“Veronica Mars” (2004-07) for a dose of noir

She used to be friends with them, a long time ago, but they hardly think of her lately except to hurl a couple of those old accusations at her. It all fell apart when Veronica Mars’ best friend was murdered. Not long after, Veronica lost her place among the anointed super-rich of Neptune and she went back to being just another lower-middle-class kid – one of many who live in the shadow of (or who provide services to) those extravagantly arrogant one-percenters.

The fact that she’s had a foot on either side of that fence makes her the perfect observer of both worlds. Veronica is cynical, sure, but she’s still capable of being shocked by the depths of sordid ugliness she witnesses in her crepuscular investigations. Moving back and forth between those different worlds of social rank – and between the brilliant SoCal daylight and its nighttime neon crappiness — makes her a liminal figure, prickly and slightly nostalgic about the naïf she used to be, about the love she used to feel for her lock-jawed, troubled ex-boyfriend, Duncan Kane, and her murdered best friend (Duncan’s sister) Lilly.

What’s not to love about Veronica Mars, at least seasons 1 and 2? Its skewering of the 1%, the diminutive Kristen Bell in the lead role (and the excellent Enrico Colantoni as her gumshoe father, an actor who raises the quality of every scene), the wisecracking dialogue. But what I love best is the cross-cutting of genres between film noir with the high school teen dramedy. Veronica is a modern-day Sam Spade/ Philip Marlowe, whose hard nose is pretty hard, yet still allows for a few sensitive spots where she can still be offended, hurt, disgusted, or maybe swept off her feet. (I maintain that Rian Johnson’s Brick, which won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, must’ve been indebted to Veronica Mars as an influence.)

It’s those California noir night scenes I love best – the ones in which she sits in her crappy car on a stakeout, or in her father’s private detective office with the glow of a computer screen. The cinematographer never missed an opportunity to give us more of that vivid noir texture: the nighttime ripples of an apartment-building swimming pool, the shadows and grime of the Camelot Motel under the harsh glow of streetlights. Those places where she’s alone and lets the melancholy move in, like coastal fog. Where she’s not performing those publicly-acceptable versions of herself. Where she’s allowed to think.

It’s such a good emotional escape — to hunt down one or two of those episodes at TheWB.com (despite all the ads; sorry ’bout that) and let yourself dive in. It’s a kind of noir you don’t get to see enough of, and which hits a wide range of pleasure centers. Why don’t any other teen shows opt for noir rather than melodrama?

“Where the Sidewalk Ends” (1950)

When I think of old Hollywood glamour and mystery, I think Gene Tierney. Like Hedy Lamarr and Merle Oberon, she had one of those faces that just seemed to convey so much — more, maybe, than existed in real life. She has an almost Asian face, with those unusually slanted pale eyes; but then there’s her oddly out-of-place mouth, which looks perfect closed but seems pinched when she speaks. Being entranced by her surely dates from my seeing the classic film noir Laura (1944) at a very impressionable age.

In Laura, the other characters talk about her mostly in flashback for an excruciatingly long period of time because she’s presumed dead — and they speak about her with such reverence that the gritty, laconic police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) starts to fall in love with her in a clumsy way, gazing at her portrait. Maybe it’s easy to idealize a dead woman; no one has any doubts about why McPherson falls so hard. As a kid watching it for the first time I had no idea that she would appear, like a vision, midway through the film, not dead at all, and slightly harder in real life than the idealized version would have had her. It’s a terrific plot twist — and the only problem I ever had with that brilliant film was that I was never sure why Laura fell for him, too.

So imagine my delight to discover Where the Sidewalk Ends, also starring Andrews and Tierney, also directed by the great Otto Preminger. I can’t emphasize enough what a great film this is, and such a great follow-up to Laura. Andrews’ character is even named Mark again, which gives Tierney the chance to pronounce it Mahwk in that same low, refined way. Andrews is a complicated, crooked anti-hero, much more fleshed out and darker than in the earlier film; his mouth is set in an even more unforgiving, hard line, especially in all those bitter close-ups. It’s as if he’s still that other Mark, except more brutal. And Tierney almost seems to be Laura again except a sad six years and an unhappy marriage later. She’s just as beautiful, but a bit haunted and still attracted to the wrong men.

The earlier film Laura haunts Where the Sidewalk Ends just the way the portrait/fantasy of Laura haunted Mark McPherson. But in the latter, their tentative romance plays out against the gritty city streets of New York, filmed beautifully on location, and in an ordinary little café, owned by an older woman Mark helped out of a jam that one time. The two of them banter/bicker back & forth at one another in a practiced way, which delights Tierney — who wouldn’t be charmed by a man whose biggest fan likes to joust with him while serving him bowls of soup?

