thriller

Young and Innocent (1937)

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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 Train here. 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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Phantom Lady (1944)

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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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Confess! (1953)

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It’s a dark night in Quebec City. We move in, slowly, on one building in particular, gliding in through the window to find a man dead on a carpet. The beaded curtain that hangs over the door to the room is still moving, his killer having departed mere moments earlier. On the street, a man in a cassock emerges from the dead man’s house and moves up the street, slowly, until he enters Ste. Marie’s church. The killer, Otto Keller (O. E. Hasse), begs Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) to take his confession, and the young priest does so. Otto begins with an expression of his gratitude to Father Logan, who helped him and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas) find work and lodging in the rectory, before he admits that he accidentally killed local dirtbag lawyer Villette (Ovila Légaré), whom he initially only intended to rob so that Alma wouldn’t have to work so hard. Father Logan confirms that his confession is held in confidence and that he will not involve the law, but that Keller must return the money and turn himself in. The following morning, Father Logan makes his way to Villette’s house, where he meets primary investigator Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), who tells him that Otto discovered the body. Larrue observes Father Logan speaking to a woman outside and becomes suspicious, even though he doesn’t hear her say the words “Villette is dead? Then we’re saved!” to the priest. The woman turns out to be Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of local legislator Pierre Grandfort, who is close friends with Crown Prosecutor Willy Robertson (Brian Aherne), but her and Father Michael’s friendship goes back even further, and is deeper. 

I Confess! gets off to a marvelous start, but then it ends up spinning its wheels for far too long, even for a film that clocks in at a mere 95 minutes. The story feels like it’s headed toward a conclusion at about the halfway mark, and by the time we reached the final third, I kept checking the time and finding myself startled to discover that only a minute or two had passed since I had last checked. The ending is sufficiently strong that the last twelve minutes were at least engaging, but it wasn’t enough to come back from the slump. Conceptually, it’s pure Hitchcock: the wrongfully accused man who must prove his innocence but for some reason cannot, the blonde who loves him, and a crew of police investigators who are at turns both foolish and malicious. As a narrative device, having a character who can’t defend himself against false allegations because he’s bound by the sanctity of the confessional is also a fresh idea, and complicating matters further by having the victim be a blackmailer extorting the priest’s ex-girlfriend in a way that potentially implicates the priest himself is a fun place to take that concept. Unfortunately, Clift is dreadfully dull in this role, Hasse’s turn as the villainous Keller is similarly underwhelming, and the apathy that Hitchcock allegedly had for this project comes through in the workmanlike nature of the cinematography. 

When I told my mother that I had recently watched this one, she asked if it had been released before or after Montgomery Clift’s infamous car accident, noting that he might have been stiff because of the resulting physical and psychological scars (and the addictions that came in attempting to medicate the latter). That didn’t happen until 1956, and I Confess was released only a couple of years after A Place in the Sun, in which I seem to remember finding him very convincing. I don’t know where the blame for his stilted performance here comes from, and I can say the same thing about Hesse. Keller seems to reflect the era’s general antipathy to German immigrants, and taken as a sole piece of evidence in a vacuum, one would think that Hitchcock thought that all Germans who asked only for the opportunity to work and bemoaned their lot in life as “[men] without a country” were simply lying in wait for the opportunity to turn on their supposed benefactors, lie about their motives, steal, frame clergymen, and kill their own wives for trying to see justice done. He’s a factor in the plot, but he’s not a character, and the film is much worse off for letting us know who the manslaughterer is from the start but not making that person interesting. Baxter ends up the MVP here, and the best part of the film comes after Father Michael has been arrested and she decides she has to explain everything to the police at the cost of her social standing and dignity: years before, Michael went off to fight in the war and told Ruth not to wait for him; when he came back, she had already married Pierre. When their innocent reunion is interrupted by a thunderstorm, the two are forced to take shelter in a gazebo, where the blackmailer/victim discovered them the next morning and inferred they had slept together, which would be enough to ruin Ruth’s marriage, embroil her husband in a scandal, and (even though he wasn’t yet ordained) defrock Michael. When her testimony ends up doing more harm than good, as the hours she spent with Michael the night of the murder fall before the time of death but her explanation finally provides the police with a potential motive for Michael, she’s distraught, and Baxter sells it tremendously. It’s just not enough to save it. 

The film almost does something interesting near its conclusion, when the jury finds that there simply isn’t enough evidence to convict Michael and he’s released. Although he’s not culpable in the eyes of the law, his verdict in the court of public opinion is much heavier, and it would have been interesting to spend a little more time with this narrative thread. Can he return to the church? How has his downfall affected the faith of his parishioners? Will some forgive but never forget? None of these questions get the chance to be answered, or even a moment’s breathing room, as Michael barely makes it down the steps before Mrs. Keller attempts to tell Larrue that her husband was the true killer, only for Keller himself to shoot her (so much for the whole motive of his theft being to spare her a life of servitude, I suppose). Oh well. A necessity really only for Hitchcock or Clift completists, I’d say skip this one. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A History of Violence (2005)

