crime thriller

The Suspect (1944)

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After finally seeing The Spiral Staircase earlier this year, I’ve been working on watching as many other films from director Robert Siodmak as I can get my hands on, having since also seen and quite enjoyed both The Dark Mirror and Phantom Lady. The calendar year 1944 was a big one for Siodmak releases, as Phantom Lady premiered in late January before being followed by adventure film Cobra Woman in May, Christmas Holiday at (bizarrely) the end of July, and closing out the year with the West Coast premiere of The Suspect on December 22. It’s unclear to me why Universal would release a picture with “Christmas” in the title in the dog days of summer, but The Suspect does fit nicely into the winter holiday season, as the inciting death that occurs in the film happens on Christmas Eve. If you’re looking for a little noir with your eggnog, this one is a breezy, memorable watch that also happens to include the kindly image of Charles Laughton decorating a Christmas tree. 

The film opens with on-screen text announcing the film’s time and place as London in 1902. After a long day as manager of Frazer & Nicholson, a tobacconist’s shop that proudly announces on their windowfront that they are the supplier of tobacco to the British royal family, Philip Marshall (Laughton) returns home to find his wife Cora (Rosalind Ivan) in a tizzy. It seems that Cora has finally gone too far with her continuous torment of their only child, son John (Dean Harens), nagging him to fix the kitchen sink and, when he failed to do so because he was doing overtime work in hopes of a promotion, threw a week’s worth of his calculations into the fire. With John out of the house, Philip announces his intention to move into the boy’s vacated room, telling Cora that there’s no longer a need to keep up their pretense of marital satisfaction now that their captive audience has departed. Cora is incensed, but powerless. 

Thus enters the lovely young Mary Gray (Ella Raines) into Philip’s life. Although he rejects her application to work as a stenographer for Frazer & Nicholson as they are fully staffed, she is nonetheless charmed by his firm-but-gentle remonstrations of the shop’s errand boy, Merridew, for his pilfering of pennies for sweets and to give to the organ grinder’s monkey. When Philip finds her crying on a park bench later, he takes her out for dinner to cheer her up. After a montage of the two of them growing closer over learning to use chopsticks, attending circuses and plays, and generally getting along pleasantly, we learn that he has helped her find a job. Their non-physical love affair must come to an end, however, as Cora refuses to give him a divorce despite their mutual unhappiness, and she extorts him into remaining with her by promising to ruin him socially if he does, and he breaks things off with Mary before going home and putting up a Christmas tree. His hopes that they might be able to find some peace during the holidays even if they have come to hate each other are dashed when Cora announces that she’s discovered Mary’s identity and plans to tell Philip’s employers and friends of his (dubious) infidelity, and that he’ll destroy Mary and leave her penniless and ruined as well. After she heads to bed, we see Philip lift his walking cane from its place beside the entry door, feeling the heft of it in his hands, and we fade to black. 

Ivan’s Cora is admirably loathsome, a truly horrid person with no redeeming qualities. This is made clear in no uncertain terms the moment that she first appears on screen, as her husband can barely make it inside before she starts to hassle him about his work hours and his light-handed treatment of their son, just before we learn about her jeopardization of the boy’s career over a minor household chore. She’s cruel, miserly, and brings nothing but misery to everyone around her, a sociopathically bitter person who manipulates every kind word and attempt at compromise and twists them into something that she can take offense to and escalate through overreaction to perceived slights. It’s frankly a relief when she dies, and virtually everyone is better off for her absence. Her sudden departure from the narrative necessitates the introduction of additional antagonists, who take the form of Scotland Yard Inspector Huxley (Stanley Ridges), who is investigating Cora’s death despite the coroner’s rule that her fatal tumble down the stairs was an accident, and the Marshalls’ slimy neighbor Gilbert (Henry Daniell). Gilbert is established in his first appearances as a perpetually inebriated snob, scion to a formerly wealthy British family of no current notability, who looks down upon his middle class neighbors with great disdain; further, he mistreats his wife from the start and we later even see her bruised from his abuse. It’s based on the activities of the first, Huxley, that the latter, Gilbert, decides to threaten to make up a story about having heard Philip and Cora fighting the night of her death, announcing his attention to blackmail Philip and to go on extorting him for more money in the future. With Philip once again in an untenable position, what can he do? 

With the Hays Code at the front of my mind, I was distracted as the film started to wind down, as The Suspect seemed to fly in the face of its strictures in both spirit and text. According to IMDb, the film was passed by the National Board of Review (certificate #10564, although I have no way of verifying that), but the poster on the film’s Wikipedia page has a “not suitable for general exhibition” notation, so it was definitely reviewed and released. The film was headed for what seemed like a happy ending with scant few minutes left to pull the old Code-accommodating switcheroo that sees our criminal protagonist find himself clapped in irons and sent off to pay for his misdeeds (or dead). John gets that promotion despite his mother’s petulant sabotage and is being sent to the Canadian office, and Philip proposes to Mary (by this time his wife) that they join him, and he makes it all the way onboard their departing ship and even has a final conversation with Huxley that absolves him of all of his (legal) guilt. Of course, it doesn’t absolve him of his (moral) guilt, as he learns that Gilbert’s widow is to be tried for her husband’s apparent murder. Alas, despite being a killer, Philip would never let his kind neighbor go to the gallows for a crime that she didn’t commit, but we still never see him delivered into police custody; he disembarks the ship as Huxley watches, confirming his suspicions. “He’s getting away,” Huxley’s partner says, to which he replies:

“No, he isn’t. He thinks he’s done a pretty big thing. Let’s leave him alone; he’ll come to us when he’s ready. Just keep an eye on him in the meantime.” 

And there we leave Philip, standing in the fog, still a free man. This flew in the face of conventional wisdom, or at least what I thought I know, about the Hays Code. Didn’t it require the death or arrest of the killer, no matter how sympathetic he or she was, in order to be approved for screening? Is that not why James Cagney gets gunned down at the end of The Roaring Twenties? Is that not why Carolyn Jones kills Mickey Rooney at the end of Baby Face Nelson, and why Jean Simmons drives herself and Robert Mitchum over a cliff in Angel Face? Isn’t that why Rebecca’s dramatic reveal is different in Hitchcock’s film from the du Maurier novel? If Hitch couldn’t skirt it when adapting a literary text, then how did Siodmak get away with leaving this film so ambiguous? So I went and re-read the code, for probably the first time in over a decade, and there’s nothing explicit in its guidelines that says a film must show the guilty face consequences. Instead, it states under “Principles of Plot” that “no plot theme should definitively side with evil against good” or “throw the sympathy of the audience with sin, crime, wrong-doing, or evil,” and that “the question of right or wrong [should never be] in doubt or fogged.” 

