a very déclassé gesture and enters the bar.  A dubious moral tone has been established.  As it turns out, the woman is not a b-girl, but a reporter for a sleazy tabloid ‘true crimes’ magazine – I wonder if she is wearing the same raincoat worn by Joan Bennett in Fritz Lang’s  Scarlet Street (1946)?

Soon, the history of the case and the lead cop’s obsession are related through some labored dialog between the cop, his buddy, and their boss at the latest crime scene.  This scene is typical of the movie’s dialog scenes: the players are all within the frame and facing or partly facing the stationary camera.  Schirmer describes this approach as follows: “rather than shooting dialogue as a series of complex shot/reverse shot combinations (shooting over the shoulder of one actor, then the other), which requires multiple set-ups, relighting, and time in the editing room to assemble the footage, B directors would cut corners.  Dialogue scenes were often filmed by framing all of the actors together facing each other, but turned slightly toward the camera. The conversation unfolds in a single, extended shot— effectively eliminating the time necessary for additional set-ups and the editing needed to achieve shot/reverse shot combinations. Moving camera shots were usually kept to a minimum because of the expense and time needed to mount them.  As a result of these factors, the majority of B movies have a relatively static quality.”

Follow Me Quietly uses a few basic internal sets, which are mostly darkly lit.  Stock footage of suspects being rounded up and police cars in traffic are used throughout. One scene of  cop cars speeding towards the camera and delivering suspects to a police station I have seen in at least three other RKO features, and as  late as Joseph.  Lewis’  1955 noir  The Big Combo.

There is a wonderfully done montage of shots depicting the deployment of cops in the manhunt triggered by a shot of a police photographer taking a photo of  the facsimile dummy of  ‘the judge’, cutting to scenes of the mass production and distribution of  the photo, then cops and  squad-cars hitting the streets, and finally suspects being apprehended and hauled into a line-up.

There are other examples in the movie, but I will leave it to readers to explore them when they get a chance to watch this very entertaining and well-made noir.

For Australian readers, Target is having a big DVD sale starting tomorrow, and you can pick-up a number of  classic noirs for only Aus$8.99 each!

I have identified the following original studio release DVDs from the on-line catalog:

Hollywood:

• You Only live Once
• Gaslight
• The Maltese Falcon
• Key Largo
• The Big Sleep
• To Have and Have Not

British:

• The Fallen Idol
• The Criminal
• The Man Between
• Brighton Rock