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Last month, The New York Times published a list of what their contributors deemed to be the best films of the 21st century. I don’t subscribe to the NYT (their contribution to the regression of the Overton Window on the issue of trans rights is morally and ethically reprehensible), so I’ve only seen it in bits and pieces as screenshots and commentary made their way onto other platforms. A friend who’s more interested in the discourse than I am mentioned that the 2005 film A History of Violence was garnering a lot of late-blooming praise, and I said that I hadn’t really been all that interested in director David Cronenberg’s mid-career pivot from body horror to drama, but that I was willing to check it out (despite my overall apathy for The Shrouds, Crimes of the Future was excellent enough that I’m very pleased he’s returned to his roots). This particular friend and I do not always align on our feelings about films (he was the one who really hated Roger Corman’s The Raven), but by the time the credits rolled on this one, we were united in our bafflement over A History of Violence’s critical acclaim. 

Small town diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson) has a peaceful life with his lawyer wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two children, teenaged Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young Sarah (Heidi Haynes). In the film’s prologue, two hardened spree killers, Leland and Billy (Stephen McHattie and Greg Bryk), murder everyone they encounter at a rural hotel; when they make their way to Millbrook, Indiana, where the Stalls live, they make the mistake of attempting to rob Stall’s Diner and learn the hard way that Tom Stall is more than capable of defending himself and his customers. Tom’s heroic defense of his staff garners national media attention, prompting the arrival of mobster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) in Millbrook, claiming that he recognizes Tom as low-level Philadelphia thug Joey Cusack, with whom he shares a violent history (naturally). Tom holds to his declaration that he has no idea what Fogarty’s talking about for as long as he can as he finds his life closing in around him: the revelation of his capacity for violence has led his bullied son to fight back against his tormentors, placing them in the hospital; his daughter is threatened by Fogarty and his men; the friendly local sheriff he’s known for decades no longer trusts him; Edie doesn’t even know who he is anymore and is shattered that her life, up to and including the name she took from her husband, is a lie. As “Tom Stall” begins to fade while “Joey” reasserts himself, the loving husband and father begins to be subsumed by the hair-trigger, foul-tempered thug, who finds himself on a headlong collision course with his brother, mafioso Richie Cusack (William Hurt). 

When this movie came to an end, my friend turned to me and asked why it was that so many film critics were taken with what he characterized as a “RedBox movie,” and I can’t say that I disagree. Although this film predates No Country for Old Men by a couple of years, its opening scene reflects an attempt by Cronenberg to echo the Coen Brothers’ western/neo-noir fusion as exemplified in 1984’s Blood Simple. This was happening at the nadir of the Coens’ career, in the wake of 2003’s fine-but-unremarkable Intolerable Cruelty and 2004’s atrocious The Ladykillers, and it almost feels like the Coens saw Cronenberg’s movie and were inspired to create a better version of this, spawning their resurgence that began with No Country. Additionally, while this film’s opening felt very much like “Cronenberg makes a Coen Bros movie,” the rest of the film settled into a “Cronenberg does Clint Eastwood” feeling. There’s a part of me that wants to give the very Canadian Cronenberg credit for attempting to tackle an inherently American genre and do so through an imitation of the viewpoint/lens of one of the most outspokenly “American” filmmakers, and while I think that’s at play here, that context doesn’t materially improve the film itself. I’ve never thought of Mortensen as being a good or bad actor, really, as I (like most people) think of him as Aragorn first and foremost, and he’s neither the strongest or weakest part of the Lord of the Rings films; at his worst, he’s still serviceable, and his very brief appearance as Lucifer in 1995’s The Prophecy is one of that film’s strongest parts. As much as I love large portions of Cronenberg’s CV, he’s never been an actor’s director, and the performances that he elicits from his actors has never been any of his films’ most interesting elements. No one is surprised by the depth of Stephen Lack’s characterization in Scanners or Oliver Reed’s in The Brood, and as he moved into the eighties the audience’s investment in Johnny in The Dead Zone and Brendel in The Fly comes from the natural charisma of Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum, respectively. If we’re being charitable, we could say that Mortensen’s portrayal of Tom/Joey here improves as he moves from one persona to the other, but he’s not the only person here giving a performance that doesn’t measure up to what we as an audience know these actors are capable of. Harris and Bello are the only people who seem to understand what the film requires of them, while Hurt is playing his role like he’s in a MadTV sketch mocking The Sopranos. 