As such, The Suspect doesn’t break any of the rules by letting Philip walk away to (presumably eventually) turn himself over to Scotland Yard, but it is rather successful in subverting the spirit of the Hays Code. Specifically, when it comes to the treatment of murder, the code states that “technique[s] of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire imitation” and that criminals must not seem justified. As to the first case, we don’t see Philip kill Cora. In fact, that the act is not depicted is enough to inject reasonable doubt on the part of the audience, and although we get a pretty good idea of how he did it since Huxley acts out, in detail, what he believes Philip did that night, it skirts the “inspire imitation” language by presenting it this way. Regarding whether or not the killing of Cora is justified, that’s left to the determination of the audience, but we’re certainly never treated to a drop of humanity in her that might make us consider the sanctity of her life. Overall, however, the impression that the code gives is one of complete and utter moral absolutism; the law can never be seen as unjust, adultery can never be justified, obscenity of word or gesture is forbidden, the law is good and everything else is evil. The Suspect makes its moral relativism clear in the scene in which we find Gilbert and Philip at odds with one another, as we find ourselves, like Philip, repulsed by the man who “merely” abuses his wife, while we empathize with Philip, who murdered his (probably). It’s not a very flashy picture, but its subtle undermining of blanket moralizing of the time seems almost radical in retrospect. 

I’ve already cited Ivan’s performance as Cora as a standout, but I was also rather taken with Molly Lamont as Gilbert’s unfortunate wife. She brings a lot of warmth and light into a role that could easily be underserved in another feature. Ella Raines, who had been the protagonist of Phantom Lady earlier that year, is lovely here, even if she’s not given much to do other than fawn over Philip; her chemistry with both Laughton and Harens makes up for the relative lack of development. Laughton is himself in quite fine form here, playing a kind, gentle man pushed to the edge and forced to take matters into his own hands. His deftness is shown in the early scene with the errand boy to establish that his interest in cheering up Mary, aside from one slightly leering glance that comes later, is on the up-and-up. By the film’s end, we’re excited for him to start his new life in Canada, far away from all of his bad memories, but his conscience stops him from finding that freedom. It’s poignant, the perfect film to add to your Christmas watchlist if you like your holiday season a little bittersweet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Black Angel (1946)

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The morning of the day on which I’m writing this, Brandon texted me to let me know that our most recent streak of daily posting was coming to an end after forty consecutive days (starting on October 20th). If only I had been productive last night, as I intended, alas! Then I remembered that these streaks are fairly exclusively interesting to us and stopped beating myself up about it. And then I got in an under-the-wire review of Went the Day Well?, which kept the streak alive. What I did instead of being productive last night was—realizing that I had gotten all the way to the end of the month without following up at all on the goal I had announced in my Blue Gardenia review, to celebrate “Noirvember”—I checked out another one of the films featured on the recent Criterion service’s “Black Out Noir” list. I hadn’t realized until watching both The Blue Gardenia and Black Angel that the “black out” referenced in the collection title isn’t just a reference to these being films noir but to actual periods of drunken or drugged lost time that characters experience within the text. In the case of Black Angel, however, it’s almost a bit of a spoiler. 

Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling) is a torch song singer living in luxury in Los Angeles. Her somewhat estranged, alcoholic husband Marty Blair (Dan Duryea) comes to visit her on their anniversary, but she leaves strict instructions with her doorman that he’s to be prevented from entering the building. Rousted from the lobby, Marty watches as another man (Peter Lorre) approaches and is allowed in to visit her. Sometime later, Kirk Bennet (John Phillips) comes to Mavis’s apartment and finds her dead; a recording of her biggest song “Heartbreak,” composed by Barry, plays on repeat. Kirk lifts the phone to call the police when he hears a noise in the other room and returns to find that a notable piece of jewelry, a heart-shaped ruby brooch, has been taken from her body, before he’s startled by the return of Mavis’s maid, who identifies him to police. Kirk is quickly convicted and sentenced to execution, and it falls to his wife Catherine (June Vincent) to try and clear his name. To that end, she and Marty team up, posing as a musical duo act and infiltrating the club of Lorre’s character, whom we learn is named Marko. They’re convinced that, if they can get into his safe, they’ll find the missing brooch and be able to clear Kirk’s name, but time is quickly running out. 

If certain parts of that plot summary sound as familiar to you as they did to me, then you’re probably noticing the similarities in structure to The Phantom Lady, a noir directed by Robert Siodmak that came out just two years prior. The wrongfully convicted killer in Phantom Lady was accused of murdering his wife, with his secretary being the only one to believe in his innocence, while Black Angel’s dead man walking is put away for killing his blackmailer (and perhaps mistress) and only his wife has faith in him. Other than that, the schematic of the film is much the same, with Catherine/Kansas finding her respective police investigators mostly unhelpful until she does his job for him by finding exonerating evidence. Each woman is assisted in this endeavor by someone who seems to fall in love with her a little and who (spoiler alert) turns out to be the actual killer. Each woman successfully manages to secure her husband’s release, just in the nick of time, and everything ends happily ever after. Why are they so similar? 

One might assume that the whiff of Black Angel feeling like an off-brand Phantom Lady can be attributed to the fact that both are adaptations of novels by Cornell Woolrich. Black Angel, in particular, was a re-working of a couple of earlier short stories into a longer work, something Woolrich did consistently throughout his career, so it would be logical to assume that this was just one of his variations on a theme. The summaries I have found of the Black Angel novel, however, paint a different picture about its source material, namely that Alberta (as she is named in the text) ends up ruining the lives of the other four male suspects and is changed internally by the lengths that she went to in order to save her husband and the things she saw that she can never forget. That’s not the structure of the film(s), which see the true culprits of the relative plot-instigating murders meet different ends but are identical in their happy reunion between the freed innocent men and the women who saved them. Black Angel the novel is more melancholy and bittersweet. From that, we have to assume that the film was produced with the directive that it ape Phantom Lady as closely as possible while keeping the characters and relationships from Black Angel’s source text, and while that might make this film more enjoyable in isolation, seeing it so soon after the superior Phantom Lady causes this one to suffer in comparison. 