See this film — it’s streaming on Netflix and is also available here on YouTube in an uncut version. Better yet, give yourself a two-night double feature of both films, in order. This is film noir at its best, and tell me whether it makes you fall for Tierney’s mystery as well.

Leave this kind of writing to the professionals.

Novelist James Agee was famous during the 1940s for his movie reviews in The Nation and Time — indeed, W. H. Auden called those reviews “the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today.” I’m reading some of them now, and they’re so terrific that they prompt me to emit involuntary outbursts of glee. His writing somehow packs all manner of ideas into single sentences without taking on that confusing and bloated quality that one sees in one’s own writing. For example, about the film Out of the Past (above) Agee writes:

In love scenes [Robert Mitchum’s] curious langour, which suggests Bing Crosby supersaturated on barbiturates, becomes a brand of sexual complacency that is not endearing. Jane Greer, on the hand, can best be described, in an ancient idiom, as a hot number.

I can’t even tell you how happy this kind of writing makes me. And how much it makes me need to see Out of the Past again. And how much it makes me warn amateurs against attempting such feats of descriptive gymnastics. (Many thanks to the Unexplained Cinema site, which turned me on to Agee’s collected film writing.)

Noir women: “Laura” (1944)

I’m writing this for the Film Noir Blogathon, put together for the benefit of preserving important film noir by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Film. I realize I’m late to this party – it took me a while to find an appropriate film because noir women often aren’t very interesting (and women are, after all, my thing on this blog). Lucky, then, that Otto Preminger’s Laura came to mind. Gene Tierney was at the perfect height of her perfect beauty; we believe she’s been murdered for half the film, yet somehow she becomes nearly our protagonist by the end; she wavers between possibly murderous suspect and perfect wish-fulfillment fantasy girl. Most of all, she’s a strikingly sympathetic character for female viewers because of she’s a version of a self-made woman, yet she’s got only bad choices when it comes to men. In fact, I think one of the most fascinating subjects of this great film is class — hers, theirs, and what class does in relationships between men and women.At first, Laura Hunt (Tierney) is only the murdered girl, the one remembered by the other suspects because during her life she was fought over by two men: the middle-aged, imperious, deliciously venomous columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) and Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a slippery, smooth-tongued Southern gentleman down on his luck. Fought over for good reason. Laura was smart and beautiful, came up through the ranks at her advertising agency, was beloved for her gentleness and elegance. They speak of her in reverent terms. No wonder the detective assigned to the case, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), falls a little bit in love with her himself, and falls asleep in her apartment underneath her lovely portrait — raising the question why a 22-year-old career woman in 1940s New York would have her own portrait above the fireplace. It’s such a lovely picture, however, that we don’t wonder for long.

That’s the thing, you see: Laura’s class is unclear, as she’s not exactly a self-made woman. Sure, she started out as a low-level copywriter in her firm, but it was Waldo’s mentorship, influence, and assistance in gaining attention and prestigious endorsements that led to her professional rise. He also helped decorate her apartment — even going so far as to loan her beautiful objects d’art for display, thereby imprinting her flat with his rococo/queer sense of feminine taste. In return, she showered him with appreciation, admiration, and a feminine gift for listening to him read his own columns aloud. As far as Waldo is concerned, her only shortcoming was her tendency to fall in love with men who didn’t deserve her; he wanted her to remain the ever-dedicated, supplicant woman who made him look good. As Waldo explains in a long conversation with Mark:

Laura had innate breeding, but she deferred to my judgment and taste. I selected a more attractive hairdress for her. I taught her what clothes were more becoming to her. Through me, she met everyone. The famous and the infamous. Her youth and beauty, her poise and charm of manner captivated them all. She had warmth, vitality. She had authentic magnetism. Wherever we went, she stood out: men admired her, women envied her. She became as well known as Waldo Lydecker’s walking stick and his white carnation. But Tuesday and Friday nights we stayed home, dining quietly, listening to my records. I read my articles to her. The way she listened was more eloquent than speech. These were the best nights. Then one Tuesday, she phoned and said she couldn’t come.

Shelby’s motives are even less attractive: having come into Laura’s life after her professional and social successes, he wants to ride her coattails — she’s already given him a job at the firm — and, probably, milk her for cash. In short, for Shelby Laura is a guarantor of status and income, while for Waldo she’s the perpetually grateful recipient of a hand up. Nor are we viewers confident things would be different with Mark. Waldo’s right: Mark calls women “dames” and “dolls,” laments the time a “doll in Washington Heights got a fox fur out of me,” and seems partly impressed with Laura because she’s just so exotic to his gritty life. Sitting in her crazily feminine apartment he seems almost creepy, even as we forgive him his awkwardness. Who is this Laura, really, with all these different views of her?

