crime

D.O.A. (1949)

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D.O.A. is a tight little noir thriller (#89 in Douglas Brode’s list in Edge of Your Seat, for those of you playing along at home) that’s one of the most perfect encapsulations of the genre. At 82 minutes, there’s almost no fat to be trimmed, and since it lapsed into the public domain years ago because of failure to renew the copyright, it’s accessible pretty much anywhere. Director Rudolph Maté, who would go on to helm When Worlds Collide just a year later, had risen through the ranks as a cinematographer, having earned his stripes on films as varied and well-remembered as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Foreign Correspondent, and the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda from director Charles Vidor. That eye for composition is striking in the film’s opening sequence, a minutes-long tracking shot that follows a man through a vast and echoey police station to find a particular detective so that he can report a murder: his own. 

Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) is an accountant and notary public in the desert town of Banning, California, population about seven thousand at the time. His secretary, Paula (Pamela Britton) is madly in love with him, a situation that he seems disinterested in either quashing or pursuing. He springs the news to her that he’s taking a solo weekend trip to San Francisco, much to her disappointment, but there’s nothing she can do to stop him, and away he goes. Arriving at his lodgings, he discovers that the place is full of salesmen who have just wrapped up an annual conference and are holding various parties all over the hotel. The place is lousy with pretty ladies in expensive fur coats, and Frank seems more than ready to sow some oats hither and yon, but not before he returns Paula’s messages. She’s not pleased to hear all the caterwauling in the background, but she nevertheless dutifully reports that a man named Eugene Philips, an importer-exporter, had been desperately trying to reach him all afternoon, ending with the cryptic statement that if he didn’t talk to Frank right away “it would be too late.” Frank goes out with the salesmen from the room across the hall to a jazz bar, where the host’s wife starts to get a little too handsy, and he excuses himself to make small talk with a pretty blonde at the bar. Distracted, he doesn’t notice the lurking figure with his back to the camera surreptitiously slipping something into his drink. The next morning, he feels extremely ill and gets a terminal diagnosis; he’s ingested the “luminous toxin,” a poison with no antidote, and now he has only days left to live, not much time to find out who his killer is.

There’s a lot that happens in the first act of this one, which is great, since it means that the second and third acts move at a breakneck speed as Frank works to pull at all of the threads of a decently convoluted conspiracy and solve his own murder before he drops dead. Paula is a fascinating character, as she initially comes off as slightly off-putting, pestering Frank to the point of workplace sexual harassment. She insists that he take her out for a drink and is notably upset that Frank made plans for a weekend trip that didn’t include her, but she also seems to realize that this is Frank taking an opportunity to give himself one last weekend as a swinging bachelor before settling into a life with her in Banning. Upon awakening in San Francisco on Saturday morning, he’s clearly ready to go back and marry Paula, even before he learns that he’s dying. Once he tells her that he needs her, she shows up to act as his sidekick for the rest of the film, and there’s real affection there. The great tragedy may be that if she hadn’t been suffocating him so, he might not have felt the need to spend a weekend away from her, and then he wouldn’t have been poisoned. Alas. Not that it would have helped save Eugene Phillips, who was going to “commit suicide” that Friday night one way or another. 

One of the other great tragedies in this has a major noir bent, which is the trope of the innocent man caught up in a dangerous web of lies and crime. For Frank, it comes down to a particular bill of sale that he notarized for Phillips months in the past, one that would have proved the dead man’s innocence. It’s not really spoiling much; the film’s electric energy all revolves around Frank going from place to place and getting answers that lead to more questions, all leading back to Phillips’s untimely demise. Who’s the real villain here? Is it Phillips’s brother, who was carrying on an affair with his sister-in-law? Is it Halliday, Eugene’s business partner? Is it the mysterious George Reynolds, whom no one seems to have ever seen and which may be no more than an alias? It’s a tight little mystery that’s completely streamlined. Just as Frank is running out of time, he grows increasingly frantic and desperate to find out who’s responsible for setting his death in motion and ensure that Paula is out of their reach, and the film feels similarly harried and headlong as it rushes toward the conclusion. 