What this film does feature in its favor is yet another deliciously slimy performance from Peter Lorre, who is wonderful here as the villainous Marko. He’s got a great scene partner in the form of his “heavy,” Lucky (former boxer Freddie Steele), and the two of them have utterly watchable chemistry as the mastermind and his lunkhead enforcer. As Marko is ultimately revealed to have had no hand in Mavis’s death, one could criticize the narrative cul-de-sac in which Catherine and Marty infiltrate his nightclub as pointless, but despite the amount of screen time that it occupies, the breathless pace of this eighty-minute feature means that the red herring doesn’t feel like time wasted. If Marko were played by an actor with less magnetism than Lorre, it might be a different story. June Vincent is also quite good, but it’s not enough to really carry this one across the finish line. I’m more intrigued now to read the novel than I am to give this one another watch. It’s competent, but not exciting. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

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With the spooky season having come to a close (as much as it does for year-round horror sickos such as we), it’s officially Noir-vember in my house, and to my delight, Criterion recently added a collection of some underseen ones. Scrolling through, none of the directors’ names jumped out at me initially, until suddenly the name “Fritz Lang” appeared, and the decision was made. The Blue Gardenia comes rather late in the storied director’s prolific career; after this one, he would only release a half dozen more films, one of which saw him returning to the Dr. Mabuse well. Based on a novella by Vera Caspary (who had previously written the novel Laura), the film features a screenplay by Charles Hoffman, who spent no small part of the last decade of his life writing 22 episodes of the Adam West Batman series, not that any of that series’ tone is present here. There’s a certain sense of lightness for a story that revolves around something so depraved, but it’s not campy, and is a true noir through and through. And it’s got a special appearance from Nat King Cole playing the title tune! 

Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter, three years after her star-making role as the title character in All About Eve) is a switchboard operator who’s been saving the latest letter from her fiancé, a soldier in the Korean War, to read it on the night of her birthday, so she can pretend that he’s really there. Earlier in the day, she watches as Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr), an advertising artist who specializes in pastels of women for pin-up calendars, semi-successfully flirts with Norah’s roommate Crystal (Anne Sothern), getting her phone number. Crystal’s in an on-again, off-again relationship with her ex-husband Homer (Ray Walker), and their third flatmate Sally (Jeff Donnell) runs down to the store when the latest trashy dime-store novel from a Mickey Spillane-style writer, so Norah has the apartment to herself when she reads her fiancé’s letter … in which he tells her that he’s fallen in love with a nurse he met while recovering in a Japanese hospital. Hurt, she receives a call from Prebble, who’s looking to meet up with Crystal; he doesn’t give her the chance to explain that he’s mistaken and decides, in her vulnerable state, to meet him at the Blue Gardenia restaurant. There, he plies her with several Pearl Diver cocktails and, once she’s good and drunk, he takes her to his place, where he spikes the coffee, she requests with something else. Confused and thinking that she’s in the company of her lost fiancé, she initially returns his kisses, but when she attempts to reject his overtures once she realizes herself, he becomes aggressive and attempts to assault her. She fends him off with a fireplace poker and, fearing that she’s killed him, runs home without her shoes, in the rain. 

When Norah awakes the next morning, she hears about the incident and, having no memory of what happened after the first round of drinks, fears that she is the murderer. This is where the film gets a little fuzzy, narratively. We in the audience have no reason to believe that she’s not the killer, and we also have no reason not to want her to “get away with it,” even if what she’d be getting away with is a pretty clear-cut case of self-defense. As we see her turn to more and more desperate methods to try and ensure that she’s never caught, we’re entirely sympathetic to her plight; the scene in which she burns her dress after hours and is caught by a policeman who merely gives her a warning about using her incinerator during hours outside those permitted by law is particularly fraught. She’s wracked by intense and escalating feelings of guilt as she watches her co-workers be called in for questioning by the police while ignoring her, since she and Prebble have no connection that anyone knows of, and he wasn’t even trying to contact her when he called her shared apartment. Eventually, she calls a tip line set up by seemingly sympathetic (but ultimately sensationalistic) journalist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte), and even meets him in person while claiming she’s doing so “for [her] friend,” whom the press—specifically Casey—has dubbed the Blue Gardenia Murderess. She’s ultimately arrested, but Conte discovers a contradiction that might set her free.

As a mystery, I found this one a little underwhelming. I always prefer when a crime picture like this one gives the audience the chance to solve the mystery alone with the characters; I am a devoted fan of Murder, She Wrote, after all. I expressed to my viewing companions this disappointment in this aspect of the film in our post-screening debrief and it’s worth noting that although the real killer is identified at the end and confesses (because, unexpectedly, Norah didn’t kill him), none of us recognized them. As it turns out, they did appear in an earlier scene, but it came so close to the beginning that the character was unrecognizable when reappearing at the end, and if I had seen this in isolation and missed that clue I would accept it as a personal failure to pay sufficient attention, but that this missed in triplicate tells me that this is a problem of the film, not of my attentiveness. That having been said, that the film needs someone other than Norah to be the killer is, for lack of a better term, perfunctory. We know she’s not a murderer, and I was never convinced that the police were ever really going to catch her; it was more of a matter of when her roommates would put two and two together regarding Norah’s skittishness and defensiveness. I expected them to figure it out earlier and help Norah cover it up, and that would have been a perfectly acceptable noir concept, but instead we have a bit of a forced romance between Norah and Casey, one which ultimately feels kind of insulting to her (after she’s discharged, she glares at and rebuffs him for his part in her initial arrest, but this is merely a ploy to seem hard to get). 

The most fun parts of the film are when we get to see the three women roommates interact with one another, and it’s a rare look into a slice of life of a bygone era, of domesticity between three single(ish) women sharing a tiny apartment. On the night after her birthday, Norah is awakened by Crystal as the mother hen of their little group. As her alarm goes off, she refers to it as “the mine whistle” to the other women, and sends Sally off to make the orange juice (condensed and out of a can — yeesh) while she gets the bathroom first that morning, as she directs the understandable groggy Norah to coffee and toast duty. Crystal is the most delightful character overall, and learning that Ann Sothern, whom I had only previously seen in Lady in a Cage, starred in a ten-film series as an underworked show girl named Maisie inspired me to track down those films for a future marathon (they were only available on the Russian equivalent of YouTube, uploaded from VHS rips from TCM, so pray for me). It’s too bad that her ultimate role in the story (as well as Sally’s) is pretty minor, since she’s full of quips and various other character choices that give the film a lot of life. 

