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’sBreathlessshook 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.
It took a couple weeks of diligent blog posts & podcast recordings to review all thirteen screenings I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, of which the major highlights were local premieres of Don Hertzfeldt’s Me, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. Overlook recaps are never complete if you only cover what movies you saw at the fest, though; it’s just as important to report on the movies you took home from the fest, thanks to the consistent, essential presence of boutique Blu-ray distributor Vinegar Syndrome as an on-site vendor. I pick up killer genre obscurities from the Vinegar Syndrome table every year, mostly because I’m prompted to select titles I’ve never heard of before by their striking cover art and by the curational nudging of a knowledgeable sales rep. I’ve left past Overlooks with blind-buy purchases of Nightbeast, The Suckling, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street – all bangers. This year’s highlight purchase was a recent in-house restoration of the 1990 Greek sexploitation thriller Singapore Sling, a movie that jumped out at me through the striking black-and-white S&M iconography on its slipcover and that over-delivered on the debauchery that graphic promises. Equal parts horror, noir, and pornography, it’s gorgeous high-art smut: the exact qualities Vinegar Syndrome regulars search for in the label’s extensive catalog. It’s almost unbelievable that it’s a new release for the company, since it feels just as perfectly calibrated to their brand as early, signature VS titles like The Telephone Book.
There are three separate narrators in this sordid domestic drama, all of whom directly address the audience in stage-play soliloquy. One is the titular Singapore Sling(named after a cocktail recipe, the only scrap of identification that can be found on his person); he’s a macho noir archetype who’s taken hard to alcoholism as his years-long search for his beloved, vanished Laura has proven fruitless. Tracking Laura’s ghost to a mysterious, remote mansion, he meets our other two narrators: the dominatrix owner of the estate and her childlike nympho daughter – a mother-daughter duo who are introduced to the audience roleplaying as the missing Laura and engaging in incestuous, fetishistic sex with the aid of a strap-on dildo. You see, they most definitely killed the missing woman, along with dozens of unnamed servants buried in a mass grave under their home’s flower garden, because they are wealthy and thus depraved. Like all noir protagonists, our POV character is doomed as soon as he stumbles into the web of these femmes fatales. They immediately beat him into concussion, tie him to a bedframe with ropes & leather straps, and take turns raping him while teasing out whether he’s aware of their similar abuse of the mysterious Laura. Speaking of which, the name “Laura” is repeated by all three players with feverish, orgasmic frequency, and it eventually proves to be a direct allusion to the classic 1940s Otto Preminger noir, complete with out-of-context references to Laura’s broken lake house radio. Whether you ever thought the noir genre could use a little sprucing up with proto-torture-porn sensibilities is dependent on your personal interests as an audience, but I can at least say I’ve never seen that exact combination before.
Singapore Sling is incestuous femdom erotica filtered through the filmmaking aesthetics of classic Universal monster movies. The father figure of the family home is dressed up like the Boris Karloff version of The Mummy and stored in the attic as an artifactual sex object. The women of the house keep some traditional BDSM restraints & tools lying around, but they also incorporate perplexing electrical equipment seemingly borrowed from the set of James Wale’s Frankenstein into their “play” (i.e., rape & torture). Its black-and-white horror sensibilities are warmly familiar, but its rape-fantasy logic feels genuinely dangerous outside the context of privately read erotic fiction, which is only slightly eased by it being played as a taboo freak-out instead of a pure turn-on. I haven’t felt this shameful while falling in love with a movie since I first watched The Skin I Live In, and its cheeky provocations don’t feel all that out of line with Almodóvar’s general schtick. I haven’t yet seen any other features from director Nikos Nikolaidis, but it appears that shock & provocation are constant in his work, evidenced by the 2011 documentary of the Vinegar Syndrome disc that features a montage of his actresses pissing & vomiting in a wide range of violent, sexual scenarios. Here, pissing & vomiting are their versions of cumshots, and their concussed captive has no choice but to lie back and take it until there is a chance to escape. I have no reference for where Nikolaidis was positioned in the Greek cinematic imagination in his time, but I do see direct evidence here that he was at least influential on currently ascending Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, from the outlandish incest of Dogtooth to the fruit-flavored masturbation and classic-monster visual cues of Poor Things.