Maté’s is a name that one doesn’t hear bandied about in cinephile circles all that much. It can’t help that, looking at his CV, his filmography is all over the place. There are several films noir listed there, many of which seem intriguing even if I’ve never heard of them, like Union Station starring William Holden, Paula starring Loretta Young, and Forbidden starring Tony Curtis. But in the midst of those are a motley assortment of historical adventures (The Prince Who Was a Thief, The Black Shield of Falworth, and The 300 Spartans), romantic comedies (It Had to Be You, Sally and Saint Anne), Oscar bait (No Sad Songs for Me), and far, far too many Westerns to name. The man worked, and his talent is clear here, and I’m excited to see if I can track down some of his other noir and crime thrillers, even if I have no interest in Siege at Red River, The Far Horizons, or The Rawhide Years. The performances here are great as well, as O’Brien perfectly embodies a man who’s clearly been spending too much time helping farmers file their taxes and fending off Paula’s pawing at him and just needs to know he could still get a city girl’s number, even if he can’t follow through with ringing her up. Britton also walks a narrow tightrope here, needing to play Paula as written while also making her someone we find likable enough to root for her and Frank to get together. With such a short time commitment and widespread availability (it’s even on Tubi), D.O.A. is worth checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man (2025)

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Someone broke into my house last week, and none of the details from The Incident make much sense. While I was away at work, they kicked in my back door, napped in my bed, and stole only my denim jacket (leaving all of the usual go-to items untouched – cash, drugs, tools, electronics, etc). They also left behind a relatively pristine pair of Nikes, wedged between the rain barrel & wall of my side porch. The Incident was jarring and, I guess, mildly violating, but because there were no signs of significant theft or intent to return, it all felt weirdly unserious. It was in that rattled, baffled headspace that I made a trip to the Zeitgeist Theatre to catch a screening of The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man with friends (after reinforcing the security of my back door, of course). Based on a true story, The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is a microbudget comedy about a fecal terrorist who dumped buckets of piss & shit on his fellow Torontonians in 2019, seemingly at random. It was a violent, traumatizing crime spree that was obviously a total nightmare for all victims soaked in the disturbed man’s soupy diarrhea. However, as the meme-referencing title indicates, there’s no way to tell that story without acknowledging that the details of the violation are, in a way, unserious. As a movie prop, a bucket of diarrhea, while disgusting, is inherently a little funny.

First-time director Braden Sitter Sr. is surprisingly sincere about the severe mental illness that would inspire someone to attack strangers with buckets of his own filth. The majority of The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man‘s 80-min runtime is dedicated to psychologically profiling the mentally unwell loner who resorted to fecal terrorism as an alternative to committing suicide.  Rishi Rodriguez stars as the enigmatic Miguel, an unemployed incel who spends most of his time doing drugs and jerking off to Virtual Reality dinosaur porn. After a few horrific LSD trips through his social media feeds, Miguel is inspired by a pigeon that shits on his head to find a new way to connect with his fellow Torontonians, having already been failed by familial, professional, and romantic relationships. He undergoes a spiritual rebirth by dumping his first diarrhea bucket on his own naked body at a construction site, emerging as a kind of Shit Christ (an escalation of the infamous Piss Christ of the 1980s). The subsequent shit-bucket attacks are self-justified by a volatile mixture of Miguel’s religious psychosis & governmental conspiracy paranoia, represented onscreen in long sequences of triple-exposure psychedelic montage layering cheap, digital photography; it’s essentially Combat Shock updated for the smartphone era. None of Miguel’s victims are privy to his illness or reasoning, though. All they know is that they were peacefully walking through a public space, and now they’re soaked in shit.

