Kurt Russell stars in the 1997 dirt-road thriller Breakdown as a man who is LOOKING for his WIFE. If that’s not his most defining characteristic, it’s at least his most often recited mission statement. In a bigger picture sense, he’s an East Coast yuppie who’s relocating to California, violently derailed by working-class Southwest roughnecks along the way. He’s initially targeted because he’s driving a newfangled SUV he cannot actually afford, the kind of vanity-purchase truck that runs on computer chips instead of old-fashioned engine power. As the menacing, truck-driving men who abduct his WIFE put it, he might as well have bought a bumper sticker that says, “Rich assholes looking for trouble.” Those gruff brutes unplug some electric gadgetry on his shiny new toy while he’s not looking, leaving him stranded on the side of the road with his WIFE (Kathleen Quinlan) until the preppy-clothed couple are “rescued” by a passing trucker (J.T. Walsh) who offers to drive them to a nearby payphone so they can request a tow. Only, the wife never makes it to that payphone; she’s kidnapped and held for ransom, at a much higher price point than Russell’s credit-card-indebted poser can afford. So, he has to get his hands dirty and fight his way back to her like a real man, with trucks and guns and such.
Breakdown largely plays like a Hollywood studio echo of Australia’s Ozploitation boom in previous decades. The dizzying desert heat, small-town gaslighting, and lethal machismo that Russell’s hero suffers while LOOKING for his WIFE all recall Wake in Fright, especially by the time he’s stripped of his Big City respectability in the final action beats. Meanwhile, the truck-on-truck violence he has to engage in to complete his mission recall the diesel-fueled warfare of Mad Max & Roadgames — two Aussie action classics. Breakdown is entertaining enough as a thriller-of-the-week relic in its first half, when most of the villainy is psychological. The way Russell is bounced from diner to bank to cop station with no one willing to acknowledge that his wife was kidnapped in broad daylight is maddening. J.T. Walsh perfectly performs banal evil in that stretch as the low-level crime boss in charge of her abduction: an everyday, unassuming trucker who’s just trying to feed his shit-heel family by committing heinous crimes against total strangers. However, it isn’t until the dirt-road chases of the go-for-broke finale that the movie shift gears from Pretty Good to Great, Actually. Bullets are traded at top highway speeds, trailer homes are smashed in demolition derby spectacle, and big rigs crash over the concrete walls of overpasses, crushing bodies below in dark, cosmic punchlines.
If there’s any discernible visual style workman director Jonathan Mostow brings to Breakdown, it’s all in the first act. When we first meet the yuppie-couple-in-crisis, Mostow looks down on them from helicopter & crane shots like a vulture circling its next meal. Once Russell is isolated in his one-man mission to get his wife back, though, it’s all just by-the-books Hollywood studio routine. The thrills quickly become what critic Mark Kermode describes as “smashy-crashy” action filmmaking, with the iciness of J.T. Walsh’s villain and the psychological torment of the small-town indifference to his crimes taking a back seat to big trucks doing big damage at high speeds. It’s not quite as mean nor as grimy as the Ozploitation films it most closely resembles, but it does have the budget to escalate their scale to explosive proportions. It’s a fun studio thriller, but not much more. Catch it next time it plays on cable TV or, like me, pick up a used DVD copy on the shelves of your local Goodwill. Trust me; it’s there.
Just a few short weeks back, Brandon and I covered the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! on the podcast, mostly because of our interest in the then-upcoming remake directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia. At the conclusion of our discussion, I remarked that I was curious to see what Lanthimos would change for his version, and whether he would keep the film’s epilogue twist as it was in the earlier film, forgo it altogether, or tweak it in some small way. Ultimately, if you have seen Save the Green Planet!, then you’re not going to be surprised by the roads that Bugonia takes, but if you’re like me, you’re still going to enjoy the ride quite a bit.
Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high profile female pharmaceutical executive that we first meet as she introduces “a new era” at work, one in which an “incident” (which remains unelaborated upon but about which we can make certain assumptions) has led to a “friendlier” face for the company. What this boils down to, mostly, is that she wants it made explicit to the workers in the office that they should take it for granted that they are allowed to go home at the end of their work day … as long as quotas are met, and people should obviously stay at the office if they have work to do. It’s typical corporate double speak, where a corporation wants to harvest the positive associations that come with a “kinder, gentler” approach to work-life balance in the wake of a public relations backlash, but still expects business to proceed as usual with no real change. It’s not a particularly flattering portrait, but it’s a familiar one. Outside of work, she has an extensive (and expensive) “reverse aging” routine that includes supplements, red-light masks, and extensive martial arts self defense training.
Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) works for Michelle’s company, Auxolith, packing boxes. He’s so far down the ladder that his team—which includes a woman who’s continuing to work despite injuring her hand and is clearly too aware of how easy it is to get rid of a squeaky wheel who might file a comp claim—doesn’t warrant even the most perfunctory of pep talks about quotas and staying late. Following a diagnosis that has rendered his mother (Alicia Silverstone) comatose, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories that have led him to one conclusion: aliens from Andromeda have infiltrated human organizations with the intent of enslaving the human race, and his boss is one of them. To this end, he enlists the help of his intellectually-disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in abducting Michelle when she arrives home from work one day. From there, he locks her in the basement, shaves her head so that she can’t use her hair to contact her mothership, and proceeds to demand that she prepare a message to tell her fellow Andromedans to expect Teddy’s arrival as advocate for the human race against their invasion. Michelle, naturally, has no idea what he’s talking about. Or does she?
If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, or even just saw the trailer, most of this is familiar to you. Teddy and his Korean counterpart, Lee Byeong-gu, even share the same backstory that their characters’ mothers are both hospitalized long term, and they share beekeeping as a hobby, with colony collapse disorder forming an integral part of both men’s alien-invasion hypotheses. The differences are pretty minor. Byeong-gu’s girlfriend in Planet! is replaced here by Teddy’s cousin; the plot point in which the captive CEO convinces the former to leave Byeong-gu by claiming that he doesn’t truly love her is replaced by a scene in which Michelle tells Don that the imminent arrival of the police puts him in serious danger. The biggest narrative change is probably the total excision of Planet!‘s subplot about two police officers, one an experienced but disgraced renegade and the other a young fast-tracked hot shot who circumvents his chain of command to consult the outsider. Although there is a police officer in this film, he’s unlike either of the two detectives, as he’s instead a socially awkward local police officer who is implied to have molested Teddy when he was the younger man’s teenage babysitter. If you’ve seen Planet!, you’ll likely recall that the two detectives therein had little bearing on the narrative and seemed to simply exist in order to give the film somewhere else to check in every once in a while and break up the monotony of spending the entire film solely in Byeong-gu’s basement. Here, those opportunities to give the audience a break come largely in the form of Teddy’s flashbacks to the time when his mother’s illness first began to affect her and his time having to still go into work while having his missing boss locked up in the basement, covered in antihistamine lotion (to numb her—or rather “its”—psychic powers). It’s a small difference, but by always keeping us in the same room as one of the two opposing forces at the movie’s core Lanthimos manages to ensure that the tension is always rising.