Complicating this smoky view of the film’s central figure is its propensity to shift protagonists. At first it would appear Waldo is our man, with his snarky narration and terrific gift with one-liners (the screenplay is perfect, most of all when a good line is handed to the brilliant Clifton Webb). Mark McPherson is a laconic, unassuming character with the questionable habit of toying with a little pocket puzzle rather than look anyone in the eye. But suddenly 30 minutes in, a long shot of Mark signals that things have shifted; we start following his investigation and privileging his view of the case, especially as he thumbs through Laura’s diary and letters or interviews her devoted maid, Bessie. Yet even as we watch Mark become obsessed with the dead girl, he’s more of a mystery than a full-fledged protagonist — so when Laura reappears in her apartment demanding to know what he’s doing there, we might be ready to shift our loyalties to her. Except for the fact that if she’s not the victim, she might be the murderer.

According to old-movie and film-noir logic, it’s natural that Laura would fall in love with Mark — our damaged protagonists should always get the girl in the end. But female viewers might view this narrative progression sideways. She clearly makes more money than this down-in-the-mouth detective and lives a more glamorous life with that money. When we see her deal gracefully, effortlessly with the maid Bessie as if she’d had hired maids all her life, we get an indication not just of that “innate grace” Waldo described; but we also see that Mark shares more in common with Bessie than with Laura. With his clenched-jaw lack of conversation, he won’t just fit in to her life, which means that perhaps she’ll be the one to sacrifice it to be his wife. Or will this be yet another of her brief, unsatisfying relationships with inappropriate men? That’s the most likely scenario; we won’t arrive at the answer, of course, because the film ends too soon. But we can speculate and think about how Laura‘s shifting protagonists begs female viewers to perceive a different narrative emerging from the film. Maybe I’m reading the film anachronistically — maybe we’re supposed to see Laura as a woman who makes do with the inadequate men presented to her. But somehow I don’t think so. I think one of the reasons this film still works so well is that nagging feeling one still has at the end, even after the murder mystery has been cleared up, that there’s still more misery in store for our heroine.

Great movie still of the day

It’s a busy day and none of my half-written drafts are cooked yet, so I’m offering you this still from 1945′s Fallen Angel with Linda Darnell and Dana Andrews, the latter of whom is lurking outside the bar in a great, evocative shot. This image comes in celebration of the upcoming film noir blog-a-thon coordinated by the Self-Styled Siren and others to help promote the preservation of film. Something to look forward to indeed. I’m also looking forward to having the time to finish a few things once I survive a particularly busy few days.

Feminéma’s Best of 2010: “Winter’s Bone”

Living outside of New York, LA or Chicago means I haven’t had the chance to see a lot of this year’s critics’ picks for best film, like Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, Mike Leigh’s Another Year, and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. Even given those gaps, however, I want to make an argument for Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone as the year’s best film and as the right film for the award during a hard year of financial crisis and jobless recovery.

I could have chosen a film that exemplified the movies’ capacity to tell great stories that take us outside ourselves to that place of pleasure and wonder. Winter’s Bone might not have been so feel-good, but it was just as great a tale as Toy Story 3, True Grit, The Kids Are All Right, or The King’s Speech.  It made a better and more unpredictable thriller than Black Swan or A Prophet, and much, much better than The Ghost Writer, Shutter Island, and Inception.

In my mind, its real battle is with David Fincher’s The Social Network, a battle it will surely lose. The Social Network benefits from a timely story, massive ticket sales, an all-star directing/writing/production team, and — let’s face it — the focus on dudes and those epic battles involving testosterone and enormous sums of money that make voters for the Academy cream their pants. In contrast, Winter’s Bone has a little-known female director and co-writer, an unknown female lead who doesn’t prettify herself, and an all-poverty setting in the Missouri Ozarks where meth dealing and squirrel-eating are ways of life. The film appeared in theaters all the way back in July rather than late this fall. In short: no matter how much it might be the better film, or at least just as good as The Social Network, Winter’s Bone doesn’t have a chance.

But here’s why we should vote for it: because it tells one of the real stories of 2010: of poor people clinging on by their fingernails. It doesn’t have lines like “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.” (And here I’m thinking about how much I objected last March to the fact that Sandra Bullock beat out Gabourey Sidibe for best actress — a choice that reveals our determination to feel good at the movies.) The story it tells — of a teenaged girl trying to keep her family together with a roof over their heads — doesn’t distract us from our own problems, sure, but that’s why the film’s terrific storytelling and perfect cast are so crucial. The fact that she succeeds in the end makes it even more appealing for our troubled times than the deeply ambivalent conclusion of The Social Network.