It’s perhaps not altogether fair to compare this film to others that followed it in this genre. The easiest points of comparison would be films like John Wick and Nobody, which also see a man who’s buried his assassin past (or his history of violence, if you will) beneath a new life and is drawn back into it when his old life reasserts itself. Those films are more concerned with their action elements than with emotional resonance or the effect on the protagonists’ family life (the Wick films circumvent this almost completely by having John’s wife already having died before the first movie opens) so it may not be a very fair comparison, but that’s all that this film has going for it when held up alongside other films of equivalent narrative shape, and it’s not a very strong argument in favor of History. It’s a pale preamble to the more emotionally effective neo-westerns that followed shortly on its heels like No Country and There Will Be Blood, a weaker film when compared to the director’s previous works as it forsakes his strengths as a director (eliciting fascination and disgust in equal measure) and highlights his weaknesses (a lack of character depth), and is ultimately an unsatisfying experience. I’m not sure what it is that I’m missing that others are seeing as so praiseworthy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Topaz (1969)

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Topaz is the answer to the question, “What if Alfred Hitchcock made a James Bond movie?” Admittedly, Hitchcock had already been making spy movies for literal decades at this point, with this one premiering nearly thirty years after Foreign Correspondent. One of Topaz’s detractors, Pauline Kael, went so far as to write that the film was “the same damned spy picture he’s been making since the thirties, and it’s getting longer, slower, and duller.” I don’t know that I agree with her about the first part, as this one feels quite different in approach to his other spy films that I’ve seen, but it certainly feels longer, moves more slowly, and doesn’t have the same panache. I watched it just a couple of days after seeing Foreign Correspondent at The Prytania, and although that film had a few moments where it started to slow down a little, it was also enlivened by the excellent mid-film car chase and windmill infiltration as well as ending on a high note with the spectacular climax in which a commercial airliner is shot down by German U-boats. In comparison, there’s nary a moment of spectacle in Topaz, with the suspense arising from the tension of international conflict and potential violence. On a more granular level, both films feature a scene in which someone is killed via being thrown out of a window and the audience is kept in suspense about the identity of the victim. In Correspondent, we watch the body being flung from a cathedral and it’s possible that our protagonist may be the one in danger, while in Topaz the body is merely found after the fact by the main character, and we’re initially led to believe it may be his son in law. It’s still excellently filmed and aesthetically pleasing, but it’s also not very special. 

The film is based on a novel by Leon Uris that was inspired by a real French-Soviet conspiracy that Uris’s friend had helped to foil, although the book took many liberties from reality and the film takes many from the novel. After an opening sequence in which a defecting KGB Colonel and his wife and daughter evade recapture by his countrymen in Amsterdam, he’s escorted to the U.S. in care of American secret agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe). None of these people are our main character, however. That’s André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), a French intelligence officer who operates under the guise of civilian business ventures. Before we even meet him, his colleagues confirm that they agree he is too close to the Americans, and he proves them right almost immediately by agreeing to help Nordstrom get pictures of a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba on behalf of the U.S., without looping in his own government. He hires a fellow French expat named Philippe (Rosco Lee Browne) to bribe the secretary of General Rico Parra (John Vernon) of Cuba to get this access, and he immediately sets out to Cuba himself following this, much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife Nicole (Dany Robin). Nicole has heard gossip that Devereaux’s frequent trips to Cuba may have more to do with an affair he’s having with a woman named Juanita de Cordoba than with his duties to France and the free world, and although Devereaux denies it, we see that he goes straight to Juanita (Karin Dor)’s house the moment his plane lands. Some subterfuge happens on the island and Devereaux returns to the states to learn that his wife has left him and returned to Paris, that “Topaz” is the codename of a secret cabal of Soviet sympathizers within the French government, and that he’s being recalled to France to stand before a council regarding his extracurricular activities. With Nordstrom’s intelligence, he has to figure out who the leader of Topaz is before he’s called to stand trial. 

Does that seem like it should take nearly two and a half hours? I’m not sure. Just two years prior, 1967 saw the release of You Only Live Twice (my personal favorite Bond, albeit one of the more problematic ones), which clocked in at 106 minutes, and it certainly seems like a lot more happened in that film than in Topaz. And if that comparison seems like I’m leaping, bear in mind that one of the Bond girls in You Only Live Twice is Karin Dor, who’s one of the best parts of this film as Juanita. There’s a very clear attempt to ape the Bond house style here, with Devereaux having two love interests in the film, the focus on infiltration via impersonation, and most clearly in the prevalence of the gadgetry of spycraft, which the film spends a decent amount of time focusing on. When Devereaux arrives in Cuba, he brings along some cutting-edge photographic equipment along with long distance lenses and remote-control cameras with a range of half a mile. When he gets the information that he needs, information gets stored in a microdot disguised as a period on one of the keys of his typewriter, negatives are stored in the disposable razor blade cartridges, and film is hidden inside the spool of his typewriter ribbon. None of it is as outlandish as some of Q’s later gadgets, but it’s still neat to me, although I could imagine this kind of detail being tedious to others. Again, Kael wasn’t wrong when she said that Hitch’s spy flicks were getting slower. 