Of course, the most interesting and notable difference here is that the kidnapped executive in Planet! was a man named Kang Man-shik, while Bugonia has Stone playing a girlboss CEO, and that one small change has a big impact. Because of the difference in the optics and the gendered dynamics alone, watching Byeong-gu and his short girlfriend abduct Kang is a very different experience from watching two burly men attack Emma Stone, one of America’s Sweethearts. The fact that we see her practicing for just such a possibility as one of her first defining character traits reminds us of the bleak truth that there’s no amount of power, wealth, or status that a woman can amass to guarantee her protection from a very determined crazy man, and even as a member of the executive class she’s still prepared for the possibility that she’ll have to fight for her life just like more conventionally vulnerable women. Stone plays Michelle with a quiet strength and dignity that she only allows to slip when she’s alone, and it’s a performance that’s so potent and visceral that it’s easy to forget that—regardless of the seemingly batshit nonsense Teddy picked up on the internet—she is nonetheless a banal force of evil, a stakeholder in the enforcement of a power structure that Teddy (and we) have every right to resent and pray for the downfall of. There’s no need to go overcomplicating it with aliens (or any other brain-rotted conspiracies); Auxolith made Teddy’s mother sick and faced no consequences, and that’s enough to make him hate Michelle, with all the rest of it being a hat on a hat. Still, in seeing a woman chained to a mattress in the basement of a man with demonstrable tendency to fly into a rage, we can’t help but sympathize with her, more than we ever did with Kang.
There are a lot of little ideas and concepts to find within this text and pick over. I find it fascinating that Teddy ultimately does the same thing that Auxolith does with regards to reckless human testing, as he chemically castrated himself prior to the movie’s events and gives his unfortunate cousin the same injection prior to their taking of Michelle. Later in the film, Don tries to explain to Teddy that he’s having side effects from the drug, possibly even a sudden onset of chemical depression, which ultimately has tragic consequences. His kidnapping of Michelle in and of itself is an abduction of the kind that he believes aliens are guilty of. Like a lot of people who fall into these traps of conspiracies that engineer a more comprehensible world out of unconnected events, Teddy is a hypocrite, and that makes him and Michelle the same. And then, of course, there’s that ending. As one would probably expect from a remake helmed by Lanthimos, this is not merely a reheated dish, but a fresh take, even if you already know what all of the ingredients are.
The J-horror classic Battle Royale is one those high-concept movies with such a clear, concise premise that it’s a convenient cultural reference point even if you’ve never seen the full picture yourself. Like Gaslight, Catfish, and The Bucket List, it’s the kind of clarifying text that defines a simple idea that’s since been extrapolated & mutated beyond the point of attribution. I had never seen Battle Royale before this year, but I’ve long-known its logline premise thanks to its lineage of dystopian YA descendants in major studio titles like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and, most recently, The Long Walk, each of which have been likened to it. Any movie wherein a group of teenagers in a fascistic near-future are pitted against each other in a lethal game of survival is going to be reflexively likened to Battle Royale, and it was starting to get embarrassing that I had not seen that film myself despite it being such a consistent reference point in that genre. Sometimes, though, procrastination pays off. This year’s 25th anniversary of the film inspired a theatrical re-release, where I got to see it for the first time big & loud, in all its gory, sadistic glory.
Having only known this film as a point of inspiration for the Hollywood YA thrillers to follow, I wasn’t especially shocked by its preference for melodrama over bloodshed – only spraying the screen with teen blood as dramatic punctuation between long scenes of heart-to-heart confessions & betrayals. As a species, teens tend to have Big Feelings about anything & everything, so it makes sense that they’d spend more time getting teary eyed about having to tear each other apart for survival than actually doing the tearing. Even the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk reads more like the teen-boy melodrama Stand by Me that it does a bodycount horror flick, and it’s got a reputation for being the more brutal version of The Hunger Games series (with which it shares a director in Francis Lawrence). Where Battle Royale gets more vicious than its Hollywood derivatives is not so much in its escalated gore, but in its prologue’s establishment that these kids already know & love each other before they’re forced to kill. Like The Long Walk, it’s an unlikely story about the value of true friendship instead of the expected story about selfish teenage violence. However, the young men of The Long Walk become fast friends after they’ve already been locked into their own respective survival game, starting off as strangers. In Battle Royale, the friendships & alliances go back for years before the story starts, which makes each lethal betrayal all the more sickening.
A class of Japanese high schoolers are mysteriously gassed while riding a school bus, waking on a small island wearing identical metal collars. Disoriented, they receive a crash-course orientation from a former aggrieved teacher (genre cinema heavyweight Beat Takeshi) and a kawaii pop idol, who appears only on a rolling AV Cart. The ultimate goal of the game is simple; the high schoolers must kill each other within 72 hours until only one survivor is left. The rules of how to accomplish that goal get a little trickier, involving explosive collars to punish conscientious objectors, volunteer players who appear to be violent gangsters from outside the class, rotating areas of the map that are temporarily forbidden to discourage stationary hiding, etc. The singular weapon that each student is provided varies wildly in effectiveness, ranging from knife to gun to binoculars to pot lid. That arbitrarily assigned hierarchy and the rules of combat appear designed entirely to keep the game moving & entertaining, as if the film were being broadcast on national Japanese television instead of closed-circuit security monitors. Every kill is even punctuated with an onscreen rolling body count that feels as if it were made for a live-feed audience, not the dweebs in the theater. That one change in broadcast scope might be the only place that later works like The Hunger Games might’ve improved on the Battle Royale premise, even if they pulled that detail from Stephen King novels like The Long Walk &The Running Man. The most Battle Royale touches on the entertainment media of its time is during the AV-cart orientation scene, in which a cutesy pop idol directs her audience to log onto http://www.br.com.
As with all films in this genre, this is primarily a story about a younger generation suffering the violent fallout of mistakes made before they were born. Beat Takeshi’s failed, disgruntled teacher is a pitch-perfect villain, seething with resentment for his young, captive victims while also reaching out to them for his one chance at genuine human connection. His hard exterior crumbles in a spectacularly pathetic display when the kids storm his compound to find his amateur, Henry Darger-esque painting of his favorite student winning the games – a nauseating tribute to her childish innocence, to which he no longer relates. Meanwhile, most of the kids in the game do their best to get by sharing resources and scheming a way off the island. They pass around food, medicine, and hacking skills when they’re supposed to be passing around bullets & live grenades. The rules of the game are unfairly stacked against them, though, and all it takes is a few trigger-happy outliers to set the mass murder in motion. The kills in Battle Royale are frequent and comically graphic, setting a dizzying rhythm in its Grand Guignol grotesqueries that propels the scene-to-scene momentum well after the rules & players are fully established. A few off-island flashbacks distract from the gore & drama at hand, but the biggest break in format is saved for the finale, when the surviving teens escape to the streets of modern Tokyo and have to live in the larger world adults have made for them, which feels equally as bleak as the game it parallels. Given how frequently this same story template has been repeated in the 25 years since Battle Royale was first released, it’s likely fair to say the generation that followed didn’t leave the world much better off for their own children either. Take care of each other out there, while you still have a choice.