I have other reasons for pushing the film. In the wake of Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Director win at the Academy Awards for The Hurt Locker, 2010 turned out to be a comparatively great year for female directors — with Nicole Holofcener, Lisa Cholodenko, Coppola, and Granik releasing top-notch films. But unlike last year, there’s little grassroots movement to push female-directed films into the top level of competition for an Oscar, no matter how superior their films might be. For me, the battle isn’t won until women are nominated more often, and when women directors get nominated for films that have women in them. (Just like it was great in 1981 to get the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice with Sandra Day O’Connor, but even better when Ruth Bader Ginsberg brought a feminist consciousness to the Court in 1993, a choice that truly benefited other women.)

• Best film:  Winter’s Bone
• Best director:  Debra Granik for Winter’s Bone
  
• Best female actor:  Kim Hye-ja for Mother (Korea, dir. Bong Joon-ho)
• Best male actor:  Colin Firth for The King’s Speech
• Best female supporting actor:  Dale Dickey for Winter’s Bone
• Best male supporting actor:  Matt Damon for True Grit

I have more to say about what a great year it was for interesting female parts and terrific female acting — my choices for best actress and supporting actress were really hard to narrow down, whereas Firth simply has no competition for best actor. But that’ll wait till another time. In the meantime I’m going to keep arguing for Winter’s Bone, and I hope you do too.

“Bugsy Malone” and lost kids’ movies

I’m not the type to cry about how children’s movies aren’t as good as they used to be — far from it, as we seem to be living in a golden age for terrific kids’ movies.  But there’s something exceptional about Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone (1976) that’s worth discussing.  Last night our home-for-the-holidays family watched it again and I struck by its appeal to both adults and children – a rarity in the 70s, an era of corny Disney features like The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) that, I’m guessing, don’t hold up all these years later.  The difference, I think, is that the child actors in Bugsy Malone are pretending to be adults in a Prohibition-era world of gangsters, molls, torch singers and showgirls, and wannabe prizefighters.  Because they inhabit their pretend-adult roles so seriously, the movie evokes a sweet melancholy for disappointments, lost chances, and broken dreams, moods discordant with other children’s films.  In fact, I think it’s the film’s juxtaposition of its sometimes dark themes, its terrific child actors, and its joyous final song that rejects cynicism in favor of youthful hope that makes it so watchable.  (Friends, it’s available in full on YouTube.)

When I saw this at a relatively young age, I wanted to visit the set and play there.  They drive kid-sized replicas of early autos that operate by bicycle pedal, it’s full of eminently singable song-and-dance numbers, and best of all, the plot pivots on a gang war over guns that shoot whipped cream.  The acting isn’t always seamless, but the best characters are played by the transcendently good Jodie Foster and, of all people, a pre-Happy Days Scott Baio as Bugsy.  Bugsy’s a scrapper – a good guy who’s a bit down on his luck but manages to get along.  He flirts with all the girls, but he really takes a shine to the solemn-faced Blowsey Brown (Florrie Dugger), a would-be singer who carries a baseball bat in her suitcase.  She shows up at Fat Sam’s speakeasy to get a job; Bugsy gets pulled into working for Fat Sam during the gang war; and their budding romance gets complicated by the worldly, wise-cracking Tallulah (Foster), a torch singer who vamps it up with the guests at the club.

What I find so remarkable about this is the prevailing sense of cynicism in the early parts of the film.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a group of 12- and 13-year-olds voicing such quasi-noir skepticism about the world.  When the club’s janitor hears again that he’ll have to wait till tomorrow to try out for a tap-dancing job, he resolutely picks up his tap shoes and sings a slow dirge:

Tomorrow
Tomorrow never comes
What kind of a fool
Do they take me for?
Tomorrow
A resting place for bums
A trap set in the slums
But I know the score

I won’t take no for an answer
I was born to be a dancer now, Yeah!

Tomorrow
Tomorrow, as they say
Another working day and another chore
Tomorrow
An awful price to pay
I gave up yesterday
But they still want more

Likewise, when Bugsy thinks he’s found a new boxer of extraordinary talent, he takes the poor guy to Cagey Joe’s gym to have him trained.  Joe looks him up and down and begins a warning-off song, eventually joined by all the other boxers in the room:

So you wanna be a boxer
In the golden ring
Can you punch like a south-bound freight train
Tell me just one thing

Can you move in a whirl like a humming bird’s wing
If you need to
Can you bob, can you weave
Can you fake, and deceive when you need to?

