The Night Runner

18 months after committing a violent attack of some sort, Roy Turner is prematurely released from a mental hospital for budgetary reasons.  Can he hold it together (and hide his past) enough in the outside world to get by?  This is the world of noir, so… not bloody likely.  It’s a cheapie film but packs some melancholy atmosphere.  There’s an aura of impending doom hanging over the proceedings, as the viewer is certain Turner will eventually crack, despite the goodwill he’s built up with the audience.  Ray Danton — quite memorable as the killer beatnik in The Beat Generation — is very sympathetic and likeable.  For a while, that is.  The main problem with this film is that it doesn’t know what to do with Turner.  His illness manifests itself in radically different ways, and only seems to pop up when it’s convenient for the narrative.  Inconsistency might be an unfair criticism when it comes to a schizophrenic character, but still, those moments feel shoehorned in rather than arrived at organically.

But it’s not a bad movie.  As I said, Danton is quite good, and the no-name supporting cast isn’t that shabby either.  Colleen Miller plays the love interest, very natural and pretty cute, too.  It appears her career was rather short and unremarkable, though.  It’s hard for me to judge the cinematography as the copy I saw was very washed-out… I didn’t notice any particularly striking shots, but given the obvious low-budget it didn’t look that bad.  The music is occasionally a little much, although during a key moment it’s intentionally over-the-top and very effectively so.  Overall I’d say it’s a skippable noir but it has a few intriguing elements.  Rating: Fair

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The Staircase

On December 9th, 2001 in Durham, NC, author Michael Peterson called 911 and told them “I think my wife fell down the stairs.”  When paramedics arrived, Kathleen Peterson was a lifeless, extremely bloody body at the bottom of the stairs.  This 8-part documentary explores the aftermath as Peterson is brought to trial for the murder of his wife.  I’m trying not to say too much because there are a number of “surprises” that enhance the drama of the film.  But I will say that one’s interest in it is not dependent on whether you believe Peterson is innocent or guilty.  I started out one way and changed my mind.  Further reading on the case has caused me to doubt again.

Sometimes a film can be judged, at least partially, by what is not in it.  Jean-Xavier de Lestrade (who also directed the stellar documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning, another stunning look at the legal process) focuses almost entirely on the defense team.  If you watch the extra features on the DVD, you will learn that he wanted to provide a more balanced picture, but the prosecution became less and less cooperative.  So it is unfortunately but inevitably one-sided.  More disturbing are the pieces of forensic evidence and testimony that were left out of the film.  I’m not certain that I’ve read is true, but if it is, it lessens the film’s credibility.  Perhaps significantly.

But ultimately it’s not a movie about what the truth is, but how we determine it.  It’s about the trial process, forensic studies, the media circus (in case you weren’t aware, Nancy Grace is a despicable human being), perception, interpretation, rules of evidence, crafting a defense, constant decision-making and second-guessing and unforeseen circumstances.  It’s about how we judge a person.  Is Peterson being judged on the evidence, or his sexuality, or his public persona, or the argumentative skills of the attorneys?  It’s a thoroughly comprehensive and endlessly fascinating study.  And it’s loaded with amazing characters, from Peterson to his family to the attorneys to one particularly entertaining witness.  There’s a surprising amount of humor, some of it very uncomfortable but funny nonetheless.

I’m not a huge aficionado of “true crime,” either in literature or film, but I’d like to be.  I’ve always enjoyed it immensely.  This film is an excellent, gripping entry in the genre, despite some reservations about the completeness of the picture.  Rating: Very Good

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The Tall T

This starts out pretty dismal.  For the first 15-20 minutes, you think you’re going to get a featherweight western with the usual tropes.  But once the pivotal event (a hold-up turned kidnapping) occurs, it becomes much darker.  Boetticher strips it down to a kind of a bare essence, waving off the goofiness of those early scenes.  What’s left is a power play of personality types.  Each man has his own code, and survival depends on your ability to assess the other’s nature and exploit it to your advantage, while staying true to your own.

Randolph Scott likewise overcomes the cheese of the opening and stands tall as a cool-under-pressure, intelligent hero, aware of his shortcomings but willing to work around them.  Richard Boone is also really interesting as the main villain, his admiration of Scott not getting in the way of his nefarious ambition.  The rest of the cast are not quite as impressive.  Maureen O’Sullivan doesn’t have much to work with, and doesn’t make much of the little she’s given.  Skip Homeier and Henry Silva (“Chink”? seriously?) are vaguely entertaining as Boone’s trigger men, as is John Hubbard as a real sleazebag, but nothing truly memorable.