The 2023 political thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a small production with no household-name movie stars and limited theatrical distribution. It vocalized leftist politics within the visual language of a mainstream heist thriller, often pausing its most explosive moments to explain the political motivations of its young domestic-terrorist dissidents, who actively disrupt the industrial processing of oil as a desperate act of global self-defense in the face of Climate Change. Despite all of its populist genre markers and its traditional Dad Movie rhythms, it didn’t make much of a cultural impact outside the usual cinephile circles. What it did accomplish, though, was presenting a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, dreaming of a better world for the American moviegoer and the American political discourse. And now, somehow, one of the last few Hollywood studios standing has put some real money behind making the real thing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the finished action-blockbuster product that How to Blow Up a Pipeline only sketched out in blueprint, one with real Hollywood money and recognizable Hollywood celebrities vocalizing revolutionary politics within the structure of a 4-quadrant crowdpleaser. It’s in no more danger of transforming the real-life American political landscape than its low-budget indie prototype was a couple years ago, but it does have a much better chance of provoking substantial political conversations among a wide, mainstream audience, because it’s got major studio muscle behind its production & distribution — improbably.
If there’s any glaring deviation from the traditional Hollywood studio action thriller here, it’s in One Battle‘s choice to de-center its archetypal lone hero to instead give credit to the heroic work of political collectives. Much like Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling stoner detective in Anderson’s previous Thomas Pynchon adaptation, 2014’s Inherent Vice, Leonardo DiCaprio’s revolutionary burnout is continually ineffective in his attempts to save the day; he’s mostly just thrashed about by political systems larger than him as he drinks & smokes his way through the pain. At the start of the picture, he’s a young bombmaker who’s joined a political resistance collective called The French 75, helping them destroy property and free prisoners of the state in the name of a future America with “free borders, free bodies, free choices, and [freedom] from fucking fear.” However, after he fathers a child with the most erratic radical in the crew (Teyana Taylor), his politics become secondary to his domestic duties as a parent. His girlfriend splits the scene and the French 75 fall apart spectacularly under the pressure of a militant fascist named Lockjaw (Sean Penn), leaving DiCaprio’s stoner dad raising his daughter alone under a stolen identity, separated from any meaningful political resistance in his middle age. He’s only dragged back into action by the abduction of the mostly oblivious teen in his care (relative newcomer Chase Infiniti), who becomes a pawn in a three-way battle between an ICE-like immigration taskforce run by Lockjaw, the remnant scraps of the surviving French 75ers, and a secret white nationalist cabal that wields more political power than anyone else involved.
A lot of the humor in One Battle After Another‘s action sequences is a result of its would-be hero’s complete lack of heroic skills. He’s long scorched away the political rhetoric & secret passcodes from his early revolutionary days with decades of bong rips, and the countless gallons of beer have left him too sluggish to keep up in the endless string of chase sequences. When tasked to attempt small parkour maneuvers following skaters to safety during a police chase, for instance, he falls 40 feet to the ground and is immediately tasered unconscious. All of the meaningful political action in the film is executed by underground networks of revolutionaries working as a collective, including one run by a karate dojo owner played by Benicio del Toro, who helps him limp along for much longer than he possibly could otherwise. At his age, DiCaprio’s revolutionary is mostly a dad who’s mission is to retrieve his daughter before she’s harmed by a fascistic government he failed to change for the better in his own youth. Even in that context, he has little effect on the outcome, pathetically so. That’s largely because the right-wing forces he’s racing to keep up with are so absurdly evil and well-funded that a paunchy, middle-aged stoner has no chance to make a dent in their armor. Sean Penn is especially grotesque as Lockjaw, continually finding new, inhuman ways to hold his body & mouth that are just as worthy of laughter as they are of disgust. The racist cabal that calls the shots above Lockjaw’s head are also presented as a hilarious punchline despite their vicious cruelty, as they’re characterized as a Christmas cult that chants, “Hail, St. Nick!” with the same ecstatic fervor that their imagined enemies chant, “Hail, Satan!”
I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio spectacle at this point in my life; the most potent images & ideas in modern cinema are lurking in microbudget indies that would be lucky to secure 1% of One Battle‘s speculated budget. Still, it’s encouraging to know the modern studio picture can be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people. Paul Thomas Anderson announced himself as a skilled craftsman as soon as he debuted with Hard Eight & Boogie Nights in the 1990s. His immediate Altmanesque control on large ensemble casts and his Scorsese-inspired tension between humor & violence have only become more personal to his own name & style as his work has sprawled over the decades since. Here, he acknowledges that the revolution will not be televised (going as far as to reduce that infamous Gil Scott-Heron piece to call center hold music), but he also argues that the revolution can be sexy & fun anyway. For all of the sparse piano-key tension of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the restless kineticism of Michael Bauman’s bulky VistaVision camerawork, the tone remains remarkably light. These revolutionaries cut up, they fuck, and they celebrate their minor victories with wild, infectious abandon. Before Anderson funnels all of the plot’s political warfare into a single highway chase on an open desert road, the audience would be forgiven for forgetting that we’re watching an action thriller and not an ensemble-cast character comedy. What’s most impressive about the movie is that it credibly succeeds in both genres while making time to clearly define the nation’s current political factions: our cartoonishly racist overlords, their pathetically naive servants who hope to join their ranks, the largely disorganized leftist resistance, and the ill-equipped everyday people struggling to just take care of their own despite the boots pressing on all of our necks.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Alain Delon’s star-making crime thriller Purple Noon (1960), adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Lurker is All About Eve by way of Nightcrawler, with a little bit of The Talented Mr. Ripley thrown in for good measure. Or is it a love story, albeit a bit of a fucked up one?
Matthew Morning (Théodore Pellerin) is working retail alongside Jamie (Sunny Suljic) at an LA boutique clothing store when mononymous musician Oliver (Archie Madekwe) comes in one day. Matthew quickly puts “My Love Song for You” by Nile Rodgers on the shop’s sound system, and Oliver is impressed by the man’s musical taste, resulting in Matthew being invited to hang backstage at Oliver’s show that night. Oliver’s entourage member Swett (Zack Fox) and producer Bowen (Wale Onayemi) haze him a bit by making him drop his pants, but when he goes one further and loses his underpants as well, it endears him to them immediately. Matt notices a quiet member of the posse, Noah (Daniel Zolghadri) lurking in the back of the green room before he meets Oliver’s manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu), who takes note of Matty’s apparent infatuation with Oliver and recommends that he find a way to make himself useful if he wants to stick around. When he’s invited to hang out the next day at Oliver’s luxurious home, he finds himself stuck doing menial house chores like taking out the garbage and washing dishes while Bowen and Swett play Call of Duty and watch nature documentaries and Oliver largely seems apathetic to his presence. When he captures some candid footage on a low-res Sony commercial video camcorder of Oliver goofing around in the driveway on a BMX, Oliver lights on the idea of having Matty hang around and work on “the documentary,” which creates friction with Noah, who is the crew’s “official” documentarian. When Matty’s former co-worker Jamie also starts to work his way into Matty’s new social circle, Matty goes to increasingly harmful lengths to ensure that his place in the hierarchy remains unchallenged.