Besides that dramatic sincerity, the most surprising thing about The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is that it’s not necessarily the piss & shit itself that earns all of the biggest laughs. Those laughs are earned by the custom-made parody songs about the piss & shit – all credited to The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man Band and all comedy gold. Familiar pop tunes from bands like The Beatles, The Who, Nirvana, Pixies, and CCR are reworked with lyrics about “pee pee” & “poo poo” in an aggressively juvenile commitment to the bit. Those parody tunes are reserved exclusively for the montage sequences that will draw most of the film’s cult-cinema notoriety: nonstop Jackass-style stunts in which innocent pedestrians are covered in shit. It’s a brilliant move, comedically, since the parody song lyrics add a fresh novelty to the centerpiece shit-bucket sequences that might become numbingly repetitive without it. Otherwise, most of the humor is crass, honest acknowledgement of the unrelenting hell of modern living. While Miguel is having his own mental health crisis isolated in his (literally) shitty apartment, his victims are introduced in standalone vignettes dealing with the constant annoyances of contemporary shitty city living: being hit on by shitty “friend-zoned” nice guys, being polite about friends’ shitty poetry, constantly being asked for obvious directions by clueless, shitty tourists. It’s all just shitty enough to make a man want to lash out Travis Bickle-style and leave his own shitty mark on the world. It’s also all deeply unserious and fixable with just the tiniest morsel of basic human empathy.

-Brandon Ledet 

Podcast #231: 187 (1997) & Inner-City Schools

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Welcome to Episode #231 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of 90s movies about well-meaning teachers confronted with the violent chaos of inner-city schools, starting with the 1997 Sam Jackson vehicle 187.

00:00 Welcome

01:55 Presence (2025)
02:56 The Brutalist (2024)
06:14 The Cranes are Flying (1957)
08:17 The Lives of Others (2006)
14:39 It’s Complicated (2009)
18:13 Two Days in Paris (2007)
20:48 Willard (1971)
23:12 The Colors Within (2025)

28:17 187 (1997)
50:06 Dangerous Minds (1995)
1:03:17 Sister Act 2 – Back in the Habit (1993)
1:24:16 High School High (1996)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Kiss of Death (1947)

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Usually, when a classic-period noir is singled out for praise, it’s because it’s lean, rapid-fire machine gun entertainment – a high-style, high-energy crime picture achieved on a low-rent budget.  1947’s Kiss of Death has none of those qualities.  After opening on a botched Christmas Eve jewel heist in a tense, largely wordless sequence, the film’s urge to entertain goes dark.  This is an oddly leisurely, somber noir about the jail-sweat struggles of one of those failed jewel thieves (played by the aptly named Victor Mature) as he’s pressured to rat on his accomplices who got away.  At first, he refuses to squeal, but threats against his family change his tune, and he reluctantly becomes an undercover rat helping cops bust the crime rings that used to supply his income, much to his personal shame.  Watching this family man squirm under police pressure in his jail cell is far from the perverse sex-and-violence pleasures audiences usually seek in classic noir, so most of Kiss of Death ends up feeling limp in its genre payoffs.  It’s still worthy of all its praise & attention, though, thanks to a maniac villain by the name of Tommy Udo.

Richard Windmark’s performance as the sad-sack squealer’s charismatic, villainous foil heroically brings Kiss of Death back to life after the much more reserved Victor Mature drowns it in moralistic tedium.  Windmark’s infamous gangster Tommy Udo is a murderous sociopath whom the D.A. wants the jewel thief to snitch on as a fellow convict, but he proves too dangerous to be around, even for a minute.  Windmark is such an energizing lunatic in the role that he earned an unlikely Oscar nomination for it, presumably for being the only sign of life in an otherwise plodding picture.  Along with the likes of James Cagney, Peter Lorre, and Ann Savage, he gives one of the all-time great unhinged noir-villain performances, often credited alongside Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs for inspiring the look & persona of The Joker.  When a cop asks Udo if he has a minute to talk, he spits back “I wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape.”  He condescendingly refers to his fellow gangsters by the uniform nickname “Squirt.”  He pushes wheelchair-using biddies down the stairs just for rubbing him the wrong way.  He is the entertaining volatility that most noirs exude in their filmmaking personified in a single movie-stealing character.