Well, you might as well quit
If you haven’t got it.

I should mention that this is really a catchy song, with lots of quick cuts to boxers in training.  But “you might as well quit / if you haven’t got it”?  When have I ever heard that before in a kids’ movie?

Now, no adult today will find the movie’s central plot about the growing arms race to be terribly remarkable — after all, the “splurge guns” at the center of the story shoot whipped cream — but as the film was made in 1976 it’s worth pondering whether it had the Cold War and the US/Soviet arms race on its mind.  Splurge guns prove to be infinitely more “deadly” than earlier weapons (that is, throwing whipped-cream pies into people’s faces), and without them Fat Sam is losing his territory quickly.  The film ends with an utter white-out battle in the speakasy, hitting everyone mercilessly in a way that at any other point would have signified death — in fact, it might have led to an even bleaker conclusion to a film that already has a lot of bleakness on its mind.  But when a pie hits the piano player and he hits a couple of notes, the battle halts; he begins singing in a rueful way, “We coulda been anything that we wanted to be,” a song that grows into a promise to change, to make friends, to live, to love:

It’s been lost, hasn’t it — the sense that the world is precarious, and that we have to become better than we are to save it.  It’s a mood I grew up with as a kid in the 70s, with children’s shows that advocated a social conscience.  All the more reason to watch Bugsy Malone.  Remember that Scott Baio was once a froggy-voiced kid with a sweet Brooklyn accent, a kid who could really act; remember that children’s films had something to say about politics; remember that 1970s message about children being the future.  It’s a pleasure to remember.

“Red Riding” (2009) and the wolf

When someone kidnaps a child – or several children, as is sometimes the case – our tendency is to respond by characterizing that person as the exception.  We tell ourselves he’s a pedophile, a psychopath, a serial killer, a freak.  He’s like the wolf of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale; this is no mere wild animal, but one who systematically sets out to trick a little girl and eat her.

The “Red Riding” trilogy produced by the UK’s Channel Four wants us to think of the wolf differently.  He is no exception; he is us, and he is eating us alive.  These films are scarily brilliant, appallingly violent, and so good I wanted to watch them again even before I’d finished watching.  Moreover, they are beautifully photographed — truly, some of the most creative and provocative cinematography I’ve seen in ages.

The first episode/film, “The Year of Our Lord 1974,” makes all other renditions of the 70s appear ersatz, like what “The Wire” did to “Law & Order.”  This is no “Life on Mars,” with its earnest fights against petty corruption in the Manchester police department of 1973, cross-cut with jumps into a groovy muscle car with the deliciously mouthy Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt.  There is no thrumping rock soundtrack, no glam anthems, not a single moment spent romanticizing the era.  The West Yorkshire of these films is filthy, perpetually raining, and unbearably claustrophobic, filled with dark tunnels, narrow stairwells, and dreary working-class 1970s homes filled with awful furniture and wallpaper.  It opens with the kidnapping of a little girl last seen wearing a red jacket and red Wellingtons, and shortly thereafter she is found dead, tortured, and with real swan’s wings sewn into her tiny back.  (All of the physical violence against children and women takes place offscreen.  This cannot be said for the violence against men — a decision that, frankly, was fine with me.)

Enter the cocksure young reporter, Eddie (Andrew Garfield), just back from starting his career in the South and feeling pretty good about himself as the local boy-made-good.  Who wouldn’t, with that terrific head of hair and his prettyboy pouty lips?  (For which we hate him immediately.)  He soon sniffs out that this is not the first little girl to go missing and pursues the serial-killer line of investigation despite the pushback he gets from the cops.  He’s right to do so — it’s a canny decision.  In contrast, his decision to pursue the little girl’s mother (Rebecca Hall, who won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress) is a bad choice, just like all his others.

Eddie wants to get to the heart of the problem, just like the well-intentioned Pete in “In the Year of Our Lord 1980″ and John and Maurice in “1983,” but there is no wolf to be slaughtered, no exceptional villain, and no heroic woodsman to intervene just in time.  Eddie has no idea how much he’s bitten off.  The webs of corruption stretch everywhere, and these men will do anything to keep it that way.  Here the cinematography does its best work (and I would argue, done most effectively and exceptionally in “1974;” it’s a crime that Rob Hardy went unrecognized for it, though his colleague David Higgs won a BAFTA for his photography in “1983″).  Every single scene is shot from a slightly disorienting angle, moving our eye about these rooms and making us notice the discomfort.  At times the imagery is backed up by, of all things, some very slow and beautiful soul music, even more disconcerting given the grim and soulless world we’re watching.  View that imagery here, as Eddie is invited by the über-skeezy John Dawson (Sean Bean at his skeeziest) to enjoy the benefits of being on the take.  It’s not just the sideways views of the two men’s faces; it’s also the camera’s pauses to watch the rain as it rolls down the windows, both of which somehow don’t allow you to forget the rain after the camera returns to their faces:

By “1980″ the corrupt establishment has really accomplished something, and they’re getting very rich.  “To us all!” they toast.  “And to the North! where we do what we like.”  (This line is just not effective textually without that accent.) But by now the cops among them are faced with the still-unsolved Yorkshire Ripper killings of maybe 13 prostitutes, and the Home Office sends Pete (Paddy Considine) and his two most trusted detectives to help.  Instead of helping, however, they find the West Yorkshire police resent them, lie to them, and conceal evidence — and for good reason, as it turns out.  Worst of all, we begin to suspect that a haggard-looking gay teenaged rentboy, aptly named B.J., is not just being overlooked as a source of information — his life is in serious danger for what he knows, although we’re not sure who’s going to come after him.  By “1983,” B.J. is sleeping in his garage space with a shotgun in his lap for fear of his life.

If you had recorded my brain activity while watching these films, all areas of my brain would have lit up:  it was the elements of fable juxtaposed with gritty thriller.  The swan’s wings, the little girl’s red jacket, the fantasy of escape and renewal; even near the very end, a voiceover tells us in a singsong, let me tell you a story voice, “Here is the one / that got away / and lived to tell the tale.”  It was also the perfect performances by Hall, Considine, the seriously under-used Maxine Peake, and David Morrissey (here, concealing his Hollywood handsomeness behind that uninspired ‘stache, glasses, and mousy brown hair), the unforgiving scenery, the shadowy women, the lost children.  And it was the films’ contrast with one of my favorites, “North and South,” in which sharp regional differences are assuaged by the growing understanding and love between its two protagonists.  In “Red Riding” there is no love between North and South; the North is fiercely determined, indeed, to do “whatever we want,” the South be damned.  When one character voices the old saw, “The Devil triumphs when good men do nowt” (again, think of that accent making all the words emerge from the tongue-iest part of the throat), we know that this is mere folly.

One more thought.  The second film opens with scenes of street protests against the Yorkshire Ripper and complaints against the police’s failure to catch him; but there are other signs as well.  Women are filmed carrying signs that say “No Means No,” “Men Off the Streets!”, and “All Sex is Rape,” and graffiti on a wall pronounces “Men Are the Enemy.”  The films have no room for this kind of feminist rage, except implicitly and extremely subtly.  No, this is a trilogy about men, the wolves and the woodsmen who go in search of the little girl in the red jacket and red Wellies.  Oh well.

Barbara Stanwyck, striver

“I feel sorry for you,” Van Heflin tells Barbara Stanwyck near the end of “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.”  It’s not exactly true; Heflin simply intends to hurt her with those words.  Nor does it really capture our feelings about Stanwyck more generally.  Looking through piles of essays about her, I’m surprised by the number of times writers characterize her by class (references to her Brooklyn accent, and so on) — which are, I think, misguided.  I think that what makes her so unsettling onscreen is that she played strivers.  No matter their class, she played an array of women marked by their careers, personal sacrifices, neediness, and deceptions — such that she encapsulated moviegoers’ ambivalence toward striving women.

“She retained a core of authenticity as unshakable and unmistakable as the Brooklyn vowels that colored her speech,” wrote the New York Times recently on release of a new DVD of six of her films.  Maybe I don’t have the ear for it, but she doesn’t sound anything like my working-class, Brooklyn-raised grandmother who was almost exactly Stanwyck’s generation; and it seems to me she took on the roles of spoiled heiresses just as often as she played women on the make.  Perhaps Stanwyck put a layer of refinement on top of something more recognizably lowbrow (like “Barbara Stanwyck” on top of her real name, Ruby Stevens).  But rather than play would-be Henry Higginses, I think we should focus on two other qualities of her voice:  its tendency to sneer (is that really how it sounded, or merely how it looked when her upper lip lifted to emit those insults she hurled at other characters?) and her relatively low register, one that could sharpen into a growl when necessary, but marked a worldliness that other ingénues didn’t have.  It only moved up the scale when she played especially despicable roles, such as the hysterically paralyzed Leona Stevenson in “Sorry, Wrong Number”; in such parts she used it to screech or cajole.  But it could be used to slippery, buttery effect as well, such as in her brilliant comic turn as a female con artist in “The Lady Eve” in which she plays Henry Fonda for a sap — and falls in love along the way.