Not necessarily the most interesting noir that I’ve ever seen, but with great performances from Sothern and Baxter and an effectively menacing villain in Burr, this one is worth checking out if you’ve got a noir itch and you’ve already seen all the classics. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dial M for Murder (1954)

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In narrative terms, the 1954 crime thriller Dial M for Murder isn’t much of an outlier in director Alfred Hitchcock’s career. If anything, it’s a useful timesaver for anyone looking for an overview crash course in Classic Hitchcock storytelling, as it effectively plays like what would happen if Strangers on a Train was retold within the stage-play limitations of Rope. Both of those preceding Hitch classics are hypothetical plottings of The Perfect Murder, which inevitably go awry in execution, leading to the murderer’s demise. The premeditated killer in this case (Ray “X-Ray Eyes” Milland) blackmails an old college classmate into killing his adulterous wife (Grace “Princess of Monaco” Kelly) as a lucrative act of marital revenge. The story is mostly contained in a single living room set and is rigidly sectioned into three dramatic acts: the opening act in which the killer explains the scheme to his accomplice, one in which the accomplice fails in his mission mid-strangling, and a final act of Columbo-style “howcatchem” investigation that puts the pieces of the puzzle back together through the nosy inquiries of an unassuming detective (John “Comic Relief” Williams). It’s all very tidy & succinct, possibly owing to the fact that Hitchcock was planning the much more elaborate production of Rear Window while going through the motions of adapting this morbid little stage play.

The surprising thing about Dial M for Murder is that its stage-bound telling doesn’t convey Hitchcock’s visual artistry, which is usually foregrounded as a knack for special effects dazzlement. At least, that’s what I thought when I first left the theater. At the start of the local screening of Dial M in The Prytania’s Classic Movies series, I was disappointed in the quality of the film scan, which appeared to be a fuzzy SD transfer from an ancient DVD print. Then, when Grace Kelly appears onscreen in the first interior scene, her gorgeous face & gowns were suddenly in sharp focus, as if someone had flipped on the HD-quality light switch. The initial fuzziness then periodically returned in a few exterior shots, which appeared to be partially composited or greenscreened for no practical, discernible reason. It turns out, of course, that this alternating visual quality was a result of the film being shot for 3D processing, then later retrofitted into a 2D print. It was produced in the brief early-50s window when the classic red-and-blue 3D glasses presentation was a popular fad, but the novelty of the effect had worn off by the time Dial M hit theaters, and the prints were descaled to a measly two dimensions halfway into its run. As Hitchcock bitterly acknowledged, 3D was “a nine-day wonder, and [he] came in on the ninth day,” making for one of the rare times when he was a latecomer instead of an innovator in visual effects.

The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies slot is a reliably wonderful way to catch up on any Old Hollywood mainstays that might be personal blindspots, and Hitchcock’s catalog has long been the backbone of that program. Since the single-screen theater is over a century old, it feels like time-traveling back to the classic films’ initial release, when they likely screened in that very theater. That effect was especially potent for their most recent screening of Dial M for Murder, which was preceded by a classic Looney Tunes short instead of trailers for upcoming attractions (the Hitchcock-spoofing Tweety Bird short “The Last Hungry Cat,” for anyone curious). Part of me wishes that they could have presented the film in its original 3D format, glasses and all, for maximum time-travel novelty. The truth is, though, that Dial M‘s 3D format was very quickly rejected by contemporary audiences, so that most people did see it screened in its confused & compromised 2D form, making my experience with the film authentic to its initial run. To the theater’s credit, they will also be screening William Castle’s 13 Ghosts in its original “Illusion-O” presentation this October, which was Castle’s personally branded 3D gimmick. There’s something beautiful about the fact that Castle’s own special-effects artistry is still chasing after its classier Hitchcock equivalents all these decades later, sometimes in the exact venues where they started their one-sided feud.

While learning about Dial M for Murder‘s retracted 3D tech after leaving the theater did help make sense of why its exterior & effects shots looked so bizarrely hazy, I still can’t figure out why Hitchcock would choose to give such a stage-bound story that treatment in the first place. The beauty of Dial M is in its narrative simplicity. By the final act, the nosy detective’s post-murder puzzle solving mostly comes down to three isolated pieces of evidence: a key, a letter, and a silk stocking. Those three pieces are moved around the puzzle board through verbal speculation, with most of the visual spectacle resulting from Grace Kelly’s elegant beauty and Ray Milland’s dastardly performance as a smug drip who hates his elegantly beautiful wife. Even so, Hitchcock finds small moments for visual extravagance, such as the husband’s explanation of how the murder should go down being framed in a high-angle shot from the ceiling’s POV, as if he and the killer were pieces on a board game. The only moments I can recall that may have benefited from the original 3D effect are the isolated shot of the contract killer reaching his hands out to strangle Kelly as she answers a phone call and the surreal shot of Kelly later answering to a judicial panel as if she were being tried for murder in the courts of Hell. Those few seconds of screentime are not worth filtering the rest of the picture through the 3D process, especially since it mostly consists of lengthy conversations in a single parlor.

It’s a testament to the strength of the stage-play source material and Hitchcock’s ability to wind up tension in his audience that Dial M is still solidly entertaining despite all of the needless distractions of its 3D processing. The Prytania’s Classic Movies crowd was an especially robust turnout that Sunday morning, likely owing to the director’s name recognition. Hitchcock always delivers, apparently even when working on autopilot.

-Brandon Ledet

Johnny Handsome (1989)

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I just finished reading the deceptively dense travel guide San Francisco Noir by essayist Nathaniel Rich, which doubles as both a guided tour of San Francisco’s many character-defining landmarks and a critical history of “the city in film noir from 1940 to the present.”  There are so many noirs set in San Francisco that Rich is able to map out all of the city’s disparate moods & neighborhoods by cataloging how they’ve been portrayed onscreen in that one specific genre, frequently stopping the tour for incisive, short-form reviews of the dozens of noirs set in and around The Bay.  As a movie nerd, the book was a great way to familiarize myself with a city I love to visit but never get to stay long enough to feel submerged below its touristy surface.  As a New Orleanian, it made me jealous.  Besides the impracticality of its distance from Los Angeles, why is it that so few classic noirs were set in New Orleans compared to the seemingly infinite noirs of San Francisco?  Reading through Rich’s illustrated history of his port city’s deep well of art, music, crime, sex, and scandal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of the hallmarks that made San Francisco such a perfect setting for noir are echoed in my own city’s alluringly sordid history.  And yet I can only name a few classic noir titles I’ve seen set on New Orleans streets: New Orleans Uncensored, Swamp Women, and Panic in the Streets.  That’s a relatively puny list when compared to such formidable San Francisco noir titles as The Maltese Falcon, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past, and Vertigo.