Maybe I’ve just developed a greater tolerance for westerns, but I enjoyed this more than the more widely acclaimed Ride Lonesome.  Except for the rough start, it’s a really engaging story with a compelling starkness to it.  The color looks quite nice and there’s an excellent sense of framing to it.  On the whole it’s a little too “standard” to rank among my favorite westerns, but it’s a fun watch, and a quick, easy one at that.  Rating: Good

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Looney Tunes 1957

Astute readers may have noticed that I’ve been watching a lot of 1957 movies lately.  That’s because over at the Filmspotting Forums we’re embarking on a bold new experiment.  You see, every year the forum holds the “Filmspot” awards, kind of our equivalent of the Oscars.  For the first time, we’re doing a “Retro Filmspots” and the year chosen was 1957.  I’m rather weak in the Shorts category, so I’m starting with a bunch of Looney Tunes.  Probably most or all of these are ones I’ve seen before, just never rated or reviewed them.  But I’m only marking as rewatch when I’m 100% certain about it.

Ali Baba Bunny - Daffy Duck is hands down my favorite Looney character.  Pairing him with Bugs Bunny often brings out his best frustrated rage.  Not so in this case.  The interactions between Bugs & Daffy are pretty minimal, and the stock Big Dumb Oaf character annoys me.  This feels rather uneventful, even for a 7-minute cartoon.  Rating: Fair

Birds Anonymous (rewatch) - Academy Award-winning film about the horrors of addiction.  No, it’s not The Lost Weekend, it’s Sylvester and Tweety.  Sylvester is rad, I love him.  But I absolutely hate Tweety Bird.  If it was up to me, he’d get eaten every time.  So I enjoy a Sylvester-centric short.  Tweety is barely in it at all.  I don’t think it’s very cool to spoof recovery programs, and there’s not really a lot of laughs here.  But it’s got some fun moments and it’s an interesting digression from the usual formula.  Rating: Good

Boyhood Daze  - A little boy’s fantasies while being banished to his room.  The artwork is very nice in this one, but otherwise it didn’t resonate with me at all.  The voice Dick Beals uses for the youngster is really annoying, and a boy’s imagination should be more wild than these standard scenarios.  Maybe I’m just a cranky old man.  Rating: Poor

Go Fly a Kit – Okay, this is freakin’ adorable.  A kitten is raised by an eagle, learns to fly, defeats a vicious dog and falls in love.  I don’t think it gets any cuter than FLYING KITTENS.  I want one!  A little too much time is spent on the dog thing, which involves the usual get-the-big-dummy-to-hit-himself-on-the-head type gags.  But it’s a really sweet and lovely short.  Rating: Very Good

Gonzales’ Tamales - The other mice get fed up with Speedy attracting all the sexy lady mice, so they enlist Sylvester to rub him out.  I never liked Speedy Gonzales much, and all the ethnic stereotyping is really off-putting.  None of the gags here are that clever, either.  Maybe the only time you’ll hear “marijuana” in a Looney Tunes cartoon, though.  Rating: Poor

Greedy for Tweety (rewatch) - This is your typical Spike/Sylvester/Tweety food chain power struggle.  Nothing too special here, but I like the bit where Sylvester is all drugged up.  I thought I didn’t like Granny, but actually she’s not that bad.  Rating: Fair

Scrambled Aches (rewatch) - The beauty of Road Runner shorts is that they’re purely gag machines.  And that’s also their downfall.  It’s always the same old shit, you know the dynamite is somehow gonna end up blowing up Wile E. Coyote, or the anvil will land on his head, or the cannon will shoot him in the face.  This one has the dehydrated boulder bit which is nice, but everything else is mildly amusing but too familiar and predictable.  Rating: Fair

Show Biz Bugs (rewatch) - Daffy’s envy of Bugs’ popularity drives him to extreme measures.  As a Daffy-heavy film, this delights me.  Lots of self-righteous pomposity and raging outbursts.  And I love how Bugs is perfectly cooperative, Daffy’s undoing is his own incompetence, arrogance and lack of crowd appeal.  But of course you have to ask… does Bugs hit that bum note on the xylophone accidentally, or is he more aware than he lets on?  Rating: Very Good