That’s not the real weak element here, however, as the major problem is just how uninteresting Devereaux is. One of the more exciting sequences in the whole film happens as he literally watches from across the street, as Philippe poses as a reporter for Ebony (he would prefer to pretend to be from Playboy, and when Devereaux refuses, Philippe teases him for his lack of imagination) and infiltrates the hotel where Rico Parra is staying in Harlem as a show of solidarity with the Black community in America. Philippe lures Parra out onto the balcony to take photos of him waving to the throng that has gathered below so that Parra’s secretary can slink away with the case containing the Cuba-Russia memo. There are several tense moments in which it seems like Parra is going to notice the missing briefcase, and he always seems just on the verge of discovery, until Philippe has just enough time to get the information and deliver it to Devereaux. It’s fantastically tense and the performance from Browne is terrific, and it’s made all the better as this may be the only time I’ve ever seen a Hitchcock film in which a Black actor has been given so much to do. Vernon’s Parra is also an incredibly sympathetic character, all things considered, as Vernon very effectively conveys the internal turmoil that Parra feels when he realizes that Juanita, whom he considers above reproach as she is a “widow of a hero of the revolution,” has been involved with Devereaux’s activities. There’s an entire world happening behind his eyes when he kills her upon discovery of her assistance in Devereaux’s espionage, ensuring that she will not be forced to undergo the same tortures that he has overseen enacted on others. In short, despite this being a cast of less well-known actors than the caliber usually on display in a Hitchcock film, everyone is doing excellent work except for the lead, who’s about as interesting as a block of wood.

If you can get past that protagonist-shaped void of charisma, there’s still a lot to enjoy here. The conspiracy itself is effectively convoluted, and there are a lot of individual moments that stand out. Juanita’s death scene, shot from above as her purple dress spreads around her like a flower or a pool of blood as she falls to the floor, is beautiful. There’s actual archival footage of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in a sequence in which Devereaux attends a rally in Cuba, and that’s a lot of fun. The opening sequence, featuring Colonel Kusenov’s flight from the KGB, is marvelously tense, and although it doesn’t live up to the spectacle that we may have come to expect from the master of suspense, it certainly measures up in the suspense department. It seems that the presence of Devereaux’s daughter Michele (Claude Jade) and her husband Francois (Michel Subor) early on is merely incidental, only for them to come back in a major way in the film’s finale, with Francois’s remarkable skill at sketching portraits playing a huge role in the revelation of the identity of Topaz’s ringleader, “Columbine.” As a spy thriller, it’s constructed well, it just lacks the overall oomph that one expects from the director.

(Note: this review is of the 143 minute version of the film widely available in the U.S. and the U.K., rather than the 127-minute theatrical edition which doesn’t seem to have seen home video release in English-speaking markets since the 1987 laserdisc.)

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

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I was recently in New Orleans for GalaxyCon 2025, so Brandon and I took advantage of being in the same place to go see the new James Gunn Superman and recorded a podcast about both it and M3GAN 2.0. Before we parted ways, he asked if I would be interested in joining him for The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Foreign Correspondent, and I’m glad that I was able to check it out. This isn’t the Master of Suspense at the very top of his game, but it’s damn near it. 

It’s 1939, the final days before WWII, and crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) has been rechristened as “Huntley Haverstock” by the editor of the New York Morning Globe and sent to Europe to report on conditions there as well as interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman). Upon arrival, Jones/Haverstock immediately becomes smitten with the beautiful Carol (Laraine Day), but not before accidentally insulting her and her father Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), the leader of the Universal Peace Party. Carol ultimately steps in as a speaker at the event where Jones planned to interview Van Meer, as the statesman is stated to have taken ill. When Jones meets him again in Amsterdam at the next stop on his tour, Van Meer seems not to recognize him and is gunned down by an assassin posing as a photographer moments later. A chase ensues as the car Jones commandeers to pursue the killer is driven by British reporter Scott ffolliott (George Sanders, of All About Eve) and he is accompanied by none other than Carol Fisher. The car bearing the murderer away seems to suddenly disappear when the group enters a stretch of road that crosses a vast field, unoccupied save for abandoned windmills. Jones decides to search about on foot while Scott and Carol attempt to catch up to the police, and although he discovers the hidden car and that Van Meer has actually been spirited away for interrogation while a duplicate was killed in his stead, by the time the police arrive, all evidence is gone. 

After recently watching the rather dour Frenzy (and following up this screening with a viewing of another dry Hitch picture, Topaz), the comedy in this one is refreshing. There’s a lot of hay made about the spelling of Scott’s last name, which is deliberately left un-capitalized. This is apparently a real English gentry practice, as the lack of consistent usage of capital letters across large swathes of British history meant that some documents utilized a double letter at the beginning of a name to indicate that it was a proper noun. When a more standardized capitalization scheme came about, some families worried that if their names were updated they might lose some deed or other if they were named “Folliott” and not “ffolliott.” Sanders is playing a wonderfully unconcerned dandy of a man who’s having a lot of fun with all of this espionage rigamarole, and although he’s serious when the moment demands it, he brings a light energy to the proceedings that is much appreciated given the subject matter. There’s also a delightful appearance from Edmund Gwenn (who would appear as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street seven years later) as a babbling, inept would-be assassin who’s sicced on Jones by the film’s twist villain. Rowley is theoretically supposed to act as Jones’s bodyguard but instead plans to lead him to his death, in a sequence that culminates in the steeple of a towering church, where Rowley’s attempts to push Jones to his doom are repeatedly interrupted by other sightseers and tourists. Jones and Carol are also quite charming together, even if it takes a while to move them past her initial antipathy toward him and their courtship, once this is surmounted, moves a bit too fast. 