Lurker is about many things. Matt’s behavior is nebulous; although he’s willing to escalate to physical harm and extortion to remain close to Oliver, the exact reasons are ambiguous enough to offer multiple interpretations. The most straightforward possibility is that Matty is simply obsessively in love with Oliver, and although Oliver himself is only ever clearly seen in the sexual company of women, Matty’s reaction to Oliver’s physical (but most likely platonic) affection demonstrates that the singer is the object of his desire. It’s clear that Shai sees Matt’s desire to be in Oliver’s orbit and may even see that attraction to Oliver as she encourages it initially, while his male friends tease Matt for “sounding like one of [Oliver’s] bitches.” Matty is clearly affected by Oliver’s attention to him, with the bits of fraternal physical affection that Oli gives him acting as an emotional drug, and Oliver’s candid vulnerability with the newest member of his entourage is perhaps too encouraging to the unstable videographer. At one point late in the film, Oliver asks Matty why he’s even around, and Matt tells him that he’s there for the same reason that everyone else around Oliver is, it’s just that he’s more driven and “better at it,” in his own words. It’s not stated explicitly, but the implication is that Oliver’s group, which he previously compared to a family of his own choosing, is made up of clingers-on and sycophants trying to ride his coattails into a life of glamour. As an audience, I don’t think we’re meant to fully believe him and his stated motivations, as this supposed reasoning aligns with some of the things we’ve seen (Matty pretends not to know who Oliver is when he first appears in the store while clearly actually being invested in impressing him with his obscure musical knowledge, which wins him a bid at the golden ring of being in Oli’s crew) but also fails to explain the more psychosexual desire that Matt clearly has.
The latter of these reasons is on fullest display in two scenes in the film. After Matt has successfully created a situation that allows him to blackmail himself back into Oliver’s home (if not his good graces), Oliver makes an attempt to steal the evidence from Matt’s room while he sleeps, but when Matt wakes up, Oliver lies that he wanted to check in on Matt and see if there is some way to get them back to being friends. Matt seems to accept the sincerity and immediately demands that they wrestle, tangling his limbs with the musician and rolling around with him, over the latter’s protests. Still later, when Oliver is on tour, Matt shows up with a girl to the hotel room where Oliver is hooking up with a woman and the two have their sexual encounters next to one another, Matt staring intensely and lovingly at Oliver the whole time. It’s this last that finally pushes Oliver too far, but for his part, Oliver seems to enjoy the attention at times, as there’s a bit of narcissism inherent to his entire career. Early on in the film, Matt tells him that he thinks Oliver has the potential to be the biggest star in the world, and for a moment it seems like he’s pushed his own apparent sycophancy too far to be believed, but after a beat, Oliver excitedly admits that he thinks the same and that the other members of his crew aren’t pushing him hard enough. Matt feeds into Oliver’s ego and the fact that it comes with a side helping of intense yearning doesn’t set off any alarm bells for Oliver until it’s too late.
The basic scaffolding of this narrative is, as noted above, very much like All About Eve, with Oliver as the Bette Davis/Margo Channing of the feature, a widely known star, and Matty as Anne Baxter’s Eve Harrington who seeks that same level of fame and adoration. Although he does ultimately see success, the film ends at the premiere of the documentary, and when a fan expresses admiration and inspiration, it’s like the finale of Eve in which a young girl comes to Eve’s hotel room in much the same way she once appeared at Margo’s stage door. Matty takes it further, pushing Jamie off of a ladder (after already trying to separate him from the group at the airport) when he gets jealous of Oliver’s preference for Jamie’s ideas for the album cover over Matt’s. Where Patricia Highsmith’s Ripleyness comes from is in the nature of unstated queer obsession that runs as an undercurrent throughout the whole thing. Matt’s “in love” (read: obsessed) with Oliver, wanting to be with him but also to be him, and it’s all conveyed with great attention to detail. Aside from the use of outdated camera equipment to genuinely create an aesthetic that is so desirable that it’s often recreated digitally, what Matt’s bringing to the table with his old Sony camcorder is something that could easily be accomplished through Instagram style filters, but there’s a true commitment to the essence of truth that Oliver wants to convey with his art, and there’s something to be said for that.
What I found to be one of the most interesting things about the film is the way that it explores the nature of what it feels like to utterly hate someone who sees you better than anyone else. Although Swett and Bowen treat Matt like a pariah once he blackmails his way back into being part of the crew, he either ignores this or is completely apathetic about it, as all he really wants is what he has: access to Oliver, even if the vibe has shifted completely. Everyone’s mistrust of him and their overt hatred for him is covered by Oliver’s having to keep playing Matt’s game, and even if it feels insincere to us in the audience, it’s sufficient to feed Matt’s internal need for Oliver’s attention and validation. In the end, however, after all that Matt puts Oliver through as part of a creative vision for Oliver’s next album, when Oliver sees the resulting footage for himself, he realizes that Matt has accomplished what he said he would: push Oli when the others would let him rest on his laurels with the fame that he already has. It doesn’t hurt that Oliver himself has dubious ethics; when Matt arrives for his first show, the musician is canoodling with a woman that Swett and Bowen picked out of the crowd for him, and the fact that this is a habit for Oliver is something that Matt is able to use against him. Exactly what Oliver did that Matt has footage of is ambiguous enough that we don’t necessarily turn on him, but allows room for doubt as to how honest any of his interactions are, up to and including his claims to Matt that he can be more honest with him than any of the others. What is it in Oliver that only Matt can see and capture? Is it a genuine (if criminally obsessive and jealous) love that Matt has? Is it a consuming desire to see Oliver become the best that he can be because of that love, or because he, Nightcrawlery, wants to ride the rising waters in Oliver’s wake? It’s unclear.