There’s almost no way to recommend Singapore Sling without sounding like a carnival barker luring rubes into a geek show. Indeed, the film does have a Spider Baby quality to its “Get a load of these freaks!” premise, which never expands beyond hanging around a decrepit mansion with sexual deviants until everyone involved is fucked to death. For all of its kink & gore, though, it’s a strangely calm, quietly eerie affair, mostly scored by the soft meditation-app rain patter of the “sick and sad” world outside the mansion walls. It’s not the kind of kill-a-minute splatstick horror that punctuates every sequence with an active disemboweling; it’s the kind of off-putting, degenerate horror that collects the organs from a disemboweling to arrange into sensual tableaux, decorated with victims’ jewelry for perverse beauty. That stomach-turning disorientation is better experienced than described, which makes this an ideal blind-buy home video experience. It’s easily my favorite film I’ve picked up from Vinegar Syndrome’s merch table at Overlook, where I consistently gamble on titles without the hive-mind knowledge of the internet informing my purchases. Relying only on the box-cover artwork and the guidance of Staff Picks at that table is the closest I get to the vintage video store experience in this post-Blockbuster Video world (at least until Future Shock Video gets a storefront going in the not-too-distant future, many many bus rides away). I look forward to it every year almost as much as I look forward to the official selections on the Overlook program.
Saint Maud was one of the movies I was most looking forward to prior to the first quarantine back in 2020, having seen many trailers for it all through the last half of 2019. When I finally did get the chance to see it, it was revelatory – an amazing, understatedly vitriolic little thriller that handled religious trauma in a different way. Instead of Maud having been victimized by a past religious indoctrination or being someone who’s so well-versed in scriptural tradition that she can twist it to whatever her ends might be, she’s a dangerously unwell person making up her own faith through incomplete, piecemeal understanding of religion coupled with hallucinatory, delusional “visions.” Throughout that film, we see her interpretation of the world through her perspective; the face of the woman for whom she is a hospice carer takes on elements of the demonic in moments, “God” speaks to her through a roach in her apartment, and she sees herself as an angel in the film’s last moments, until the final split-second that shows us in the audience what’s actually happening to Maud (brutally and horrifically).
I wasn’t terribly interested in Love Lies Bleeding until the friend with whom I went to see Drive-Away Dolls asked me if we would be seeing it as well, and told me that it was directed by Rose Glass, who also helmed Saint Maud. That was better advertisement than any of the trailers for the film that I had seen, and I was not disappointed. Bleeding is the story of an intensely passionate love between two women and the way that drugs, troubled pasts, unrequited longing, and violence conspire to keep them apart. Somewhere in west Texas—I assume, given the prevalence of Lone Star beer—it’s 1989, and Lou (Kristen Stewart) works at Crater Gym, a cavernous warehouse full of free weights, meatheads, and stenciled slogans like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and its ilk. It’s a shit life, rubbing one out every night on the couch while her TV dinner goes cold, trying and failing to quit smoking, and unclogging the same gym toilet over and over while fending off the advances of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), who may be the only other queer woman in town but whom Lou finds repellant. One day, bisexual bodybuilder Jackie (Kay O’Brian) appears in the gym and upends Lou’s world; she’s hitch-hiking her way to a body-building competition in Vegas and is stopping over here for a bit after getting a job waiting tables at the local gun range/club’s cantina.
The two immediately hit it off and after a passionate night together in which Lou introduces Jackie to steroids to which she has access, Lou agrees to let Jackie stay with her until she goes further west to the competition. The situation is complicated by the fact that the gun range is owned by Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), Lou’s father. The range is just a cover, though, as his real business is running guns across the border to Mexico, and he’s got local law enforcement in his pocket, and Lou knows he’s bad news since she was once more involved in the family business, although she hasn’t spoken to her father in years following the suspicious disappearance of her mother. The only other remaining family Lou has is her sister Bethany (Jena Malone), mother of three married to utter piece of shit J.J. (Dave Franco), who also works for Lou Sr. and got Jackie her job after he has sex with her in a bar parking lot, the night before she and Lou meet. J.J. is habitually physically abusive of Bethany, and when he puts her in the hospital, the simmering rage, resentment, and violence under the surface of everything comes to a boil, with tragic consequences.