The tension here is excellently done as well. The scene in which Jones sneaks around in the windmill and discovers the real Van Meer is very tautly directed, as is the scene in which Jones must sneak from one upper-story hotel room on an elevated floor to another in order to escape being silenced. Both are spectacular, but nothing can top the film’s climax, when Carol, Scott, Jones, and the apprehended antagonist/instigator are en route back to the United States just as WWII breaks out in Europe. Their commercial airliner is almost immediately shot at by a German U-boat and goes down, and the sequence is utterly marvelous, like something out of Final Destination. One unfortunate woman stands to voice her distress at the situation and her intent to contact the British consulate as soon as the plane lands, only to be shot to death by bullets that pierce the fuselage mid-sentence. Aside from a potentially improbable number of survivors, the plane crash is frighteningly realistic, and it put me slightly on edge given that I had a flight out of MSY that same day. At the film’s climax, Jones delivers an impassioned plea over the radio that resonates just as much now as it did then, even if no one ever uses the word “fascism” outright. 

The romance in this one is decent. It lacks the passion of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief or the slow smolder between Kelly and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. There are elements of Notorious here in the parallels between Carol here and Ingmar Bergman’s Alicia in that film, but to say more would spoil a major plot point. This one is pretty close in the Hitchcock timeline to his 1938 picture The Lady Vanishes, and the romance here plays out at the same accelerated pace as Lady, with the major difference being that the romantic couple in that film spent most of their screentime together investigating and their natural chemistry was a strong factor in selling the breakneck romance. McCrea is fantastic as a leading man, even if he was Hitchcock’s second choice (after Gary Cooper), and he’s great in all of his scenes, while Laraine Day is absolutely delightful as Carol Fisher, but the two spend just a touch too little time together on screen to sell it completely, and as such they never quite mesh despite each individual actor’s excellence. Sanders’s ffolliott is also very fun here, and is the perfect comedic relief that the film occasionally needs, when that role isn’t being fulfilled by Rowley falling out of a steeple. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cape Fear (1991)

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As the final moments of Cape Fear came to a close with a zoom-in on Juliette Lewis’s eyes and a half-heartedly delivered epilogue about how she and her family never spoke about what happened with Max Cady with one another, I turned to my viewing companion and asked, “Wait, was this a bad movie?” to which he replied “I think it might have been.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

It came up months ago in a discussion about Goodfellas in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Nowhere, but I have a pretty big Martin Scorsese gap in my film knowledge. Until this year, I thought I had seen only one of his films, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (which was discussed in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Richard III), although further review of his filmography revealed that I had also seen two movies that I didn’t realize were his: the concert film The Last Waltz and Shutter Island, neither of which I initially connect to him because, in the case of the former, it’s not very much like his primary body of work, and in the case of the latter, it wasn’t a very good movie. Since then, I’ve also seen Casino (discussed in our Junk Head episode) and Taxi Driver (discussed in our Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie episode), and now we can add Cape Fear to the list, although I had kind of already seen it given that it forms the basis of the Simpsons episode “Cape Feare,” which I would conservatively estimate that I have seen one hundred times. 

A remake of the 1962 film directed by J. Lee Thompson starring Gregory Peck as a lawyer stalked and harassed by a recently released felon played by Robert Mitchum, Scorsese’s Cape Fear casts Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden, a former Atlanta public defender now living in North Carolina. His wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) is a graphic designer and their daughter Danielle (Lewis) is a high school student whom they have enrolled in summer school to punish her for smoking pot. Bowden is also carrying on an emotional (but not physical—yet) affair with a county clerk employee named Lori (Ileana Douglas). It isn’t his flirtation with infidelity that turns his life upside down, however, but the release of Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a man Sam dismissively refers to as a “Pentecostal hillbilly,” the scion of a family of snake-handling whom Sam unsuccessfully defended against a charge of aggravated rape of a sixteen-year-old girl. During the trial, Sam followed his personal ethics while simultaneously committing dereliction of his duty as Cady’s appointed advocate by burying evidence that Cady’s victim was characterized as “promiscuous,” which would have allowed Cady to argue down to a lesser sentence. Sam assumed that this would never come to light since Cady was illiterate, but in the fourteen years that he spent in prison, Cady has not only learned to read but has studied philosophy, theology, and the law. Using his new knowledge, Cady sets about tormenting the Bowden family while always remaining just within the allowance of legal statutes and using Sam’s defensiveness and hot temper against him by goading him into starting altercations. When Cady assaults Lori after taking her home from a bar because he knows that she, with her knowledge of how her sexual and personal history will be dragged out in front of a courtroom full of her co-workers, will refuse to press charges, things take a turn for the violent, and things get worse for the Bowdens and their allies from there. 