It turns out I’m not the only person convinced of New Orleans’s hospitality to noir moods & tropes, as I found Roger Ebert entertaining the same thought in his 1989 review of the Walter Hill neo-noir Johnny Handsome.  Ebert wrote, “Johnny Handsome comes out of the film noir atmosphere of the 1940s, out of movies with dark streets and bitter laughter, with characters who live in cold-water flats and treat saloons as their living rooms.  It is set in New Orleans, a city with a film noir soul, and it stars Mickey Rourke as a weary loser who has just about given up on himself.”  Struck by Ebert’s assessment of New Orleans’s “film noir soul,” I dug into his other contemporary reviews of New Orleans-set thrillers starring the leads of Johnny Handsome.  The results were mostly silly, including a thumbs-down dismissal of Hard Target (featuring Johnny Handsome villain Lance Henriksen) as being “not very smart and not very original” and a positive review of Angel Heart (also starring Mickey Rourke) that describes the West Bank neighborhood of Algiers as a “town across from New Orleans that makes the fleshpots of Bourbon Street look like Disneyland.”  Sure, Roger.  I’m glad I kept digging, though, because his 1987 review of the neo-noir erotic thriller The Big Easy (which shares a star with Johnny Handsome‘s secondary villain, Ellen Barkin), captures the city’s “film noir soul” perfectly in the paragraph, “The movie takes place in New Orleans, that most mysterious of American cities, a city where you can have the feeling you never will really know what goes down on those shadowy passages into those green and humid courtyards so guarded from the street.”  That’s some good poetry.

As you can likely tell by my stalling to discuss this film directly by recapping the works of more talented & prestigious film critics, Johnny Dangerously is not especially interesting, at least not when compared to the rest of its era’s New Orleans crime pictures.  It’s not as scuzzy as Angel Heart, nor as steamy as The Big Easy, nor as deliriously over-the-top as Hard Target.  Its one claim to novelty among the other 80s New Orleans crime thrillers starring its central trio of volatile performers is that it’s the most faithful to the genre’s classic noir roots.  Johnny Handsome evokes the drunken, downtrodden storytelling logic of vintage crime story paperbacks, ones written decades before its actual 1970s source material.  Walter Hill reportedly dragged his feet on adapting that novel for years despite multiple offers, but his eventual decision to move its setting from New Jersey to New Orleans and to frame it within a traditionalist noir sensibility makes perfect sense for the material.  The results just aren’t particularly exciting.  Johnny Handsome is bookended by two heists: an early one in which Rourke’s titular disfigured anti-hero is abandoned by his gangster cohorts (Barkin & Henriksen) while looting a French Quarter jewelry store, and a climactic one in which he pays them back by trapping them in a doomed robbery of a shipyard construction site.  Both sequences are fantastic, but there’s a lot of dead air between, which Hill mostly fills with achingly sincere melodrama about a supposedly reformed criminal who can’t seem to get out of the game.  It’s the same level of heightened pastiche he brought to his 50s greaser throwback Streets of Fire, but something about it feels weirdly subdued & unenthused this go-round.

There are actually two old-school genre tributes at play in Johnny Handsome, both of which are signaled to the audience in black & white flashback.  While the film’s classic noir tropes are introduced in an early flashback washed in an aged sepia tone, its simultaneous echo of German Expressionist horror is presented in a starker Xerox contrast.  We’re told that Johnny Handsome was born with a monstrous, mutated face, even though he honestly doesn’t look too out of place in the context of The French Quarter – a circus without tents.  His disfigurement is important to the plot, though, so much so that Hill allowed Rourke to mumble his lines under heavy prosthetics to achieve the effect.  After getting busted during the first botched heist and before plotting to launch the second, Rourke finds himself imprisoned in Angola, where a kind mad scientist (Forest Whitaker) offers to lessen his sentence if he agrees to experimental facial reconstruction surgery.  The surgery goes so well that Rourke is able to insert himself into his old, leather-clad cohorts’ lives incognito, luring them into participating in their own demise with the second heist.  That sci-fi aspect of the plot has a distinct Hands of Orlac feel to it, which was also echoed in contemporary thrillers like Scalpel & Body Parts to much greater effect.  At least Johnny Handsome switches up the formula by combining its German Expressionist patina with classic noir tropes.  It’s a unique genre hybrid, even if subtly played, and it all comes together beautifully by the time the semi-reformed Rourke’s new girlfriend is practically screeching at his old frenemies, “No! No, don’t cut up Johnny’s beautiful face!”

All of the classic New Orleans noirs I’ve seen are fairly mediocre pictures.  Most of the San Francisco noirs covered in Nathaniel Rich’s book are mediocre too, which is true of most movie genres and of all art everywhere.  By the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s (which was essentially just neo-noir with an emphasis on video store sleaze), the movie industry had caught up with New Orleans’s noir potential and set some pretty great crime thrillers here: The Big Easy, Angel Heart, Tightrope, Cat People, Down By Law, etc.  Johnny Dangerously is far from the best example of that wave of locally set 80s thrillers, but it’s the one that best evokes the city’s classic-period noir past that never was.  I enjoyed the movie less as a sincere, in-the-moment thriller than I appreciated it as a what-could’ve-been simulation of what New Orleans’s “film noir soul” might’ve looked like if given the same amount of screentime as San Francisco noir in the genre’s heyday. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Dry (2021)

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There are a lot of things that they just don’t make like they used to. Cadbury creme eggs, Star Warses, western democracy. But one thing that’s still reliably chugging along through the same well-worn, comfortable ruts that the covered wagons made, and that’s the small-town crime thriller. Now with more Eric Bana! 

Bana stars in The Dry as Aaron Falk, a federal agent in Australia who returns to his fictional hometown of Kiewarra, some twenty years after he was run out of town by locals who believed the then-teenaged Aaron (Joe Klocek) had something to do with the drowning death of his girlfriend, Ellie (Bebe Bettencourt). Although Kiewarra is now suffering economically due to the titular intense drought, flashbacks show a verdant river and fields as backdrop to the youthful friendship between Aaron and Luke (played by Martin Dingle-Wall as an adult and Sam Corlett in the past), as well as Luke’s then-girlfriend, Gretchen (Claude Scott-Mitchell). Unfortunately, it’s the tragic death of Luke and his family that’s brought Aaron home after all this time, in an apparent murder suicide at the hands of his old friend. 

Asked by Luke’s parents to stay and investigate further in order to prove their son’s innocence, Aaron finds himself the object of scorn and scrutiny by Ellie’s older brother Grant (Matt Nable), who still believes Aaron got off scot-free for his sister’s murder, as well as Ellie’s now cognitively challenged father Mal (William Zappa), who confusedly accuses Aaron for covering up for his son, not recognizing that the man he’s accusing is the Falk boy. He also reunites with Gretchen (Genevieve O’Reilly), and the two reconnect while he investigates. While reviewing the files of Luke’s wife, Aaron discovers “Grant?” written on the back of a document, which leads him into conflict with Ellie’s family once again. 