Besides the dark, revitalizing energy of Windmark’s performance, Kiss of Death is most commendable for its early use of location shooting around 1940s New York City, including prison scenes shot at Sing Sing.  Shooting outside of a Los Angeles studio lot was atypical for a small-scale crime picture at the time, which you can tell as soon as an opening-credits title card brags about the novelty.  It’s also unusual for a noir of this kind to be narrated by the doomed antihero’s love interest (and, weirdly, his kids’ former babysitter, played by Colleen Gray), but I can’t say her voice adds as much interest or texture to the picture as the location shooting, except maybe in softening the genre’s macho tendencies.  Otherwise, Hollywood workman director Henry Hathaway (True Grit, Niagara, Call Northside 777) brings a controlled, level-headed approach to the production that keeps it from achieving anything especially flashy or memorable within its genre template.  Only Tommy Udo breaks through that containment of Old Hollywood professionalism, transforming a cozy afternoon watch into a momentarily thrilling freak show.  He is the spectacle worth seeking out here, the only reason the film is remembered at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Asphalt (1929)

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I am by no means well studied in the broader history of German Expressionism, but I have seen a horror movie or two.  When I think of the German Expressionist visual style, my mind immediately conjures up the fantastic, transportive images of titles like Nosferatu, M, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, The Hands of Orlac, Destiny, The Golem and, of course, Metropolis.  Even the cultural impact of those films’ innovative directors & cinematographers emigrating to America has always been most immediately apparent in early Hollywood horrors like The Black Cat & Dracula, given their surrealistic production design and shadowy visual play.  It was surprising, then, to find no supernatural dream logic in the once-lost German Expressionist drama Asphalt, which might account for the film’s relatively low name recognition in that field.  In terms of narrative, Joe May’s tragic story of mismatched lovers feels more familiar to early Hollywood dramas about misbehaved women than it does to the nightmare-realm horrors more typically associated with German Expressionism.  However, all of the ecstatic visual flourish associated with that film movement is in full swing, as the camera sways wildly in an attempt to capture the bustling urban chaos of Berlin, where its doomed love story is set.  Its plot synopsis might sound like the German equivalent of early US films like A Fool There Was, The Red Kimona, Parisian Love, or A Woman of the World, but it’s way less restrained & stage-bound than any of those titles.  It’s pure cinema, made by the people who established the language of that artform in its infancy.

Metropolis star Gustav Fröhlich plays a bumbling, naive cop who’s not quite streetwise enough to handle the streets of Berlin.  Else Heller (doing her best Louise Brooks drag) plays the young man’s downfall: a cunning, compulsive thief he catches robbing a jewelry store when he should be directing traffic his first day on the job.  The poor rube buys her sob story about needing to steal to survive, as she is perilously close to being evicted onto the harsh streets of Berlin.  An unlikely romance blossoms between cop & criminal as his sympathy grows, until she can’t stand his naivety any longer and fully confesses her betrayal of trust.  She does not, in fact, steal for survival.  She steals because it’s thrilling to get away with taking home diamonds & furs.  She steals for the fun of stealing.  What ruins the fun is the way her flirty pickpocket lifestyle gets her new beau into steep trouble, both with the macho brutes of her past and with the strictly law-abiding members of his own family.  The dramatic entertainment value of Asphalt is in watching a young, fashionable woman thieve, lie, and cheat in hedonistic excess, even if the morals of the era require it to eventually condemn her for crimes against morality.  No matter how deplorable the femme fatale’s behavior is in the abstract, the movie takes obvious delight in watching her smoke cigarettes and smolder in a heated bathtub, treating herself to a life of luxury that she would be denied through any legal path.  She might not steal to survive, exactly, but she does steal to make life worth surviving.