If she was just as beautiful as most of her peers, Stanwyck made herself unlovely in her willingness to show audiences that she was working just a little bit too hard.  As the 1991 TCM documentary about her put it, “According to the conventions of the time, there was only one way out for a good working girl.  That was to stop being ‘good’.”  Maybe it came from her hardscrabble real life:  when she was four, her mother died after being pushed from a trolley by a drunkard, and only two weeks after the funeral her father disappeared from his five children to dig the canal at Panama, never to be heard from again.  She bounced between foster homes for years but really wanted to follow her sister Mildred to the stage.  Perhaps due to a lucky marriage to the comedian Frank Fay, by the late 1920s she was already receiving top billing in films such as “Mexicali Rose” (1929), “Ten Cents a Dance” (1931), and “Shopworn” (1932).  She cemented her on-screen persona with parts in scandalous pre-Code films, most memorably in “Baby Face” (1933) in which she quite literally sleeps her way to the top, as this trailer shows:

I believe it wasn’t the so-called “Brooklyn vowels” that made Stanwyck appear authentic; it was the hardness of her characters, their willingness to use gumption, fast talk, or sex — or all three at once — anything to get ahead.  If a Ginger Rogers or Katharine Hepburn could make such striving women sympathetic and even fragile, Stanwyck made them scary.  Her characters always wanted something crass — money, power — and they usually sought it from men.  She played these women with a slightly transparent desperation and capacity for betrayal such that she was the woman men learned to avoid, whom women learned to think of as bitchy.  Even as a young teenage viewer of old movies, I found the Stanwyck of “The Big Valley” from the 60s, striding around in jodhpurs and telling everyone what to do, just as unnerving as her improbably blonde Phyllis Dietrichson in “Double Indemnity.”

Take “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” (1946).  Van Heflin plays a man who ran away from Iverstown when he was a kid, the night of the big electrical storm.  Little does he know that he just missed witnessing his childhood sweetheart murder her domineering, wealthy aunt in the heat of passion — so when he accidentally shows up in town again, the grown-up Barbara Stanwyck thinks he wants to blackmail her and her weak-willed husband, Kirk Douglas, who helped cover up the crime way back when (in his screen debut, Douglas shows that you could have parked a Buick on his magnificent chin, but he cowers before Stanwyck).  By this time she’s the town’s petty royalty:  not only has she inherited every penny of her aunt’s estate, she’s increased the family factory to ten times its original size and ensured that Douglas will never face an opponent when he runs for re-election as D.A.  When she sits at her desk in the factory, proudly showing Heflin the extent of her business savvy and success, we find ourselves cringing at her almost manly grit and determination, and we worry that he’s going to fall for her again.  Is it really Heflin’s silence she wants?  Or is he The Man Who Got Away?  Yet again, is she primarily interested in pushing the slightly dim-witted Toni (Lizabeth Scott, with the legs above) out of the picture?

Her titular “strange love” is, I think, all three of those things — Stanwyck’s Martha Ivers is yet another example for viewers of what women aren’t supposed to be.  Yet look at what a bundle of contradictions her steeliness represented:  on the one hand Stanwyck was the highest-paid woman in America after 1944, nominated four times for Best Actress, consistently earning top billing throughout her career in the 30s and 40s, and married to one of the screen’s most dreamily beautiful men, Robert Taylor; yet on the other, she played hard women who lose in the end, undone by their grasping attempts to be something more than they are.

She succeeded, while her characters offered a cautionary tale about women, careerism, and worldly desires.  She played the heavy in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” only to be murdered in the end, while Lizabeth Scott ran off with Van Heflin (I maintain this was no great achievement, as Heflin seemed more a pervert than anything else, while Scott played jailbait).  Meanwhile, Stanwyck was resuscitated two years later to engage in this brilliant exchange from “Double Indemnity” with, of all people, Fred MacMurray:

Phyllis: (Standing up.)  “Mr. Neff, why don’t you drop by tomorrow evening around 8:30?  He’ll be in then.”
Neff:  “Who?”
Phyllis:  “My husband. You were anxious to talk to him, weren’t you?”
Neff:  “Yeah, I was. But I’m sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.”
Phyllis:  “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, forty-five miles an hour.”
Neff:  “How fast was I going, Officer?”
Phyllis:  “I’d say around ninety.”
Neff:  “Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.”
Phyllis:  “Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.”
Neff:  “Suppose it doesn’t take.”
Phyllis:  “Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.”
Neff:  “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.”
Phyllis:  “Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.”
Neff:  “That tears it… (He takes his hat and briefcase after his advances are coldly rebuffed.) 8:30 tomorrow evening, then.”
Phyllis:  “That’s what I suggested.”
Neff:  “You’ll be here too?”
Phyllis:  “I guess so. I usually am.”
Neff:  “Same chair, same perfume, same anklet?”
Phyllis:  “I wonder if I know what you mean.”
Neff: (Opening the entrance door.)  “I wonder if you wonder.”