The southern fried thriller-noir bona fides of this movie are on full display. A mixture of Blood Simple, Thelma & Louise, and Blue Velvet with a little Requiem for a Dream sprinkled in for good measure, the film is elegant in its construction. The fingerprints from Blood Simple are all over this one, from its grimy, sweaty, eighties, west Texas setting to that classic visual of the highway at night, a dark void surrounding the small halo of light from a vehicle’s headlights. Bleeding’s final moments could take place in the exact same field as the one in which Ray buries Dan Hedaya’s Marty, just in daylight. Moreover, just like Abby and Ray in the Coen brothers’ film, our protagonists are forced to commit larger and larger acts of violence in order to try and be together, free from the potential for violence. Ed Harris channels Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth here, albeit in a more subdued manner. Although his violence is free from any psychosexual elements (give or take how much enjoyment he gets from forcing Jackie to learn to shoot while he “coaches” her through extensive body contact), he is just as sadistic as Booth, and Lou Sr. is perhaps the most frightening onscreen psychopath since Anton Chigurh. The similarities to Thelma & Louise are fairly close to the surface, and there’s something fascinating happening with the way that steroids are treated with the same intensity and as having the potential for the same fall out as intravenous drugs in Requiem.
Where this film picks up the torch from Glass’s earlier work is in the way that we are once again made privy to the internal life of an emotionally and mentally unwell person. Jackie is a fascinating character. When we first meet her, she’s using her body to get what she needs, and is at peace with that. She has history, but no origin; the earliest part of her life that she mentions is being adopted at age thirteen (by parents that no longer speak to her and who call her a “monster”), and she tells Lou that she turned to bodybuilding as a way to change her body due to fatphobic bullying. Like Maud, she’s running from something, but unlike her, she also has a goal in mind and is relying on herself to get there, self-actualizing where Maud turned to a hollow, false spirituality. She’s remarkably self-sufficient and dedicated, as we see when she wakes up under an overpass and immediately gets to work on both exercise and brushing her teeth. In this, she is a contrast to both Lou, who is never seen exercising and is instead trying to shortcut with steroids, and Daisy, who is most clearly communicated to us as undesirable through the centering of her poor dental hygiene. She’s still human, however, and allows her lust-turned-passion for Lou and her thirst for validation through victory in the Vegas competition to lead her down a path that deteriorates her mental state. At first, her steroid-affected hallucinations of developing greater vein and muscle definition are empowering and concurrent with her deepening passion with Lou, but when she tries to run from the consequences of her first major (albeit justified) act of violence, she ultimately has a nightmarish series of visions in Vegas that cause her to become even more aggressive, resulting in her falling first into the hands of the authorities and then under the influence of Lou Sr.
Another thing that’s fun about these visions is the way that they relate back to things that we see her absorbing, even if they’re making their way into her subconscious without her really noticing. After their first night together, Lou prepares breakfast for Jackie, who (somewhat ungratefully) asks her to leave the yolks out, a period-appropriate “healthier” alternative to eating a whole egg; later, in a montage we see Lou carefully separating out the yolks while preparing breakfast, and several shots of the eggs ending up in the garbage alongside the remnants of emptied ashtrays. This comes back around when Jackie later hallucinates that she has vomited Lou onto the stage in front of her at the competition, covered in a sort of amniotic egg white mixture. Further, in the film’s climax, Jackie imagines herself fully hulking out and turning into a giant woman (apologies that that song will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day, Steven Universe fans), and this is actually foreshadowed earlier on, when we see her watching the 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels. (If you’re like me, you probably assumed that this was used because the film is in the public domain, and were delighted to see that there was a narrative reason behind its inclusion.) It’s all very elegantly constructed, and as a man who always loves it when things fall perfectly into place, it was incredibly satisfying.
There should be no mistaking that this is still a brutal movie. It’s not one for those with queasy stomachs, and I’m not just talking about all of the disgusting mullets (of which there are … many). J.J.’s death is extreme, and we see the aftereffects of it multiple times. That’s the kind of thing you’d probably expect from a movie with the word “bleeding” in the title, but just in case you’re somehow floating around out there with the idea that this is more romance than grit, I want to make it clear that this is a ferocious, vicious piece of work, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Nothing lasts, really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.”
All of the stills and promotional posters for David Lean’s 1945 adultery drama Brief Encounter had convinced me that it was going to be a noir, not a stately stage play adaptation. Having now seen the film in full, I’m not entirely sure I was wrong. Brief Encounter is a kind of classic noir where the inciting crime is an emotional affair instead of a heist or a murder. It has all of the stylistic markers of noir: the drastic camera angles, the haze of urban steam, a morally compromised lead recounting their crimes in a confessional narration track. The fact that there’s no actual crime to speak of does little to muddle that flirtation with the genre. When the potential adulterers develop their first inside joke it’s like watching them load a revolver. Each kiss is another bullet unloaded from its chamber. When they chain-smoke on empty city streets to calm their nerves, they act as if they’re on the lam, avoiding eye contact with city cops. The whole affair is just as thrillingly romantic as it is unavoidably doomed.