Asphalt intuitively takes for granted that crime is sexy & fun, so it gets to spend a lot of its time playing around with new, exciting ways to move the camera instead of complicating its central romantic dynamic.  It opens with kaleidoscopic mirroring of Berlin street traffic and sweeping montages of the rain-slicked asphalt beneath those cars & feet.  The camera is in constant motion, either evoking the mania of navigating a city’s cacophonous busyness in exterior scenes or taking inventory of individual objects & players on interior sets.  It represents an end of an era for ecstatic, inventive German filmmaking, but there’s no solemn, settled maturity to its cinematography.  It’s desperate to impress.  Like Metropolis, a complete print of Asphalt was considered lost media for decades, until it pieced back together through archival discovery & recovery in the 1990s.  Unlike Metropolis, it’s been largely forgotten to time a second time since that restoration.  There just isn’t as much of a completionist streak among romance & crime film enjoyers the same way that horror & sci-fi freaks will seek out anything that falls into their genre of choice.  I’m as guilty of that bias as anyone, having never heard of this film until a used DVD copy fell into my hands at the Minneapolis record store Electric Fetus.  Meanwhile, I’ve actively sought out at least a dozen horror films from the German Expressionist era in my frantic search to guzzle down all things horror.  It turns out they were making romantic dramas in that period too, just like in Hollywood (except way dreamier & prettier).

-Brandon Ledet

Le Samouraï (1967)

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I have not felt motivated to watch Richard Linklater’s undercover cop comedy Hit Man since it hit Netflix, but I did happen to catch its opening half-hour in the holiest of cinematic venues: muted on the TV at my neighborhood bar.  The one sequence that caught my eye while I was enjoying my banh mi and cocktail that evening was an early montage of classic film clips in which Glen Powell’s pretend-hit-man explains that the entire hired assassin concept is a movie trope, not a real-life occupation.  I don’t know whether the 1967 neo-noir Le Samouraï was referenced in that quick montage because I wouldn’t see it screened at the theater down the street from that bar until a few days later, but it would have fit right in.  Like Branded to Kill, In Bruges, John Wick, Barry, and all the other hired-assassin media that Hit Man gently mocks for its outlandishness, Le Samouraï imagines a complex crime-world hierarchy in which money is routinely exchanged for murder, no questions asked – a world with its own bureaucratic rules & procedures.  Like those films, it’s also fully aware of its indulgence in outlandish fiction, striving to be as cool & entertaining as possible without worrying about being factual.  If anything, the most outlandish aspect of Le Samouraï is its casting of the extraordinarily handsome Alain Delon as an anonymous assassin who goes unnoticed in public as he executes his orders, which is a logical misstep Hit Man repeats by casting the Hollywood handsome Glen Powell as a master of disguise who can credibly disappear undercover.

In its own way, Le Samouraï is also a commentary on classic crime movie tropes, or it’s at least in direct communication with them.  A few years after Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless shook up the French filmmaking establishment by returning to the high-style chaos of classic American noir, Jean-Pierre Melville offered a much calmer, stranger refraction of the American gangster picture.  Delon’s mostly silent hitman glides through the streets of Paris with an overly professional, emotionless affect, but he still vainly checks his image in every mirror he passes, making sure his trench coat & fedora match the classic noir archetype projected in his mind.  He’s a film trope out of time, which leads to great pop-art juxtaposition when he passes advertisements for modern products like Orangina on city streets.  A disorienting organ motif loops on the soundtrack as he wordlessly carries out his work, dodges cops, and kills professional rivals, giving his crime world setting the same dreamlike quality that the Goblin soundtrack gives the ballet school of Dario Argento’s Suspriria.  If Godard brought the crime film back to the poverty-row roots of its infancy, Melville pushed it forward past the point of death to the world beyond, sending his audience to a hypnotically hip hitman heaven.  Most of the storytelling is visual, with all of the loudmouth blathering left for the cops on Delon’s tail.  In other words, it’s all style, to the point where the style is the substance.