Three Little Bops - The “Three Little Pigs” recast as a jazz trio.  You kind of feel for the wolf in this scenario.  He’s branded as a “square” but he just wants to be accepted in the exclusionary hepcat world.  But it all works out nicely in the end.  Great use of rhyme and music in this one, very clever and a neat snapshot of the popular culture at the time.  Rating: Very Good

Tweety and the Beanstalk - Jeez, another Tweety one.  They sure cranked these out, didn’t they?  Uninteresting take on the classic fairy tale.  You’d think Sylvester having to cope with a giant Tweety might create some fun situations, but nope.  Really dull, tired gags.  And lame racism at the end.  Rating: Poor

Zoom and Bored (rewatch) - What a dumb pun.  I get the “zoom” part but where does “bored” fit in?  Nowhere, unless it’s referring to the viewer, bored with the same old Coyote/Road Runner bits.  This one has a lot of jokes that leave you saying “Is that all there is to it?”  It does have something of an epic climax, but otherwise it’s a snooze.  Rating: Poor

What’s Opera, Doc? (rewatch) - Saving the best — or at least the most iconic — for last.  You have to wonder if they knew how memorable it would be or if it was just another job for them.  Usually Elmer Fudd annoys the hell out of me, but when he’s singing “Kill the wabbit!” he’s irresistible.  Maybe a little slow at points, but some beautiful work that’s actually a little bit touching.  Rating: Very Good

They Drive by Night

 

The Fabrini brothers are a trucking team trying to escape the grip of a tight-fisted employer and a persistent representative of the loan company.  In their quest for financial independence, they’ll be sidetracked by a road accident… and a woman.  As a 1940 film, this isn’t quite part of the noir cycle, but the two halves of it each resemble noirs to come.  In the first half, the trials and tribulations of truckers bring to mind Thieves’ Highway.  And no wonder… A.I. Bezzerides penned the source material for both movies.  And the second half introduces a femme fatale, played by one of the best: Ida Lupino.  The tone of the film isn’t especially noir, or at least is only occasionally so.  But the groundwork is there, and besides, it doesn’t have to be noir to be good.  The script generally does a great job of juggling drama, action, comedy and romance.  I found the first half of it a little more compelling.  Even though it has more of an anecdotal structure, the details of the trucking life are interesting, and it really gets you attached to the characters.  The second half slows things down a bit, but it picks up again as Lupino gets crazier.

Putting together George Raft and Humphrey Bogart as brothers is a stroke of casting genius.  Both guys are bold and personable, and you can easily imagine them being blood relatives.  The same nasal intonations, the same reserved swagger, the same cautious intelligence.  Ann Sheridan is great, too, a fine mix of brassy and supportive.  But Lupino practically steals the show, and her character has danger written all over her.  The performance gets a little broad at the end, but it’s certainly a memorable moment.

With a sharp script (loads of innuendo) and charismatic performances, They Drive By Night overcomes its minor pacing problems and is a very enjoyable movie.  Rating: Very Good

IMDb

Trivial footnote: 25 year mystery SOLVED!  Ever since high school, one of my favorite albums has been Hole by Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel.  The album starts off with someone saying: “You wanna know something, red?  I like you.  I like everything about you.  I like the way you fill out your clothes.”  I never knew where that came from, I assumed it was a sample but I wasn’t sure.  It’s George Raft, talking to Ann Sheridan.  Now I just need to figure out where “I wanna soak my head under your hose” comes from.

The Shadow on the Window

This plot is a little complicated for just a one-liner summary.  A woman is doing a stenography job for a wealthy rancher.  Three young thugs burst in and kill the guy.  Meanwhile, the woman’s young son witnesses the whole thing from outside the window.  Dazed, he wanders off and eventually is reunited with his father, a cop who is estranged from the mother.  But the kid won’t say a word.  Now it’s up to the father to figure out what happened to his wife, and it’s up to her to stop these three punks from killing her, too.