Who could have held her own in that dialogue with such inscrutable distance other than Stanwyck?  I wonder if we’re still dealing with the fallout of a Hollywood deeply ambivalent about women with careers, self-made women, women who want something more than they have — and if this is the reason we still recoil at Stanwyck’s brassy snarl rather than embrace it.  I recommend we embrace careerism and reject the narrative that such women lose in the end.  Stanwyck did.

“Rough Magic” and missed chances

I was compelled to see “Rough Magic” (1995) again last night — and not because I remembered it being terribly good.  There’s something haunting about it despite the fact that it’s just not a very good movie.  I think it’s so promising — and therefore disappointing — because the combination of magical realism and film noir is so full of possibility.  It’s truly too bad the film doesn’t manage to make it work.

It helps that Bridget Fonda channels such a terrific Lauren Bacall vibe playing Myra, a magician’s assistant, and that most of the film’s action takes place in a sunny postwar Mexico rather than the familiar darkened streets, alleys, and dives of Southern California.  Myra’s on the lam because back in LA, she saw her slick wannabe-politician fiancé murder her magician boss; and as she drives her gorgeous convertible into rural Mexico, her increasingly sinister fiancé arranges for a freelance private eye, Ross (Russell Crowe, using a ham-fisted New York accent in one of his earliest American roles) to find her and bring her back.  Instead, Ross falls for her and the two get caught up in the possibility that Myra might really possess magical abilities, skills that can be enhanced if she can find an ancient shaman woman. 

The movie has a terrific opening, which puts you exactly in the mood for what it’s about to sell you.  Dressed in a memorable stage outfit, Myra chases a white rabbit into an elevator filled with three businessmen.  Instead of picking up the rabbit right away, she extracts three little bunnies from the men’s suit coat pockets, pops them into her top hat, tips the hat onto her head (and Bridget Fonda looks fantastic in a top hat), and leaves while the men’s mouths are still open.  It’s a great movie opening: I was sold.

The two actors offered a lot of promise, too.  Fonda seemed to be a perpetual B actor, mostly memorable for being out-acted by Jennifer Jason Leigh in “Single White Female” (1992).  Still, she always had a kind of hopeful, nervous appeal — maybe even like Jean Arthur, one of my favorites — that made me watch for her.  And when I first saw this film, I’d only seen Crowe in the great Australian film “Proof” (1991); by 1995 he’d bulked up to a pugilist’s body, which seemed odd at the time and yet appears somehow endearing, even ideal for his version of a WWII vet-cum-private dick with more than just a layer of post-traumatic stress.  Neither seems wholly comfortable in his own skin, as if the director compiled the entire film with first takes.  This isn’t to say they do a bad job; the actors’ jitteriness, their slight discomfort with their tough-guy, wise-cracking lines … all this still made me hope the film would turn out to be one of those modest but magically sweet films.

But by the time Myra and Ross set off together on the run, the film takes a dive.  Although it was written and directed by the same woman, Clare Peploe, who apparently had experience in both fields, the film’s unevenness made me wonder if it had been made by two or three people who spent the production period at one another’s throats — perhaps a noir writer and a magical realism writer who ceased to get along at some point, or maybe there was a diva-like editor who chopped out all the parts of the story that might have given it smooth transitions and sustained the mood.  Even more disappointing is the fact that it comes up with a comical Latino (Paul Rodriguez) for no good reason at all (what happened to political correctness in the mid-90s?).  The film eventually loses track of its own tale and drops a few of the balls it has in the air, making it very rough magic indeed.  More than anything, by the end it’s merely become a farce, not entirely intentionally.

Despite the missed chances of “Rough Magic,” I hope someone else tries this formula.  The magical realism makes for such a great twist on the cynical, fast-talking noir trope.  I love the idea that, rather than simply find again that a grisly crime was motivated by sex and greed, our hard-bitten protagonist might find love and/or transformation at work in the universe.

It’s just too bad.  We could use some magic at this point.  At my university we’re staggering and yet are still a few weeks away from the end of the semester, and I seem to be surrounded by cynicism and exhaustion.  At least I know better why this film has haunted me — and why we could use a film that dilutes gritty noir with hope.