Any further praise I could heap on Le Samouraï that would just be variations on labeling it Cool.  The opening scroll that explains Delon’s antihero protagonist lives by an honorable samurai code?  Cool.  His anxious-bird home alarm system; his small collection of adoring Parisian babes who will likely be his undoing; his deep knowledge of the public transit system that allows him to avoid arrest?  All very cool.  What’s even cooler is that I got the chance to see the movie with a full, enthusiastic crowd, thanks to the popularity of The Broad’s regular $6 Tuesdays deal.  Like the muted television hanging over the local watering hole, $6 Tuesdays has become a great cinematic equalizer that has made watching movies into a communal event again, rather than something I do alone in the dark while everyone else watches Hit Man on Netflix at home.  If there were only a new digital restoration of a classic Euro genre film I’ve never seen before making the theatrical rounds every week, I’d be set. 

-Brandon Ledet

Double Indemnity (1944)

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When Fred MacMurray’s horndog insurance salesman meets Barbara Stanwyck’s femme fatale at the start of Double Indemnity, she’s dressed only in a beach towel, fresh from sunbathing.  After changing into a knee-length dress, she entertains him in the parlor, pretending to be interested in purchasing car insurance from his company but really feeling out his potential to help with the murder of her husband.  He immediately catches onto her scheme (a hunch confirmed by her conversational shift away from automobile insurance to “accident” insurance), but he sticks around to flirt anyway, mostly for the vague promise of adultery.  When Stanwyck uncrosses her bare legs during this uneasy negotiation to draw MacMurray’s attention to her girly ankle bracelet, it hit me; I had seen this exact dynamic play out before in Basic Instinct.  I was watching a horned-up dope flirt with an obvious murderess in her cliffside California home, mesmerized by strategic flashes of her lower-body flesh.  After I had already retitled the film Double Instinctity in my head, I later retitled it The Insurance Man Always Files Twice, following the clever “accidental death” of Stanwyck’s husband (only to later learn that the novel Double Indemnity was written by the author of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain).  By the time the adulterous couple’s alibi for murder involving the anonymity of public train transportation had me retitling it Dangers on a Train, it became clear this was an immeasurably influential American crime picture that was directly imitated and alluded to throughout Hollywood long before Verhoeven arrived to sleaze up the scene.

Although it was released years before the term was coined by a French critic, Double Indemnity did not invent the film noir genre.  Even if the genre hadn’t gotten its start in dime store paperback novels, Humphrey Bogart had already been led to his onscreen doom by Mary Astor’s femme fatale in Double Indemnity‘s suaver older cousin The Maltese Falcon a few years prior.  Stanwyck’s own femme fatale archetype is also named Phyllis Dietrichson, a winking reference to earlier femmes fatale played by Marlene Dietrich in her pre-Code collaborations with Josef von Sternberg.  Still, it’s early and iconic enough that modern audiences get to watch it establish the core tropes of film noir in real time, to the point where it plays like a pastiche of a genre that hadn’t even been named yet.  Before MacMurray is hypnotized by Stanwyck’s anklet, he moseys around her dusty parlor and directly comments on the room’s shadowy lighting and Venetian blinds – two standard visual signifiers of classic noir.  That narration track rattles on at bewildering speeds throughout the entire picture, referring to Stanwyck as “a dame” (when in 3rd person) and “Baby” (when in 2nd person) so many times that it verges on self-parody.  That narration also frames the entire story as a flashback confession to the reasoning behind the central murder, a narrative structure echoed in classic noir melodramas like Mildred Pierce and director Billy Wilder’s own Sunset Boulevard.   Double Indemnity is not the first of its kind, but it is the Platonic ideal of a major studio noir, the same way Detour exemplifies the ideal of the genre’s Poverty Row variety.  And even Detour‘s femme fatale Ann Savage starred in her own shameless knockoff of the picture initially titled Single Indemnity, before it was sued by Paramount Pictures into changing its title to Apology for Murder.