Most of the reviews for this film label it a “slow burn,” and it’s definitely that, with an emphasis on “slow.” This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it also wasn’t really what I was in the mood for when I was finally able to set aside some time to screen this one. There are no molds being broken here; nothing ever starts to get meta or strays from the conventional. It’s your standard Protagonist Archetype 7C (Law Enforcement Officer, Federal) with modifier 32-A (Chip on the Shoulder) sigma (adolescent tragedy), in setting 3 (small town) B (where  they grew up) dash 5 (in economic crisis) dash B (due to inclement weather), where Kappa (a homicide) has occurred, involving Pi-3 (their childhood friend). The plot is solid and hangs together. It’s nothing new, but if this is the thing that’s up your alley, then you will enjoy it. 

Normally, when we apply the descriptor “paint by numbers,” which certainly applies here, we’re talking about something with mass market appeal and application. This film is more of a masterpiece by numbers, where your end result is something that’s good enough to be truly proud of, or even be turned into a 1000-piece puzzle. I wish I could speak more highly of it, because what normally renders the more run-of-the-mill versions of these films to the heap of forgotten mediocrity is that they have no staying power beyond their twist, but this one is gorgeously shot, thoughtfully edited, and masterfully acted. You can really feel the heat radiating off of the ground in draught-addled Kiewarra, but it’s not enough to elevate this into the pantheon of its genre. It’s above average but does not exceed expectations. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blow the Man Down (2020)

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More movies could use a genuine, in-the-flesh Greek Chorus and this one’s the proof. Blow the Man Down‘s most audacious stylistic choice is the way it breaks its story up into loose chapters with a recurring device in which gruff, East Coast fishermen sing old-fashioned sea shanties directly to the camera. The first instance of these periodic Greek Chorus interjections was so jarring that I was convinced the movie was going to be a full-blown musical. Instead, the antique, weathered sea shanties are merely used to break the film up into acts, commenting on the moods & perils of the film’s protagonists after major events in their journey. It’s about as classic of a theatrical device as possible, elevating the modern on-screen drama with an Old-World patina without distracting from its in-the-moment thrills. It’s such an effective device that it’s a wonder you don’t see it exploited in modern cinema more often. Part of what makes the device work so well here, though, is that the movie would still be great without it. It’s an enhancement, not a crutch.

Blow the Man Down is a small-scale thriller about two sisters who stumble into their East Coast fishing town’s criminal underworld when they find themselves needing to dispose of a cruel, dead man’s body. In their scramble to cover up a man’s death, they clash with local police corruption, the terrifying madam who runs the community brothel (Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale), and their own naïve misconceptions of their family’s history on both sides of the law. The entire picture is sharply edited & performed with a dark sense of humor lurking behind each thriller beat. It recalls other normal-people-in-over-their-head-with-hyperviolence pictures like Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin or the Saulnier-adjacent black comedy I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore. Except, it’s specifically about a community of women competently running things behind the scenes while clueless men bumble about in the foreground, which is not a dynamic I can remember seeing in a post-Coens, Saulnier-adjacent thriller before. It’s an incredibly stylish movie, especially considering the scale of its budget, but it’s also one with a distinct thematic core that distinguishes it within its genre.

The attention-grabbing Greek Chorus device that binds this film together is far from its sole distinguishing feature. It’s just indicative of the stylish, heightened eye the film generally applies to its otherwise familiar thriller beats. The coastal Maine fisheries setting makes violence feel like an everyday part of life in this isolated, unpoliced community. Gutted fish, sharpened boning knives, and rickety harpoons recall the same fishing-town hyperviolence of over-the-top slashers like The Mutilator & I Know What You Did Last Summer – except that the characters navigating that treacherous ground feel like real, fully fleshed-out people. Part of that three-dimensional characterization means that they have a dry, withering sense of humor even in the face of traumatizing brutality. That humor is communicated loud & clear as soon as the first sea shanty, when the lead Greek Chorus member literally winks at the camera with a full Bugs Bunny sense of deviousness. It only gets more nuanced & discomforting as the violence escalates.

Blow the Man Down is frequently brutal & cold, following bone-tired characters as they trudge through the blue hues & white snows of coastal Maine as if they were walking corpses just waiting to be chopped up & shoved into fishing coolers. It’s also a warmly human movie about a silent system of tough, shrewd women, each with their own morbid senses of humor and touches of whimsy. Its Greek Chorus sea shanties device is an excellent attention-grabber and a concise summation of the film’s harsh tonal clashes at large, but it’s not all the film has to offer. It’s only a siren song, luring you to violently crash onto the rocks so the real drama can wash over your wreckage.

-Brandon Ledet

The Irishman (2019)

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Despite it earning an ecstatic reception that wasn’t afforded to similar late-career, swing-for-the-fences experiments like Silence or Hugo, I struggled to get excited for Martin Scorsese’s latest picture. Somewhere between the film’s 3.5-hour runtime and my disappointment in seeing my ancient Unkie Marty fall back on his tried & true Gangster Epic template, I couldn’t help but meet the prospect of watching The Irishman with an exhausted shrug. I doubt I ever would have caught up with the film at all if it weren’t for its prominence in the current Oscars Discourse, as I’ve been outright bored by Scorsese’s most recent mobster-violence retreads The Departed & The Wolf of Wall Street in the past. Even as someone who’d count GoodFellas among his favorite films of all time, I struggle to see the need to return to this thematic territory yet again, especially from a filmmaker who has so many other kinds of stories to tell (and, sadly, so little time left to tell them). It turns out that I was both a little right and a little wrong in my skepticism. The Irishman finds plenty more to say about the corruption & violence of organized crime that Scorsese has not addressed in previous efforts. Unfortunately, it allows that new material to be drowned out by an overwhelming flood of the same-old-same-old.