This film was on the Black List (in 2020), meaning that it was relatively easy to find the screenplay. Matt is notably less evil in the final film, as the script that I found included him treating his grandmother much more coldly and cruelly, including getting her to pay for his flight back to the US after he gets stranded in London but ignoring her at the airport and taking an Uber (in the film she picks him up without incident). All that really remains of this in the final film is a brief scene in which he yells at her when she tries to talk to him while he’s on the phone with Oliver. There’s also an entire subplot about Oliver’s elderly neighbor, whom Matt (possibly accidentally) kills and then (definitely intentionally) moves into his garage so that he can continue to spy on Oliver’s group which is left out of the film. In the final release, the most violence that occurs is when Matt pushes Jamie off of a ladder (we see him later and, other than a broken nose, he’s fine) and when Oliver’s group beats Matty after they’ve finally had enough. It’s a choice that makes for a more interesting movie to make Matty less of an out and out serial killer and inject a bit more ambiguity, despite the fact that I went into this hoping to see just that kind of obsessive violence. Well worth it.
I’ve been hearing nothing but good things about The Long Walk, so it was a surprise to me that, among the five-person group with whom I attended the movie, it only got a 20% approval rate (and the one who liked it was me). Among the complaints that I collected in the post-screening debrief was that it felt like torture porn to one, was too violent for others, that the character development was underbaked, and the film was denounced as largely predictable. For the more personally subjective takes, I can say that the film is definitely one of the more gruesomely violent that I’ve seen this year (bar something like Final Destination: Bloodlines, where the violence is more fantastical and cartoonish). For the critiques of structure, I also can’t provide evidence that the film didn’t follow a fairly straightforward narrative throughline or that every character felt fully fleshed out. To the latter, I would argue that the confinement of the narrative to a dwindling band of fifty teenaged boys walking on a road necessitates that backstory and character be revealed through dialogue, which can run counter to what one expects from film as a medium. For the former, I would make a very similar argument; containment of the premise makes the eventuality of the stations of the plot inevitable, but that alone is not inherently a negative.
Although this wasn’t the first of Stephen King’s novels to be published, it is the first that he wrote, only seeing publication several years after Carrieunder King’s pen name Richard Bachman. He began writing it as a college student in the mid-sixties, and I think that these facts are obvious from the text itself — both that it’s highly influenced by the Vietnam War (a time during which widespread media allowed for Americans to see drafted boys get blown to bits on the nightly news for the first time) and that it’s the writing of a young, not-yet-fully-developed author. That’s not entirely a bad thing, however, as it allows for this update of the material (sort of; it’s set in a dystopian future but has all the trappings of this bad future having happened due to something awful in the 1970s, not Next Sunday, AD) to speak to a different social crisis, our contemporary one in which society relegates its youth to die horribly for the viewing pleasure of the masses. If anything, it was perhaps too early, as it feels like an answer to the dystopian YA literature adaptation glut of a decade ago, a commentary on The Hunger Games and its imitators while being a darker, meaner, grislier concept that plays out under a different regime.
The main character of the film is Ray Garraway (Cooper Hoffman), who submitted himself to a lottery in which there is a 98% certainty that he will die, on the one chance that he will be the survivor of the fifty “Walkers” who wins a massive cash prize as well as the opportunity to make one “wish.” This is over the wishes of his mother (Judy Greer), who has already lost her husband, a victim of state violence after teaching outlawed ideas to his son post-societal collapse. The competition itself is annual and features one boy from every state, all of whom set out to travel down Route 1 on foot, with the caveat that they must maintain a speed greater than three miles per hour, with a system of warnings issued for falling below that threshold before the boy’s “ticket gets punched”—that is, shot in the face by the accompanying military guard, led by “The Major” (Mark Hammil). Other competitors that we spend some time with and get to know include: Richard Harkness (Jordan Gonzalez), the one with big glasses who’s hoping to write a book about what it’s like to participate in the Long Walk; Collie Parker (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation actor Joshua Odjick), a tough jock; athlete and apparent ringer Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing); religious Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot) of Baton Rouge (represent!); yapper Hank Olson (Ben Wang); and your garden variety Stephen King long-haired antisocial shit-stirrer Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer). The person that Ray grows closest to, however, is Peter McVries (David Jonsson), an orphaned young man with a striking scar on the side of his face. A few of these doomed boys dub themselves “the Musketeers,” but their boisterous false optimism is immediately challenged by the death of the first of their number, a kid named Curley who had clearly lied about his age in order to enter the Walk. Alliances are formed and fall apart, friendships are made and then tragically cut short at the hands of carbine-wielding death squads, and the mental and physical anguish and turmoil play out as the boys’ numbers dwindle.
The movie I most thought of while watching this film was actually Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 opus mother!, in that I can’t remember any film other than that or The Long Walk that could accurately be described, as Lindsay Ellis did, as “Oops, All Metaphor.” There’s nothing subtle about The Long Walk, from the opening moments to the final seconds, and it’s perhaps that lack of subtlety that lends itself to an interpretation that this film was perhaps too predictable to be fully appreciated. I’d still argue that this is more a function of the premise and its constraints than it is an issue with the film itself, but as always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There’s no attempt to parse any of the suffering that the boys are going through, and there’s no chance that they’re going to be able to have two winners at the end or really that the “winner” will survive very long after they reach the end of their Walk. Characters say to one another that entering the lottery pool for the Long Walk is technically a choice, but if literally everyone enters because it’s the only chance for any kind of economic movement out of poverty, then it’s not really a choice at all, is it? The movie can get away with wearing its message on its sleeve because all of the characters are teenage boys, so it’s not terribly out of place for them to have these not-that-staggering revelations and feel that they’ve stumbled upon some great wisdom, but I also understand if that feels preachy to certain audiences who are already aligned with the movie’s moral. I would venture that, given the state of media literacy (and actual literacy, for that matter) we’re currently grappling with out here in the real world, I’d warrant that this kind of declarative, undisguised thesis statement may be necessary to get it to stick, but that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.
There are some themes for which the film reaches but which fall outside of its grasp. When Ray reveals his true motivation for entering the Walk to Peter, Peter tries to caution him against vengeance, but it’s arguable that Ray’s desire to kill one of the heads of the evil government is actually an excellent way to try and right some of society’s wrongs, if he’s given the chance. We never get a clear idea of just what society’s current shape is, as the narrative simply isn’t as invested in world building as much as it is in exploring the miseries of a life in which you have no choice but to walk (or work) yourself to death; it’s one possible inference now that the entire U.S. is now under the control of the Major as a military despot like Gaddafi or Idi Amin, that slaying the head of that dragon if given the opportunity is a moral imperative. It reminds me a bit of the finale of King’s novel The Dead Zone, in which psychic protagonist Johnny Smith ultimately realizes that he has to end, by any means necessary, the rising political career of a man named Greg Stillson, who will end the world in a nuclear holocaust if he is allowed to ascend to the presidency. The protestations against revenge as a factor are where the film slips into a kind of navel-gazing that isn’t fully tonally consistent with the rest of the text, but when that’s the biggest complaint you can get from me, then you should know that this is a recommendation.