The opening shots of this lean, 86-minute stunner are of two commuter trains passing in opposite directions at a furious speed, their billows of steam settling into a wispy veil over the platform where our would-be lovers first meet. Later, the lovers are similarly veiled by the gauze of cigarette smoke under movie projector lights, in the cinema where they spend Thursday afternoons sitting in the tension of each other’s desire. Their entire affair carries the impermanence and impossibility of a dream, with both dreamers daring each other to make it real. Celia Johnson narrates their emotional crimes in flashback, looking for someone safe to confess to and eventually settling on an internal monologue to her doting but unexciting husband. In her months-long flirtation with Trevor Howard’s mysterious but gentlemanly doctor, she never gets a glimpse of his homelife with his wife, but we get the sense that it’s just as sweetly serene. Their entire relationship is based on the spark of excitement found in flirting with a stranger while waiting for their opposite-direction trains home, a romance that can only flourish in a liminal space. If they did leave their spouses for each other, they’d likely settle into the same warm but bland domestic routines; the spell would be broken.
Whether David Lean was knowingly playing with the tones & tropes of film noir here is unclear. Since the genre had not yet been fully codified or even named, it’s more likely that he simply framed an adulterous dalliance as if it were a legal crime instead of just a moral one, and the stylistic overtones of the era took care of the rest. Either way, it’s clear that Brief Encounter has endured as a major influence on modern filmmakers, from the moody high-style tension of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love to the opening across-the-bar “What’s their deal?” speculation of Celine Song’s Past Lives. Because it’s such a dialogue heavy stage-to-screen production, a lot of its power is creditable to Johnson & Howard’s acting chops, especially in the physicality of their guilt-haunted faces. When Johnson reassures the audience, “I’m a happily married woman,” her body language tells a different story, and there’s similar complexity lurking behind every line delivery of her imagined confession. Still, Lean is a formidable third wheel, guiding this trainwreck romance from the director’s chair with such intensity that you can practically feel his hand tilting the frame. There’s no event or action I can point to that would help classify it as a thriller, but it is thrilling from start to end, with a final line of dialogue that’s more explosive than any stick of stolen dynamite.
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.
I’ve been hearing the term “dream ballet” tossed around with unusual frequency lately, due to that glamorous Old Hollywood indulgence enjoying a resurgence in the Oscar nominees Maestro & Barbie. Both films feature an abrupt break from reality in which their male leads slip into a dream dimension to express their abstract emotional state through the art of balletic, interpretive dance – something much more common to the grand movie musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Era than to the overly cynical, logical filmmaking landscape we’re currently trudging through. It shouldn’t have surprised me, then, that all of this “dream ballet” chatter was echoed in my recent thrift store Blu-ray purchase of the Old Hollywood classic Party Girl, which stops its real-world story of doomed lovers on a mobsters’ payroll in its tracks to indulge in a few escapist sequences of fantastical dance. Where Party Girl‘s otherworldly dance numbers tripped me up, though, is in the way they subvert & pervert the most timelessly iconic dream ballet sequence in the Old Hollywood canon (the same one visually referenced in the “I’m Just Ken” dream ballet interlude of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie). In Party Girl, dancer-turned-actress Cyd Charisse reworks her breakout performance in the dream ballet sequence from Singing in the Rain into a show girl strip tease. The ethereal pinks & purples of Singing in the Rain‘s infinite studio set are retrofitted to the stage of a Prohibition-era Chicago gangster hangout called The Golden Rooster, and Charisse takes a moment in that otherworldly void to flirt with the camera instead of the audience in the room with her. She’s initially costumed in a showgirl outfit with an eccentrically long train that flows behind her movements—until she removes it in classic burlesque tease—recalling the gorgeous white fabric that trailed her movements in Singing in the Rain. It turns out her brief dance with Gene Kelley in that film was so instantly iconic that it was already being lovingly referenced just a few years later (decades before Ryan Gosling was even born).