It’s impossible to talk about this film in 2025 without taking it into consideration with the indelible pop cultural impression that its Simpsons adaptation left on the greater consciousness. “Marge on the Lam” will never be more famous than Thelma & Louise; “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(d’oh)cious” will never be better remembered than Mary Poppins; and “Rosebud” will never touch the widespread cultural importance of Citizen Kane. But Cape Fear? It may be less famous than “Cape Feare.” It doesn’t hurt that it’s widely considered one of the series’ best episodes, usually appearing in various top ten lists, and it’s a personal favorite of mine. When it comes to Sideshow Bob episodes, I think that I would give the edge to “Sideshow Bob Roberts” by just a hair because of that installment’s biting political edge, but “Cape Feare” is the funniest by a wide margin. Even if you’re someone who’s never seen the show, the omnipresence of memes that originate from it mean that it’s given us some of the longest lasting Simpsons jokes and images, like Homer’s extreme stupidity rendering him unable to respond to the name of his witness protection identity, Homer’s frightening offer of brownies and brandishing of a chainsaw on the “Thompson” family’s houseboat, and, of course, Bob and the rakes. It’s with this in mind that I offer the possibility that this movie was not intended to be as comedic as I found it, which contributed to a feeling of overall tonal whiplash and inconsistency that made it a strange text to interact with. That, combined with some experimental filmmaking choices that range from the interesting to the absurd, make for a film that is overall less than the sum of its parts. 

Despite the main conflict of the film happening between Nolte’s Sam and De Niro’s Cady, the most powerful scenes in this film are those that feature the film’s talented roster of actresses acting against one of them. Cady’s semi-seduction of Danielle by calling her the night before summer school starts to pose as her new drama teacher and direct her to the theatre in the film’s basement for “class” the next day, where he preys upon the fifteen-year-old’s desire to be treated more maturely, is skin-crawling, and Lewis plays Danielle perfectly in this scene —  disturbed but intrigued, flattered in spite of herself, and frighteningly naive. Lange gets two big scenes. While her big monologue in the finale, in which she attempts to redirect Cady’s imminent sexual violence against Danielle back onto herself by flattering him and lying about an emotional connection, is quite good, it’s the earlier scene in which she accuses Sam of sleeping with Lori after hearing him sounding overly concerned on the phone that is her powerhouse moment. She’s a tornado of fury, and it’s fantastic to witness. In Ileana Douglas’s penultimate scene, Sam comes to her in the hospital after Cady has beaten and sexually assaulted her, and we get our first glimpse of just how dangerous and vile a man Cady is; Lori has been brutalized. Douglas gives what may be a career-best performance delivering a harrowing monologue about what it’s like to be a woman who’s witnessed the justice system act as a secondary violating entity in the way that it forces the events to be revisited and picked over, examined and re-examined and cross-examined, and how often justice fails to be served in spite of all of it. 

It’s a gut-punch of a scene (genuinely the film’s greatest), one that’s immediately followed by one in which the furious Sam demands takes his anger out verbally upon sympathetic police lieutenant Elgart (Robert Mitchum, who previously portrayed Cady in 1962), who ends the scene with the uproariously funny line “Well, pardon me all over the place.” He’s not the only returning actor from the earlier film to appear in a scene that borders on camp in tone, either, as Peck portrays Lee Heller, an attorney that Cady engages to file a restraining order against Sam when Sam’s private investigator Kersek (Joe Don Baker) hires some goons to rough Cady up, in which Cady manages to get the upper hand. Heller appears in court wearing a suit that’s several sizes too big for him while Peck affects a Southern accent, to the effect that he feels like he’s a simple hyper chicken from a backwoods asteroid costumed by David Byrne. Cady himself is an interesting case, as De Niro plays him as a truly terrifying man, driven and determined and focused, with nothing but hatred and revenge in his heart. On the other hand, Cady is a clownish figure, dressing in garish clothing of various bold prints (notably, Cady also continues to wear bellbottoms in several scenes, which would have been the style at the time that he was sentenced in 1977), and his menace is undercut by some of De Niro’s choices to go a little “broad.” Or am I just too Simpsons-pilled? Do I read the scene in which a severely dirtied Cady detaches himself from the bottom of the Bowden’s Jeep Cherokee after they’ve driven out to Cape Fear as campy and funny because I’ve seen Sideshow Bob do it countless times? Am I not supposed to be laughing when Cady finally dies, being dragged beneath the surging waters of Cape Fear when he starts speaking in tongues before singing a hymn about the River Jordan? It feels like I shouldn’t be given that mere moments before this Leigh and Danielle were in harrowing sexual danger, but I also can’t imagine that the film could expect me to take Cady’s dying glossolalia seriously either. “Cape Feare” is in such a rhetorical conversation with Cape Fear that it’s essentially paratext, so I have to consider that I’m biased not to take the film’s drama seriously, but I also don’t think that the shadow of “Cape Feare” is entirely to blame for a Cape Fear’s tonal failings either. 