Scorsese mascot Robert De Niro stars as a low-level mafia hitman who becomes the unlikely, trusted bodyguard of infamous union organizer Jimmy Hoffa – played by the explosively charismatic Al Pacino. Pacino remains a hoot throughout the picture, which almost forgives the endless hours that monotonously detail the behind-the-scenes corruption & violence on the union-mafia border. Classic Scorsese collaborators like Joe Pesci & Harvey Keitel are flanked by giddy-to-be-there “youngsters” like Ray Romano & Bobby Cannavale in a GooderFellers redux that serves mostly as a history lesson to a new generation about why Hoffa was important in his time and how his flagrant corruption forever altered public opinion on labor unions in America. Each cast member holds their own in this decades-spanning epic, despite a distracting, much-written-about “de-aging” effect that lands the film near the realm of the “theme park” superhero movies Scorsese has been having fun flippantly dismissing in the press. It’s just that they’re instructed to joylessly go through the motions of reliving Marty’s past Mean Streets/GoodFellas/Casino triumphs, deliberately stripping the onscreen power & violence of any potential misinterpreted cool. No matter how many times Scorsese’s past pictures have been willfully misinterpreted as dorm-poster posturing for Badass Antiheroes, they’ve always had that same grim, hyper-critical eye for this realm of hyperviolent bullies. Those movies were just never this dull or exhausting. Scorsese is essentially repenting here for the sin of being entertaining.

In theory, I appreciate the idea of Scorsese self-examining what a life spent submerged in all this violence is meant to accomplish. In its best moments, The Irishman is exactly that – featuring an ancient De Niro, retired from his Murderer for Hire days, unable to find meaning in the remaining scraps of his life. He self-justifies his “youthful” crimes as a soldier who was just following orders, one with a duty to “protect” his family by remaining well-employed. After three grueling hours of matter-of-fact violence & corruption, the movie finally finds him discovering just how empty all that dutiful brutality truly was. Faced with the idleness of obsoletion & an inability to mend familial bonds that were never really there to begin with (especially with a silently disgusted adult daughter played by an expertly icy Anna Paquin), he actually considers what he’s done with his life for the first time, and is haunted by what he finds. That’s the core of the movie! That’s new, fresh territory worth dwelling on & exploring at length in miserable sequences of domestic drama. Unfortunately, these scenes that get at what the movie is About are only a small blip in a grander picture, a flood of familiar faces & imagery from Scorsese’s past work. I could have fallen in love with The Irishman if it started with that final half-hour and really dug into the themes that distinguish it as a unique work in Scorsese’s catalog. As is, they’re treated more as dashes of seasoning rather than a proper meal.

Ultimately, The Irishman is Fine. It’s also easy to complain about and not entirely worth the effort, so in that sense I suppose it’s a perfect Oscar Movie. Part of me wishes that Scorsese had gotten all these accolades for something more demanding & daring like Silence instead, but I can’t begrudge one of our greatest living cinephiles getting recognized for his contributions to the artform – no matter the context. The only real hurdle here for most audiences is going to be its massive runtime, as everything else goes down relatively smooth (including the confounding “de-aging” tech, thanks to the growing ubiquity of CGI fuckery on the big screen). I’ve got my own personal reservations about the choice in subject matter & thematic emphasis, but no real fervor for shouting them at what appears to be an otherwise appreciative crowd.

-Brandon Ledet

Corrupt (1999)

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Albert Pyun is one of those under-the-radar schlockteurs of the direct-to-VHS and early-VOD eras who churns out dozens & dozens of low-profile genre pics at an alarming rate without drawing too much attention to himself. Chances are that if you’ve seen an Albert Pyun film it wasn’t on purpose, but rather a statistical inevitability since he’s made so many sci-fi & crime film cheapies that you were bound to stumble into one of them eventually. For instance, I recently picked up a $1 used DVD copy of Pyun’s “urban” crime film Corrupt because it featured New Orleans rapper Silkk the Shocker on the cover, who I couldn’t recall ever having seen in a proper feature film before. I still haven’t. Part of Albert Pyun’s “Urban Trilogy” (alongside the Snoop Dogg vehicles Urban Menace & The Wrecking Crew), Corrupt is indeed Silkk the Shocker’s feature film debut as an actor, but only on a technicality. Shot in early-digital’s cheapo days (and trying to pass off the Czech Republic as New York City), this film is a very slight 69min that just barely holds itself together long enough to qualify as a movie. Silkk The Shocker also fades into the background for long stretches so that his costar, Ice-T, winds up claiming the most screentime (despite being the antagonist). This is an Ice-T movie that Silkk The Shocker just happens to pass through from time to time, but my purchase of the film under a mistaken pretense of what I was getting into is fairly typical to the quantity-over-quality M.O. for Pyun in general, so I was amused by the bait and switch.

While the title might signal that this is a thriller about crooked cops, it turns out Corrupt is the name of Ice-T’s character, not a descriptor of his persona. The controversial-rapper-turned-network-television-star appears here as the exact kind of criminal dirtbag he now pursues weekly as a fictional police detective on Law & Order: SVU. A drug kingpin with a hot temper, Corrupt threatens to implode an ongoing truce between NYC gangs because he cannot leave one particular brother-sister duo in his neighborhood alone – the brother (Silkk the Shocker) because he suspects him of stealing his drugs and the sister (Eva La Dare) because he wants to use his powerful street status to coerce her into bed. Silkk the Shocker occasionally runs across the screen to fire a gun in Ice-T’s general direction but most of Corrupt is concerned with that latter conflict with the sister. This is a shockingly dialogue-heavy picture about sexual coercion & rape in organized street crime, amounting to more of a melodrama than a crime thriller. A few disorienting smash-cut establishing-shot montages attempt to convince the audience that we’re watching a New York story, but most of the film is confined to single-location indoor scenes in the warehouses & diners of Bratislava, so that the film feels like a morbid stage play wherein a gangster abuses his power to manipulate a woman who does not want to sleep with him into bed. It’s a much more somber, wordy picture than you’d expect given its early-digi crime cheapie pedigree, which is the exact kind of expectation vs. reality dissonance that typifies Albert Pyun’s career.

Since the novelty of a Silkk the Shocker movie is minimalized along with the local rapper’s screentime, there are exactly two reasons why anyone should ever seek out Corrupt on purpose. The first is that its DVD (as well as the only version of the film uploaded to YouTube, appropriately) includes an amazingly disrespectful commentary track from Ice-T. Bored in the recording booth, Ice-T mercilessly riffs on the film in an MST3k tradition as if under the (understandable) assumption that no one would ever possibly be listening. He makes fun of the cheapness of Albert Pyun’s catalog in general, and jokes about how he only did a Pyun film because he’s been “blackballed from real movies” (this was before his TV career took off). He even makes fun of the audience for having purchased the DVD in the first place, much less played his commentary track, reasoning “You’re a loser with too much time on your hands.” (Fair point, no lies detected.) On the off chance that you’re actually interested in the production details for Corrupt, he does ease off these self-deprecating bon mots for insights like his complaint that “There was no place to shit” on set, so the crew would have to “hold it in the whole day.” It’s amazing. The second reason the film is potentially worth seeking out is that it features a scene in which Ice-T self-emulates with impossibly cheap CG-fire effects in order to dispose of his enemies (his mechanism for surviving the burns himself being too convoluted to be worth explaining). The image is so cheaply done that it approaches an art-film surreality that gives me hope there are other sublimely absurdist moments awaiting me the next time I accidentally stumble into an Albert Pyun film. It’s still a moment I’d recommend enhancing with Ice-T’s commentary track for peak effectiveness, though.