Although Fred MacMurray easily racks up Double Indemnity‘s highest word count on the narration track, he’s not the cast’s MVP.  If nothing else, veteran character actor Edward G. Robinson fast-talks circles around him as his nosy business partner who unravels the adulterous couple’s perfect insurance-scam murder simply by following the hunches in his stomach (which he refers to as his “little man”).  The two insurance men have a great, intimate rapport that plays like genuine affection, whereas MacMurray’s carnal attraction to Barbara Stanwyck is purely violent hedonism.  Stanwyck is the obvious choice for MVP, then, as being led around on an LA murder spree by the leash of her anklet is such an obviously bad idea, but she’s a convincing lure anyway.  Like Michael Douglas’s dipshit cokehead detective in Basic Instinct, MacMurray knows this woman will lead to his doom, but he still gives into her schemes because the sex is that good – a business deal sealed when she appears at his apartment in a wet trench coat for their first act of consummation.  She isn’t afforded nearly as much screentime as MacMurray, but her every appearance is a cinematic event, from her initial beach towel entrance to her unflinching witness of her husband’s murder, to her grocery store appearance in Leave Her to Heaven sunglasses and a Laura Palmer wig.  Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson may owe thematic debt to the Marlene Dietrich femmes fatale before her—among other pre-Code influences—but she’s clearly striking and conniving enough to truly earn the term “iconic” that gets tossed around so liberally these days.  MacMurray’s job is just to play the stooge who drools at her anklet-adorned feet, which he does with humorous naivete.

It’s difficult to imagine how shocking the seediness of Double Indemnity would have registered in the 1940s, when noir was still taking its first baby steps.  It took Wilder years to get a version of the script approved for production, since unrepentant murder & adultery were still fictional taboos instead of standard soap opera fodder.  Along with cowriter (and noir novelist in his own right) Raymond Chandler, Wilder drives the wickedness of his characters home in a climactic double-crossing argument where Stanwyck declares both she and her duped insurance man are “rotten,” and he coldly replies, “Only, you’re a little more rotten.”  With barely suppressed pride, she spits back, “Rotten to the heart.”  There is little in the way of whodunit mystery to the script; it’s working more in the howcatchem style of a Columbo or Poker Face.  The real mystery is just how rotten these characters are at heart, a contest Phyllis Dietrichson wins in a walk.  By the time major-studio noir had its revival in Hollywood’s erotic thriller era, Double Indemnity‘s shock value had to be ratcheted up by films like Basic Instinct and the Postman Always Rings Twice remake to catch up with a jaded, seen-it-all audience.  The rotten-hearted cruelty of Stanwyck’s femme fatale remained deliciously evil as times changed, though, and even Sharon Stone’s bisexual murderess in Verhoeven’s version could only play as an homage rather than an escalation.

-Brandon Ledet

White Heat (1949)

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I’m only a few episodes into my first-time watch of the HBO series The Sopranos, and I already see why it became a pet favorite among cinephiles.  Not only is it one of the first watercooler shows that nudged the TV drama format towards the more cinematic anti-hero era of so-called “Peak Television” (I’m more of a sitcom guy personally, don’t shoot), but it also constantly references the exact kinds of Italo-American gangster dramas that turn pimply college freshmen into cinephiles in the first place.  In just the first few episodes of the show, characters have already made multiple references to the Godfather trilogy and to Goodfellas; there’s even a brief appearance from a Scorsese lookalike, coked out and ducking into a trashy nightclub.  It’s safe to assume, then, that the Sopranos writers’ room was well versed in the rich history of the American gangster picture, so I’m also going to assume it was no coincidence that I was thinking a lot about Tony Soprano while recently watching the 1949 James Cagney noir White Heat (also for the first time).