One of the things that is most praiseworthy in the film is the moral dilemma that it posits. Sam unequivocally betrayed his oath and broke the law by suppressing evidence that would have reduced Cady’s sentence; there’s no argument about that. But Cady had already bragged to him about beating two previous aggravated sexual assault charges and when Sam witnessed the extent of his brutality toward his teenaged victim, he made what is a reasonable moral and ethical choice to ensure that Cady could not continue his reign of terror. Justice failed, and justice was served. This is ultimately what Cady discovered and what set him off on his violent revenge campaign, and it turns out that Sam did it all in vain, anyway. Cady insists he would have served the seven years he would have gotten with his reduced charges and considered it just, but by the time he had spent that amount of time incarcerated, he had already murdered another inmate and made it look like an accident. This open secret meant that the parole board never even considered his early release. If Sam hadn’t hidden the “exonerating” evidence, Cady would still have served the same amount of time. Violence simply begets; that’s its nature. If the film had spent a little bit more time on this topic, I think it might have been able to pull these disparate threads together, but it never really comes to the forefront. As it is, this one is composed of some great elements, but they don’t work together. You can’t take it as seriously as it sometimes demands because it’s a little too campy in certain places, but you can’t take it as a fully straightforward campy thriller-comedy not because it’s often too frightening but because the omnipresent threat of sexual violence makes it too dark to comfortably enjoy on that level. Less worthy as a whole than the combined value of its individual parts.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

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While attending a recent screening at my local arthouse, I pointed out to my companions that there was going to be several screenings of Rear Window the coming weekend and gave it my typical whole-hearted recommendation. These were two of my younger friends who mentioned that they’ve seen far too few of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, but one of them had been in a high school theater production of The Lodger, which was quite the coincidence as I had a library copy of the DVD at home at that very moment. It’s also available on the Criterion app and Tubi (at least at the time of this writing), which means it’s pretty accessible, for anyone who might be interested. I know that a silent film is a hard sell these days, but I liked this one quite a lot and loved its use of expressionistic composition and dark atmosphere and recommend checking it out. 

The Lodger (subtitled A Story of the London Fog) is a 1927 thriller from the Master of Suspense, his third film. It largely centers around one family’s experiences with a new lodger in their boarding house while the city at large quivers in fear at the actions of a serial killer leaving notes identifying themself as “The Avenger.” Mr. and Mrs. Bunting are caring and doting parents to their daughter, Daisy, a blonde young fashion model still living at home with them. Every Tuesday night for months, a blonde woman has been found murdered by the Avenger, and the police seem at a loss. The Buntings are friends with a detective named Joe Chandler, who is visiting them when news of the seventh victim arrives. That same night, a dark and imposing man appears at the Bunting home in response to their “room to let” sign. Joe is eventually put on the case to find the Avenger, and although he is able to discern a pattern from the location of the killings and estimate the general location of the next slaying, his jealousy over the growing attraction between the lodger and Daisy leads him to suspect the lodger of being the killer. When a search of the lodger’s, um, lodgings leads him to a map of the victims’ locations and clippings about the killings, the lodger is arrested, but Daisy helps him to escape, even though she (and we) still have no evidence of his innocence. 

There were moments during the course of the film that I was worried we were headed toward that easiest conclusion, but I should have known that even in this earliest part of his career, Hitchcock would already be working in a more subversive manner. In recent discussions on the podcast of Strangers on a Train, we talked about how Hitchcock never had much respect for the police, individually or institutionally, and there are already elements of this at play. Joe Chandler may manage to put together some clues about the real Avenger, but his personal failures of pettiness and jealousy lead him to pursue an innocent man, to the point that during his flight from the law the lodger is almost lynched by a mob while the real killer is elsewhere racking up yet another body. Hitchcock also loved to tell (and retell) the story of an innocent man being wrongly accused and pursued, from The 39 Steps to To Catch a Thief to North by Northwest to Frenzy, so it’s no surprise that it turned up as a plot point in this early work of his. I did expect there to be a bit more of a twist surrounding Joe, however. 

It’s never quite clear exactly what his relationship is to Daisy. Sometimes, she seems very receptive to his wooing, but at other times rejects his advances, although it’s a possible interpretation that her rejection largely occurs in scenes in which her parents are present. In their first scene together, he flirts with her by cutting a heart shape out of the dough that her mother is preparing and placing it in front of her, to which Daisy responds by tearing the heart in half and handing it back to him. To me, this established that his interest was unwelcome, but there are other scenes in which she welcomes his attention with enthusiasm. At the time of release, Joe’s actor Malcolm Keen was 40 years old, and he looks older. I’d probably attribute it to the technological limits of the time rather than to an intentional aesthetic choice, but Keen’s fair complexion and the make-up available at the time renders him, well, a bit ghastly-looking. In comparison, although Ivor Novello’s lodger character arrives at the Bunting house looking and behaving like a total weirdo, once he settles in, he reveals himself to be as beautiful as he is brooding. As a result, although I was willing to believe that the film was headed toward the revelation that the lodger was the Avenger as easily as it might have been headed toward his innocence, I also thought it might be revealed that Joe was the Avenger, but that might be my expectations being a little too close to modernity. The Avenger is apprehended entirely offscreen, his identity never revealed, but the audience of today looks at this rather small cast of characters and automatically assume that one of the characters has to be the killer. Through that lens, it could only be Joe, but that wasn’t really a trope of the medium yet.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