I do think that it was an interesting choice on the part of the producers to choose Francis Lawrence to direct, considering that he helmed three of the four Hunger Games films as well as prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and the upcoming release Sunrise on the Reaping. He was also the man responsible for Constantine and I Am Legend, which is probably why the latter film seems to be on TV multiple times a week right now: for synergy purposes. The film’s writer is JT Mollner, who wrote and directed last year’s divisive nonchronological Kyle Gallner vehicle Strange Darling, and I’m hoping based on a text conversation with Brandon that his skill here is starting to win our dear editor back over. I wouldn’t have imagined this as a team that would be able to bring this source material to life so well, but it gets a recommendation from me.
I had somehow never seen a full episode of the criminal-justice procedural Law & Order before this year. Since the start of this summer, however, I’ve watched nearly 100 episodes of the series, as it quickly became my go-to nightly watch after I ran out of episodes of The Sopranos. As a result, nearly everything I watch these days is filtered through a Law & Order lens. It’s not just detective stories & courtroom dramas either. The show is so lousy with recognizable actors that I’ve already seen big-namers like Ann Dowd, Christine Baranski, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney repeat as multiple unrelated characters only four seasons into the show (among one-off stunt casting appearances from unexpected heavy-hitters like Elaine Stritch, Tony Todd, and James Earl Jones), like a local repertory-theatre troop with a globally famous cast. So, I like to think it’s somewhat justifiable that Law & Order was at the top of my mind during a local screening of the new Night of the Juggler restoration that’s currently making the theatrical rounds. Released a full decade before Law & Order premiered in 1990, Night of the Juggler is a grimy NYC detective story similar to the 1st-act investigations of my new vintage-television obsession. While it doesn’t share early Law & Order‘s more prestigious contributions from cinematographer Ernest Dickerson or mad-genius screen actor Michael Moriarty, it does overlap significantly with the below-the-line cast & crew, including Dan Hedeya playing a violently corrupt police sergeant in both titles. In total, there are 28 contributors who worked on both Night of the Juggler and Law & Order—mostly NYC-based character actors—which feels like a substantial number even if it doesn’t remotely compare with the 757 contributors who worked on both Law & Order and my previous nightly catch-up show, The Sopranos.
There is one major payoff Night of the Juggler offers that even peak-era Law & Order couldn’t afford: action. In most of the NYPD investigations on Law & Order, suspects who flee the scene are quickly apprehended by detectives Logan & Briscoe at the same shooting location where they’re spotted. The show is largely a crime-of-the-week soap opera that contains its scene-to-scene drama to a series of courtrooms, judges’ chambers, and holding cells. Night of the Juggler cannot be contained. It runs wild in the streets of New York City, staging multiple, lengthy chase scenes that hop from taxi to subway train to public park to porno theatre to underground cellar, leaving a trail of wrecked cars & hot dog carts in its wake. Its premise is typical to an early Law & Order episode, though, even if it’s one the show would likely save for a season-finale ratings spike. Cliff Gorman plays a run-of-the-mill maniac New Yorker who exacts revenge upon the millionaire real estate developers who gentrified his neighborhood by kidnapping one of the business pricks’ teenage daughter in Central Park. Only, he mistakenly kidnaps her doppelganger, the daughter of a tough-as-nails truck driver and former cop played by James Brolin. So, not only is there no way for the unscrupulous sleaze to cash the teen in for the demanded million-dollar ransom, but now he also has a crazed working-class brute on his tail who’s willing & able to punch him to death for the offense — as soon as he can catch up with him. Dressed more like a lumberjack than an ex-cop city boy, Brolin is a macho folk hero who takes a principled stand against the flagrant crime of late-70s NYC by chasing down the man who wronged him for vigilante justice while NYPD’s finest twiddle their thumbs (or, in the case of Dan Hedeya’s wild-eyed corrupt sergeant, attempt to take down the obvious victim instead of the obvious creep).
Night of the Juggler is the kind of low-budget, anything-goes filmmaking that’s most remarkable for the unpredictability of its minor details. Gorman’s unpredictability as the crazed kidnapper is especially thrilling. He’s introduced at a greasy-spoon diner, making a smiley face out of his bacon & eggs breakfast plate before dousing that culinary cartoon with excessive ketchup gore. He’s scary because his every move is impossible to anticipate, especially as he seemingly falls in love with his underage “Million Dollar Baby” kidnapping victim while making threatening phone calls to the wrong family about what he’ll do to her if they don’t pay up (including her sending her back home as “chunks of meat”). There is no shortage of NYC freaks on his level here. The city is overflowing with the criminally insane, making it near impossible for James Brolin to navigate his way back to his daughter before she’s torn apart by the horde. Despite drowning in that bottomless cesspool of cretins, both Brolin and his kidnapped kid continually express a deep, unbreakable love for the city and its people, which makes the movie oddly charming despite the frequent escalations of its violence. Sure, Brolin is on a similar vengeance mission as Charles Bronson is in the Death Wish series, but in this case the criminal he’s after is the racist lunatic, not the hero; Brolin generally loves the people of New York, chastising his ex-wife for abandoning the city for the safer, blander refuge of suburban Connecticut. When Mandy Patinkin appears as a vigilante cabbie, or Sharon Mitchell shows up to work the peep show booths on 42nd Street, or Richard Castellano stops his police investigation dead to instead inquire about how frozen yogurt is made, the Big Apple comes across as a great city spoiled only by its few bad apples, among which are the cops who care more about personal profit than the people they supposedly serve.
Night of the Juggler‘s recent return to theaters is a cause to celebrate among longtime fans who luckily caught it during its original run or during its subsequent late-night cable broadcasts, as it’s essentially become lost media in the four decades since. The new restoration is especially being heralded by genre-film junkies who watched the scuzzy, taped-off-the-TV scan of it that made its way to YouTube in recent years. That scuzziness isn’t totally inappropriate for a movie that mostly characterizes New York City as a collection of feral rats scurrying around underground jets of steam, but I imagine the pixelation of a low-quality YouTube upload would’ve made it borderline illegible during its multiple whirlwind street chases, so there’s never been a better time to catch up with it than now, really. Not for nothing, there’s also never been a better time to catch up with early seasons of Law & Order if you missed its original run, since it consistently aired out-of-sequence during its years of televised syndication. It also looks incredible streaming in HD as a relic from when major-network primetime dramas were shot on actual celluloid and featured contributions from world-class actors & cinematographers. Law & Order and Night of the Juggler: two great, greasy tastes that taste extra great & greasy together.