Like The Sopranos, White Heat is also specifically about the pathological neuroses of the American mobster archetype. James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett is an unhinged sadist of a mob boss with a “psychopathic devotion” to his mother and not much affection for any other living being.  Despite ruling over his goons with an iron fist, Jarrett frequently suffers intense (possibly psychosomatic) migraines that require that his mother remain on standby to coddle him back to good health.  At the start of The Sopranos, James Gandolfini’s New Jersey mafia don Tony suffers similar spells.  Stressed to the brink by the various pressures of his job as the local head of “sanitation,” Tony Soprano starts experiencing panic attacks that cause him to faint, inspiring him to take up regular sessions with a psychiatrist (Lorraine Bracco) that provide the show with a convenient episodic narrative structure.  Tony also has a remarkably evil mother whom he loves dearly, but that parallel appears unrelated.  Most mafia media centered on a mob boss in crisis tracks the way these anti-hero archetypes must delicately balance the necessary brutality of their jobs with the vulnerability of becoming so brutal that it inspires mutiny (whether among members of their own crew or among the cops on their payroll).  What makes White Heat & The Sopranos stand out in that genre is in their Freudian interest in those powerful brutes’ troubled psychology, an interest that places the 1940s Cagney picture decades ahead of the curve.

Cagney was enough of a studio star by the time he made White Heat that he had a sweetheart deal to develop his own projects as a creative voice.  Already having set the high standard for the American gangster picture in 1931’s The Public Enemy, he wasn’t particularly interested in returning to the genre until he was inspired to push his character’s psychology to shocking extremes.  One way you can tell Cagney gives an all-timer performance in White Heat is that he manages to make a character named “Cody” genuinely intimidating, scary even.   He’s described as “inhuman” by the cops on his tail, shooting lead into their bellies with reckless abandon – sometimes to cover his tracks, sometimes just because.  The film’s opening train heist is particularly brutal, with Cagney’s stunt double hopping onto a moving locomotive and shooting every cop, conductor, and railway worker who gets a good look at him dead, just in case.  When one of his most trusted goons accidentally has his face melted off by the train’s furious steam, Cody cruelly leaves him for dead, writhing in pain under his bandages.  Cody’s boyishly sweet to his mother but an absolute terror to everyone else.  He grinds his teeth.  He strangles his moll.  He’s little more than an excuse for Cagney to run wild as a murderous psychopath, more Norman Bates than Vito Corleone.

White Heat is not as iconic of a Cagney mobster picture as The Public Enemy, which is more directly referenced in episodes of The Sopranos that I have not gotten to yet.  This later work from Cagney is a little too tardy & bloated to register as the height of classic-period American noir.  The opening train heist and subsequent fallout is shocking in its brutality, but that effect slowly dulls in the lull leading up to the second heist in the final act, which is delayed by a largely uninteresting plot involving a voluntary jail stint and an undercover cop.  Cagney’s feverish performance keeps the energy up in the meantime, though, as you immediately get the sense that there’s no other way for a character so psychotically chaotic to meet his end than in a storm of bullets; all of the tension is just in waiting for that storm to approach and worrying about who he’ll hurt before it arrives.  Cagney never takes his foot off the gas, delivering his final “Made it ma! Top of the world!” line readings as if he’s winning the lottery instead of being shot to death.  I haven’t yet spoiled myself on how Tony Soprano’s going to go out six seasons of television from where I am now, but I assume it’s going to be just as tragic of an end, just likely without Cody Jarrett’s celebratory zeal for violence.  Tony may be suffering a mental health crisis, but he’s not nearly as violently, manically crazed as Cody; few characters are.

-Brandon Ledet

Johnny Handsome (1989)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

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