Unfortunately, Party Girl peaks early with that balletic strip tease, and Charisse is given little to do off-stage, despite playing the titular moll. She stars as 1930s Chicago showgirl Vicky Gaye, who earns extra cash between shows at The Golden Rooster by making paid appearances at mobster parties in private residences (a light, Hays Code-approved form of prostitution). While working one of these pop-up speakeasy parties, she falls for the mobsters’ suave attorney, a “guardian angel for punks & gunmen” played by a disappointingly stiff Robert Taylor. Their romance is a dully dignified one, with both parties pushing each other to get out of The Life even though they’re both on the same mobster’s payroll. Courtroom debates, backroom negotiations, boat trips overseas, and medical crises ensue at a leisurely pace, occasionally interrupted by Tommy-gun fire & mildly salacious dance numbers. Director Nicholas Ray brings the same eye for lurid beauty that elevates much more essential classics in his catalog like Johnny Guitar, especially in the way he puts the Metrocolor film processing to use in his splashes of gold & red. Unfortunately, his flair for full-glam Old Hollywood magic is the wrong approach for noir, a genre that would’ve been much better suited for his scrappier early pictures like Rebel Without a Cause. As a major studio noir, Party Girl is hopelessly bloated, something that’s apparent as soon as it widens the frame into CinemaScope. It’s still beautiful nonetheless, whether it’s gawking at the vivid reds of a blood-filled bathtub or gawking at the glittering gold & pink sequins of Cyd Charisse’s dance costumes. By the time she reappears onstage for a second dance break from reality in a leopard print gown, all of the energy of the picture has already bled out in one too many courtroom scenes, which are always death for late-period, major studio noir.
I don’t know that Cyd Charisse’s first big dance number in Party Girl technically counts as a dream ballet, since it’s narratively set up as a nightclub stage act instead of an expressionistic break from reality. I do know that it’s referencing the go-to standard of dream ballet sequences, though, a connection to Singing in the Rain that’s made apparent enough by Charisse’s casting before it’s underlined in her costuming. That dance routine also deliberately disregards the physical boundaries of its stage the same way Busby Berkeley used to in his own fantastical dance sequences, treating the camera as the audience POV instead of staying anchored to the extras seated in the room. It’s the most alive Ray ever feels behind the camera, and it’s the one stretch of the film where Charisse’s screen presence feels irreplaceable. I haven’t seen Maestro myself, nor am I likely to unprompted, but I can report that I was equally thrilled by the visual Singing in the Rain callback in Barbie‘s dream ballet sequence last summer. In that moment, I felt the high-artifice movie magic of Old Hollywood return in full force, a sensibility echoed in the over-stylized set & costume design throughout Barbieland. Hopefully, a third dream ballet sequence in a major motion picture will continue the trend after its repetition in Maestro; it’s one of the most genius tropes invented by the Hollywood dream machine, the kind of overwhelming sensory indulgence that inspires nerds with TCM & Criterion subscriptions to mutter “pure cinema” under our breath.
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.
Welcome to Episode #201 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, James and Brandon discuss cinematic representations of Elvis Presley, from his youth-culture acting chops in Michael Curtiz’s New Orleans noir King Creole (1958) to his recent post-mortem biopic depictions in Baz Luhrman’s Elvis (2022) & Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023).
The recent, ongoing Barbenheimer phenomenon has been a shock for regular moviegoers, since we’ve long gotten used to having vast, empty multiplexes to ourselves, like rats making nests in abandoned hospitals. The “Think pink!” Barbiearmy was out en masse on Barbenheimer Weekend, which was healthy for local cinemas’ survival in a post-streaming world and for our own generally anti-social routine of silently watching screens glow, alone in the dark. This us-vs-them dichotomy was especially vivid to me on that Sunday morning, when I watched Orson Welles’s classic-period noir Touch of Evil at The Prytania. The century-old single screener’s “Classic Movies” series is the only recurring repertory program in town where you can regularly see gems like Touch of Evil in a proper venue (give or take Prytania’s other, artier weekly rep series, Wildwood). It’s also the only theater in town that was screening Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimeron a 70mm film print instead of a standard DCP, which means that a huge crowd of Oppieheads formed in the lobby during the final third of Touch of Evil, increasingly impatient with the opening film’s lengthy runtime. I’m sure there were a few brave cinema soldiers who watched Touch of Evil and Oppenheimer as a back-to-back double feature that morning, since all-day double features were the commanding theme of the weekend. Most of the people outside the theater walls likely hadn’t been to a movie since last year’s Top Gun & Avatar sequels, though, judging by the fact that there usually isn’t a line stretching all the way down the block outside The Prytania on Sunday mornings as I make my quick, anti-social exits to my bus stop. It’s the Barbies & Oppies that allow theaters to stay open for those lesser-attended (but infinitely more precious) Classic Movies screenings, though, so in a way that block-long line out the door warmed my heart even more than watching another Old Hollywood relic in the Renet Brunet Classic Movie slot.