After a recent viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, I double checked to see if it had already been covered on the site (it had), since I had learned to do this recently after getting a couple of paragraphs into a review of the director’s Frenzy, which Brandon had also already covered. This made me wonder just how many of Hitch’s thriller features we had covered; these account for 40 of the roughly 45 films in his filmography (I say “roughly” since I’m not sure how we would count his earliest, lost films like Number 13 and The Mountain Eagle), and I texted Brandon that we had covered 13 so far, to which he noted that we had already hit 14 if one counts his discussion of Strangers on a Trainhere. I thought it would be fun to try and do all 40 sometime, and figured I would tackle the next one chronologically after The Lodger. Unfortunately, my local video store does not have a copy of Blackmail!, so I rented Murder!, only to find out that the LaserLight DVD they have in their possession is one of those quick and dirty late nineties/early 2000s releases of a very poor transfer (in fact, The Hitchcock Zone has a warning about this exact DVD). It was, in a word, unwatchable, and that’s coming from someone who buys every unlabelled estate sale VHS he sees just to see what’s on them. I was still in a Hitchcock mood, though, so I decided to see what he had available on the Criterion Collection and stumbled across Young and Innocent, one of his 1937 pictures. The description of the film gave fair warning that the movie did contain a sequence of Blackface, which made me a bit wary. The movie ended up being so much fun and so delightful (in fact, I started to wonder why it wasn’t more well known) that I had completely forgotten about this heads-up by the time that the last ten minutes rolled around, and boy did it negatively affect my perception of this feature overall.
The film opens on an argument between Christine Clay, a British actress returned home after having success in Hollywood, and her ex-husband Guy, who accuses her of “bringing home boys and men” and refusing to accept that the marriage is over. The following morning, young Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is walking along a cliffside when he sees a body on the beach and climbs down, discovers Christine dead, and sprints away to get help. His speed is witnessed by two girls who had come down to the water to swim, and despite the fact that he did come back with the police, said coppers immediately decide to believe the teenagers’ interpretation that he was fleeing the scene and arrest him; it certainly doesn’t help that his raincoat was recently stolen and Christine was strangled with a raincoat belt, or that he and Christine knew each other from their stateside film work, where Robert was a writer. Their suspicions deepen when they learn that she has left him a substantial amount of money in her will, and he’s prepared for immediate arraignment. While detained at the station, he faints when he learns of this, and is revived by Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), the daughter of the police commissioner, and is totally adorable with her Sealyham terrier named Towser and her beat-up, hand-cranked jalopy. When he’s given a clearly incompetent public defender, he flees the overcrowded courthouse and escapes by hiding in Erica’s car. When she runs out of gas, he pushes the car to the nearest petrol station and uses his last few coins to pay for more fuel before hiding out in an abandoned barn. When Erica returns home, she overhears that he can’t get far since he only has thirty pence, and she comes to believe that he must be innocent, as he claimed. When she returns to the barn to leave behind some food and coins for him, the two barely escape discovery by a couple of her father’s policemen, and she ends up agreeing to take him to the boarding house where a drifting vagrant who supposedly has possession of his raincoat may be able to prove his innocence.
De Marney and Pilbeam are utterly charming in these roles. We know from the start that Robert is innocent, so even though Erica’s claims that he’s too sweet-looking to be a murderer are dubious at best, we also can’t help but agree when we see Robert’s boyishness, especially when we get to see the two together in all their on-screen chemistry. In a lot of these “innocent man pursued” pictures, Hitch’s leading men often get frustrated and agitated at their situation, and even though this is early in his career, it’s kind of refreshing to see a man who’s at least somewhat enjoying the ride that he’s on. That makes his flirtation with Erica and her eventual willingness to help him try and find the proof of his innocence a nice, charming romance, with two sweet leads who work quite well together. Once they do locate the homeless china-mender, Old Will (Edward Rigby) and enlist him in their mission, he adds even more charm to their little ensemble. Perhaps my favorite character, however, is Erica’s Aunt Margaret (Mary Clare), who appears when Erica and Robert are still heading to the boarding house where Old Will might be found, and she says that she’ll call her father so that he doesn’t get worried and start looking for her. Erica has forgotten that it’s her younger cousin’s birthday and she gets roped into attending her party. Aunt Margaret is a total busybody and a bit of a party bully, but she’s so arch and funny that she’s much more entertaining than she is frustrating. Her husband, Uncle Basil (Basil Radford, who would appear the following year in The Lady Vanishes), is less suspicious and can see that blossoming romance between Erica and Robert so clearly that he ends up helping them slip away.
The general light-heartedness of this one also makes for a very fun comedic outing, but it’s also not without its fascinating set pieces, either. Besides the aforementioned child’s birthday party scene, Erica’s home life with her father and several younger brothers is also quite charming. It’s clear that her relationship with her family is a loving one, and all of the boys get enough characterization that it’s a delight to watch them all play off of each other. There’s a studious and up-tight one with glasses, the more jocular and athletic middle boy, and the precocious youngest who ends up bringing a rat to the dinner table at one point. This makes the later more serious scene in which her father shows her the resignation letter that he intends to deliver that day (rather than arrest his own daughter, whom he knows has abetted an escaped inmate) all the more impactful. For comedic set pieces, there’s a very good one at the restaurant called Tom’s Hat where Robert’s raincoat first went missing, when a couple of vagrants get into a brawl with some truckers that they feel are giving away a little too much information about Old Will, with Robert forcing his way inside in order to try and save Erica from the kerfuffle, only for her to have already made her way out of the building without any of his help. On the more dramatic side, the abandoned barn makes for a beautiful location, and there’s also a great setpiece where Robert, Old Will, and Erica (and Towser!) drive into an abandoned mine shaft to evade pursuing police, only for the shaft to give way beneath them and swallow the car as they desperately try to climb out of it before it falls. There’s also a great dance sequence at the end where Old Will, having been given an offscreen makeover that he despises, goes to a fancy hotel with Erica to see if he can identify Christine’s killer there, and it’s a sight to behold.
Unfortunately, it’s this final scene in the hotel where the film gets a little too ugly to swallow. It wasn’t uncommon for live musical performances of the era to take advantage of the minstrel show aesthetic, and every single member of the ten-piece band performing at the hotel ballroom is in Blackface, and it’s quite awful. I know that I’m looking at this through a modern lens and the contemporary logic was that it would make sense for the killer to have a job where he’s in some kind of disguise, and being painted to look like a racist caricature made for an understandable method of hiding in plain sight during a time when that kind of entertainment was common. Still, I can’t help but be sickened by the final ten minutes, especially since this one was chugging along at such a nice pace up until that point. I was a little curious as to why the quality control on the subtitles for this film seemed to be barely up to snuff, as the caption “[inaudible]” appears more here than in any other film I’ve ever seen, over a dozen times. Sometimes it’s character names that perhaps the captioner didn’t feel confident in providing or slang of the time that a younger staffer at Criterion might simply be unfamiliar with (in the very opening scene, Guy tells Christine that he won’t accept her “Reno divorce,” which the subtitles render as “[inaudible] divorce”), but at other times it’s just fast child-speech that a trained ear should be able to hear or it’s totally clear dialogue. It made it feel like this was done haphazardly and lazily, and I was keeping track of what I heard in order to email Criterion to recommend an update, but by the end of the film, all of the wind in my sails had gone out after seeing the Blackface sequences, and I get the feeling that whoever was in charge of getting this up onto the Criterion Channel likely had the same deflation. I can’t say that I blame them.