Since purchasing this film, one of my favorite modern critics (Justin Decloux of Film Trap and the Important Cinema Club podcast) has published an entire book of critical essays exploring the appeal of Albert Pyun as a filmmaker, titled Radioactive Dreams. Maybe after reading that collection I’ll be better equipped in purposefully seeking out Pyun films for pleasure instead of stumbling across them in confusion. One thing will not change though: Corrupt will still hold less value as a Silkk the Shocker vehicle (despite him being featured prominently on the poster) than it does as a showcase for Ice-T – as an actor as well as a raconteur (in his no-fucks-given commentary track) and a rapper (Ice-T songs play almost continually throughout the film with his vocals alarmingly high in the mix). I guess I’m going to have to seek out my Silkk the Shocker fix in his next film credit after Corrupt, Hot Boyz, which was apparently produced & directed by his brother Master P.

-Brandon Ledet

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

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The common wisdom about Bugs Bunny is that he was modeled after Old Hollywood hunk Clark Gable; the only reason we even have the misconception that real-life rabbits love to eat carrots is because Bugs Bunny parodied Gable doing so in It Happened One Night and the image stuck. However, Gable’s slick, fast-talking, devilish pranksterism is just as much of a reflection of Studio Era sensibilities as they are a personal quirk. His rapid-fire dialogue delivery screams “Turner Classic Movies” more so than seeming specific to him, as if he were speaking a language called “Old Movie” that just happens to sound a lot like sped-up English. I’m saying this mostly because Bugs Bunny was the only thing I could think about while recently watching The Maltese Falcon for the first time, even though that’s a film that stars Humphrey Bogart, not Gable. The Maltese Falcon is a film with an absurdly prestigious pedigree: it’s the directorial debut of Studio Era legend John Huston; it’s cited as the first “major” film noir (as opposed to the smaller, independently produced noir pictures that preceded it); it’s one of the most defining examples of the MacGuffin as a literary device; etc. Still, all I could think about for the entire duration of the film was how funny Humphrey Bogart was in the lead role, and how much he reminded me of Bugs. Bogart is fluent in the same Old Movie language Clark Gable speaks (Bugsy Bunny also parodied him in the Casablanca poof Carrotblanca), and I feel as if I already owe the film a re-watch, not being able to keep up with each joke as fast as they were flying at me in Old Movie dialect.

As the film’s reputation of typifying a MacGuffin may suggest, the plot of The Maltese Falcon does not matter all that much. Bogart stars as a hard-drinking detective who gets sucked into a thieves’ quarrel by a dangerous dame (Mary Astor). At the expense of his partner, his freedom, and potentially his life, he aids this sultry stranger in their quest to obtain a highly valuable ornament ([whispering to my date while watching The Maltese Falcon when The Maltese Falcon first appears on the screen] “That’s the Maltese Falcon”) while avoiding the bullets of a small ring of thieves who also desperately desire to possess it. Casablanca’s Sydney Greenstreet, The Killing’s Elisha Cook Jr, and everyone’s favorite pervert Peter Lorre round out the main cast as that trio of gun-toting thieves, each taking turns backing Bogart into a corner so he can promptly talk his way out of it. It’s Bogart lashing out in that fight-or-flight position that makes The Maltese Falcon such a consistently fun watch. Whether talking to the dame, the cops, or the crooks, Bogart’s hardboiled detective delivers long strings of uninterrupted sass at a machine gun’s pace. Bogart knows he’s being lied to & bullied from all directions, but he finds the danger & mystery of that set-up to be a gas, taking great delight in calling everyone out in their deceits as his hypersensitive bullshit detector goes haywire. When Sydney Greenstreet’s would-be criminal mastermind repeatedly tells Bogart, “You are a character,” out of a gamesman’s delight, it the most honest sentiment shared by any of the film’s various players. This is a film built entirely on Bogart being a comically oversized character, in the colloquial sense of the word.

I don’t want to oversell The Maltese Falcon as a laugh-a-second yuck ‘em up comedy. Based on a very serious crime novel, the second adaption after a 1930s original (Hollywood remake culture has gone too far!), the film’s surface-level details deliver everything you’d want to see in a classic noir. Our “hero” is a hard-drinking adulterer who inserts himself into deadly criminals’ schemes for amusement & personal profit. He dons the classic suits & fedoras combo that inspire those wretched “Men used to dress classy” MRA memes. He’s framed with the intense lighting & drastic angles of classic noir while simply rolling a cigarette or pouring himself a drink, a handsome personification of gruff masculinity. This is directly contrasted with the fey, sexually devious energy of Peter Lorre, playing a character explicitly described as homosexual in the source material. Bogart gets into some S&M play with Lorre (who is introduced practically fellating the handle of his cane), dominating him with some Kung Fu action and barking “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.” There’s a serious, even tragic romanticism to this Alpha Male masculinity, typified by his fawning secretary’s plea “You always think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good.” Unfortunately, that macho posturing was something that trickled down into the zeitgeist just as much as Bogart’s “Ain’t I a stinker?” pranksterism, influencing descendants as disparate as the wise-cracking meatheads of French New Wave staples like Breathless and 1980s action spectacles like Commando. There’s a danger in making your troubled antiheroes out to be such slick charmers; they end up being so lovable they’re practically children’s-entertainment cartoon bunnies.

At this point, you probably don’t need to hear from me or any amateur film blogger that The Maltese Falcon is well-made & worth seeing. Catching it for the first time on the big screen (thanks to The Prytania’s Classic Movies series) mostly just confirmed for me what I had already assumed from its name recognition & its heavy rotation in corners like TCM: it’s a handsome, well-crafted noir with a talented cast & a distinct Old Hollywood charm. The only thing I didn’t know to expect was that it would be so damn funny. Even its score often reinforces the humor of the dialogue, with chipper flights of orchestral whims incongruously accompanying a murderous plot about greedy, gun-toting thieves. It’s practically the same accompaniment you’d expect to hear in a Merrie Melodies cartoon while Bugs Bunny cracks wise in an Old Movie cadence to talk his way out of getting shot by Elmer Fudd.

-Brandon Ledet