D.O.A. (1949)

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

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Her Vengeance (1988)

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Golden Harvest’s 1988 rape revenge thriller Her Vengeance is reportedly a remake of fellow Hong Kong exploitation flick Kiss of Death, released by the rival Shaw Brothers studio in 1974. However, sometime between those two productions the most notorious American landmark of the genre, I Spit on Your Grave, left its permanent mark on the rape revenge template, so citing its primary influence becomes a little muddled. Her Vengeance does adhere to the exact plot structure of Kiss of Death, following the training-and-payback saga of a sexually assaulted woman who learns her martial arts skills from a physically disabled wheelchair user before getting her titular vengeance. Something about the continued violation of that initial assault following her well after the inciting incident screams I Spit on Your Grave to me, though. The frustrating, traumatizing thing about I Spit on Your Grave is that its vengeful antiheroine is assaulted multiple times before she flips the power dynamic of the film’s violence, restarting the 1st-act violation several times over without letting the audience move on to something less vile. In Her Vengeance, the initial assault continues in less literal ways, but persists nonetheless. Our assaulted antiheroine contracts gonorrhea, which exponentially worsens even as she trains her body for combat. She reveals her assault to her blind sister (and, by extension to the audience) by explaining that the gang who jumped her were also the same five scumbags who killed their father and left both the sister and the sister’s fiancée physically disabled. Then, her vengeful warpath accidentally puts the last few living people she cares about in their own mortal danger as innocent bystanders, so that she’s repeatedly traumatized every time the gang goes tit-for-tat with her assassinations. It’s relentlessly, exhaustingly bleak.

Thankfully, the dependably entertaining director Lam Nai-Chou lightens up the mood where he can, bringing some of the cartoonish hijinks from his better-known classics The Seventh Curse & Riki-Oh to a genre not typically known for its goofball amusements. As nightmarishly vicious as the gangsters are in every scene, they do initiate an armored truck heist by sticking a banana in the tailpipe, a classic gag. Frequent Sammo Hung collaborator Lam Ching-ying performs most of the more outlandish antics as our heroine’s wheelchair-using martial arts trainer, using his chair as a weapon and a constant inspiration for over-the-top stunts. Seemingly overwhelmed by the pure evil emanating from the worst of the surviving gangsters, he also rigs his nightclub with lethal boobytraps for a spectacularly violent climax, like a Home Alone precursor for convicted murderers. These outrageous “Triad Spring Cleaning” sequences are especially fun to watch due to the film’s Category III rating, which allows it to indulge in the most grotesque practical gore details imaginable. That freedom to indulge cuts both ways, though, making for an excruciating first-act assault as the gang members take turns abusing our antiheroine in a graveyard nightscape. Lam mercifully does not fixate on actor Pauline Wong Siu-Fung’s naked, abused body during that sequence, which helps diffuse any potential dirtbag eroticism seen elsewhere in this disreputable genre. Instead, he catalogs the cartoonishly evil Dick-Tracy-villain faces of her attackers, each with names like Salty, Long Legs, and Rooster. He also finds some sly humor in her eventual revenge on those C.H.U.D.s, having her cut off one of their ears with a pair of scissors, then later featuring a Vincent Van Gogh portrait as a background detail. Her Vengeance is not the Steel & Lace-level absurd escalation of the rape revenge template you’d expect from the director of The Seventh Curse, but Lam still finds a few occasions to have his usual fun, so it’s not a total dirge.

Curiously, the recent Vinegar Syndrome release includes a longer-running alternate Category IIB cut of the film that averts its lens from some of the more violent details but adds in additional scenes of dramatic context that overcorrects their lost length. Apparently, Golden Harvest produced five different cuts of the film in total, mostly as a preemptive measure to avoid its inevitable censorship by the Hong Kong government. If I were a more diligent cinema scholar I might’ve watched the IIB cut of the film for comparison’s sake before writing this review, or revisited I Spit on Your Grave, or sought out Kiss of Death. Since this is such a deeply, deliberately unpleasant genre, however, I can’t imagine wanting to suffer through this story a second time, no matter how softened or warped. The only reason I watched Her Vengeance in the first place is because it was packaged with my recent purchase of fellow Category III grotesquerie Devil Fetus, and I had some light familiarity with the director’s name. I do not regret the discomfort at all. Pauline Wong Siu-Fung gives a heartbreaking performance as a sweetheart nightclub employee who’s embittered & radicalized by her Triad gang-assault, emerging as a vicious killer herself on the other side. Lam Ching-ying makes spectacular use of his wheelchair prop, delivering some of the coolest, most badass disability representation I’ve ever seen in a martial arts film. Lam Nai-Chou crafts some memorably bizarre action-cinema payoffs typical to his most eccentric works. Still, I don’t think I’ll be making this particular journey into rape-revenge Hell again anytime soon. Once was plenty, thank you. I’ll stick to the relatively wholesome safety of Devil Fetus until these psychic wounds have healed.

-Brandon Ledet