Civil engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) finds himself alone in Anselmo’s Bar one night with two tickets to see the Broadway’s Chicka-Boom-Boom musical revue. He approaches an equally lonely woman (Fay Helm) in an extravagant hat and convinces her to accompany him, as he has been stood up. At the show, prima donna performer Estela Moneteiro (Aurora Miranda, sister of Carmen) is wearing identical head garb for her performance and grows incensed when she spots that a woman in the audience is wearing the exact same hat. The theater-going couple also get the attention of accompanying drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook, Jr.), who makes eyes at the woman. As Scott walks the mysterious woman back to the bar where they met, she refuses to give him her name, saying that “It’s better this way.” When he returns home, he finds himself greeted by Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez), who is curious as to why Scott’s wife is dead in the next room. Scott admits that he and his wife argued that evening, their anniversary, and that he left to let off some steam. The only person who can confirm his alibi is the woman that he was with all night. Although his presence is confirmed at the bar by the bartender (Andrew Tombes) and his delivery to the theatre is collaborated by the cab driver, both of them—rather sweatily—proclaim that he was alone and that there was no woman with him, with or without an elaborate hat.
It’s here that the film switches gears and our true protagonist appears: Carol Richman (Ella Raines), Scott’s secretary, whom he has nicknamed “Kansas.” She knows he’s innocent, and when he’s convicted, she continues to try and find the “phantom lady” who can testify to Scott’s location. First she stakes herself out at Anselmo’s and gives the bartender the evil eye for nights on end before finally following him through the streets to confront him about why he lied about Scott being alone; when the bartender breaks free from the mitts of a group of men who intervene when he threatens Carol for following him, he winds up straight in front of an oncoming car and is killed. Things really come to a head when Carol, now assisted by a recalcitrant Inspector Burgess (who now realizes that a guilty man would never have hung onto the specific alibi that Scott did), poses as a “hep kitten” in order to go home with Cliff the drummer who, in a drunken state, admits that he was bribed to pretend he never saw Scott’s oddly-adorned companion. While Carol goes to summon Burgess, Cliff is confronted by the man who bribed him, who disposes of him before Burgess and Carol can return. The last hope is to try and get the truth from Estela Moneteiro, but the diva is so vain about her headwear that she had her own version of the hat destroyed upon seeing a copy in the audience and proclaims that she never saw the woman. But if they can find out who made the hat . . .
I’m not sure that I could name another single noir where the protagonist is a woman. Sure, there are always femmes fatale and ladies with gams that go all the way up to heaven, but it’s a rare surprise to see one leading the investigation, tracking down leads, and working tirelessly to prove the innocence of their love. That it takes so long for Carol to enter the picture is hardly worth mentioning, since the film moves at a breathless clip from the moment she appears until the film’s conclusion, and we move at a good pace since we’ve only got eighty-seven minutes to tell this tale. The only time that the film starts to feel a little slow is when Carol finally manages to track down the phantom lady, discovering that she’s named Ann Terry, and the woman is in a state of period-appropriate heartbroken mourning. Her fiance died mere days before they were to be married, and the night that she attended the theatre with Scott was apparently the only time she’s left her home since the incident. When Carol finds her, she’s only half there, behaving as if she’s been dosed with downers to keep her from hurting herself (which, given the state of medicine at the time, very well may have been the case). The conversation between the two is, then, naturally stilted, but watching Carol talk to Ann like she’s a child and only getting half answers is a bit frustrating to watch, and really throws a speed bump into the mix. The only thing that ensures that the film’s momentum continues is the knowledge that we in the audience have that the co-investigator who has joined her by this point is the murderer of the late Mrs. Henderson (and Cliff), and that keeps the suspense alive. Their final confrontation once she discovers the evidence is effectively tense, and I genuinely wasn’t sure that Carol was going to make it out alive.
Robert Siodmak directed this picture, one year before The Spiral Staircase and two before The Dark Mirror. He partnered on this one with producer Joan Harrison, a name I’m quite familiar with from seeing it in the opening credits of every episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as her screenplay credits on Foreign Correspondent, Rebecca, and Suspicion. A contemporary reviewer stated that “Miss Harrison is doing nothing that Hitchcock has not done a great deal better,” and although this film doesn’t hold a candle to the consensus classics that her longtime collaborator created, it’s quite comparable to a fair bit of it (and much better than some of his later works, or even some of his middle period clunkers). I’d like to think it’s Harrison’s involvement in this one that made it a woman-centered uniqueness, which transcends mere novelty. Of course, that same bent is likely the reason that we have the protracted sentimental scene between Ann and Carol, but that cost is well worth the reward of just how much more interesting this one is than a lot of other noirs of the period, many of which were cheap and disposable, putting it in the same category of excellent genre representatives that have withstood the test of time, like D.O.A. I’ve also found myself stumbling into a bit of a Siodmak retrospective this year, and he continues to impress. There’s visual flair here that sets this one apart from its contemporaries as well, as one would expect from a film that has an opening credit for “Phantom Hat design,” and there’s a fantastic sequence late in the film set in the apartment/studio of a sculptor, where ominous heads of various sizes oversee the events as they play out, which makes for a foreboding feeling. The sequence in which Carol poses as floozy “Jeannie” to catch the eye of Cliff and try to get more information from him includes a detour where he takes her to a cramped room that appears to be little more than a storage space where some of this other musician friends play frenzied jazz. The quick cutting of the film to match the energy of the music, combined with the isolation of the location and the buckets of sweat that everyone’s shedding, give us the sense that Carol is in real danger, even if the text contains no actual peril, just the general vibe of it.
Like Dark Mirror, where this one falls apart a little is in its fascination with the psychology of the killer. Burgess goes on a long-winded speech about “paranoiacs,” ironically delivered to the person that the audience is now aware is the killer, and how impossible it is for them to fit into normal society and how they’re perpetually distressed. All of this happens while the killer seems to be barely able to control his hands and then faints at the end of the conversation, yet Burgess takes no note of the obvious implication that the man feels guilty about something that Burgess has said (he does seem to be a little more paranoid about this after, but not enough to warn Carol to be careful directly). The murderer spends quite a lot of time with Burgess and Carol as part of the investigation, and while there’s a lot of fun to be had as they get closer and closer to the truth while he becomes less and less able to control his obvious anxiety, it also makes them look a little stupid. I would have bought the narrative that he simply killed Scott’s wife for the reasons that he eventually gives (that he flew into a rage when she admitted that, even though she was cheating on her husband with him, she had no intention of running off together) and that the rest of his killings were to cover his tracks. I haven’t been able to find specific information about what the original intended ending for the film was, but I have found a few offhand references to changes made to the climax because of the Hays Code, and it’s possible that this psychological focus was also a result of compliance with the Code’s mandates; maybe he was just a killer in the initial text and the rest was grafted on. It feels that way, but that doesn’t make this one any less enjoyable.
Swampflix 