As you can tell by the title, Touch of Evil isn’t much of a heartwarmer anyway. Welles’s major-studio noir is a shockingly grim & grimy crime picture; it’s also shockingly gorgeous. It opens with a minutes-long, spectacularly complex tracking shot that follows two unsuspecting couples crossing into America from a Mexican border town, unaware that a bomb has been planted in the trunk of one couple’s car. It’s a perfect illustration of the Hitchcock method of building suspense, showing the audience “the bomb under the table” long before the characters it threatens are aware of it. That back-alley bombing is also a great source of political intrigue, leading to a feature-length investigation of the whos, wheres, whens, and whys behind the dynamite. The detective from the Mexican side of the border is played by Charlton Heston (in a queasily outdated choice of cross-racial casting) as a noble, idealistic rule-follower who believes in the sanctity of the law. The corrupt cop from the American side is played by Welles himself, matching the immense beauty of his camera work with his immense hideousness as a crooked, racist villain who frames young Mexican men for crimes they obviously did not commit. In the movie’s view of law enforcement, all cops are bastards, but American cops are the slimiest, most repulsive bastards of all – something Welles conveys in the prophetic prosthetics that exaggerate his own facial features (by guessing exactly what his real-life face would eventually become) and in the exaggerated camera angles that frame that face at monstrous angles in sweaty close-ups. His villainy really goes overboard when he attacks Heston for the transgression of actually following the law by dispatching drug-cartel biker boys to torment the detective’s naive, newlywed wife – a young Janet Leigh, who hadn’t yet learned from Norman Bates to beware handsome creeps at remote motels. The whole picture is slimy & ugly in its heart, but stunningly beautiful to the eye.
Like every other Orson Welles picture after Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil suffers from discord between its director and its studio. The version presented at The Prytania was the one most widely available to modern audiences: a digital restoration of a 1998 re-edit that attempted to reconstruct the film according to an Orson Welles memo to the execs at Universal, detailing how he would like to see it sequenced. Touch of Evil had a much less prestigious reputation before that late-90s re-issue, since the studio butchered Welles’s vision in the editing room, leaving it just as much of a tattered mess as other notoriously muddled works like The Magnificent Ambersons. The familiar tropes & rhythms of noir are a useful anchor for Welles’s studio-compromised fragments of genius, though, which you won’t find in Ambersons but is apparent in both Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai. In the memo-corrected edit, there’s still some initial confusion about what action is set on which side of the border, but it feels like a small concern if you allow yourself to get swept up in the flow of the overachieving camerawork and in the jurisdictional clashes between the two nations’ police. Thankfully, the Welles memo at least helped re-establish in the current edit that Heston’s investigation of American corruption should be intercut with the harassment & drugging of his wife, whom he’s essentially abandoned so he can play hero. There’s incredible tension in watching this detective fall further down the rabbit hole while leaving ample time for the vultures outside to pick at his family, which I assume was lost in the initial edit that separated their stories as distinct & sequential rather than rottenly concurrent. There’s still plenty space for smaller, less expected touches in the current tight-noir edit, though, most notably in Marlene Dietrich & Zsa Zsa Gabor’s small roles as border-town sex workers and in Welles’s own onscreen character-choice grotesqueries.
I didn’t walk out of The Prytania into the Sunday afternoon sunshine feeling “good”, exactly, even if it’s always a treat to watch such a formidable Old Hollywood classic for the first time on a proper screen. There’s plenty to feel queasy about in Touch of Evil beyond Heston’s “respectful” brownface performance and the ogling of Leigh’s writhing, incapacitated body. Welles leans into the downbeat misery of noir pretty hard here, the same way he leans into his camera’s extreme Dutch angles. The movie’s not supposed to leave you feeling good about the American “justice” system, an effect Welles ensured would come across by playing the ugly, sweaty face of that system himself. So, I desperately needed the little pick-me-up of seeing a huge crowd gather outside to watch Oppenheimer (another massive downer) on 70mm: a sign that The Movies aren’t fully dead yet, and that I’ll get to see a projection of some other butchered-by-the-studio Orson Welles picture in the future, thanks to the real money-makers like Barbenheimer.
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