It’s not bad for a premise, and there are some pretty good moments.  One of the three kids is a lunkhead but with a heart of gold, and the conflicts within that group are somewhat intriguing.  When the cops finally figure out what’s going on, there’s a chase scene that’s nicely done.  The film seems to have a strong emphasis on the deterioration of “family values”, even more so than the usual films of the 50′s.  One of the youths copes with a drunken stepfather, there’s a couple who resent the monthly dinners with their uncle, a witness who can’t be found because he’s busy cheating on his wife, and of course the broken family at the center of the film.  I don’t think this theme makes the movie any more compelling, but it’s there.

It’s all rather middle-of-the-road stuff.  The cast is unremarkable, no one is terrible (John Drew Barrymore’s angry young man shtick is a little hacky) and no one is great (the best is probably Gerald Sarracini as the aforementioned lunkhead).  The little kid is the Beaver himself, Jerry Mathers.  Fortunately the whole point of the movie is that he won’t talk.  Music and cinematography are decent.  There’s not much noir atmosphere to the film, but the story is mildly engaging.  I wouldn’t recommend it, although it’s not a total waste of time.  The Desperate Hours is a better movie in the same general motif.  Rating: Fair

IMDb

The Girl in Black Stockings

A girl (wearing black stockings, naturally) winds up dead at a Utah lodge and everyone’s a suspect.  There’s potential here.  For one thing, you’ve got Marie Windsor, Anne Bancroft and Mamie Van Doren in the cast.  You’ve got Ron Randell as a bitter, misogynist quadriplegic.  You’ve got grisly (offscreen) deaths.  In a way, it’s reminiscent of “Twin Peaks” with a small, remote town, a large cast of characters with their own secrets and a dark mystery.  But without any of the irony, humor or compelling weirdness.  If I had to sum this film up in one word, that word would be “sluggish.”  All the overblown dialogue is loaded with pregnant pauses, but the pauses are stillborn.  It’s a whole lot of nothing that goes nowhere. 

Everyone acts and talks like they’re sleepwalking.  You’ve never seen such a lackadaisical reaction to a man falling into a log slicing machine.  There isn’t a good performance in the bunch.  Windsor is utterly wasted, Bancroft is thinking about her tax returns or something, Van Doren is a generic bimbo, Randell is a buzzkill.  The sheriff (John Dehner) and lawyer (Lex Barker) trying to solve the case have the most tedious conversations.  Oh, and there’s Larry Chance with his horribly stereotypical Native American voice.  I’m surprised he didn’t drop a “me smokum peace pipe” in there somewhere.  And I might as well as mention the score is really bad, too.

It’s all so pointlessly drawn-out, overwritten and unengaging that it’s difficult to care about what’s going on.  By the time I got to the long-winded wrapup (complete with half-assed psychological mumbo jumbo) at the end, I’d already ceased to give a damn.  And apparently so had the cast.  What a snoozefest.  Rating: Crap

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Ni Liv (Nine Lives)

Jan Baalsrud was a member of a Norwegian resistance team in WWII.  His squad was wiped out after revealing themselves to the wrong person, and for the next several weeks he struggled to survive while evading the Germans.  This isn’t merely the story of Baalsrud’s remarkable survival — involving the harshest of terrain, snowblindness, frostbite, starvation and self-amputation — but also the tale of the numerous brave citizens who put their lives on the line helping him get to Sweden.  It becomes a game of trust with each new encounter.  How do you know who you can rely on?  In the end, Baalsrud had to put your faith in strangers, but some of those people took tremendous risks for and went through incredible effort for him.

Arne Skouen makes the story relentlessly exciting and engaging, with nary a dull moment.  The cinematography is exquisite, utilizing dramatic editing techniques, moody lighting and subjective camera to put you inside the mind of Baalsrud, especially in the hallucination sequence and the film’s triumphant, majestic ending.  There were a few moments when I was a little confused, especially at the climax, but it may be an appropriate sign of Baalsrud’s deteriorating mental state.  Jack Fjeldstad is quite good in the lead role, but perhaps even better are Henny Moan and Alf Malland as the couple who go particularly above and beyond the call of duty to assist him.

I can’t recall what drew my attention to this film and made me put it on my list, but I’m glad I saw it.  A very thrilling and stirring movie.  Rating: Very Good

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Chain of Evidence

A parolee goes missing and it’s up to detective Andy Doyle to find him, but trouble finds him first.  This is one of several “Andy Doyle” films starring Bill Elliott, although I fail to see why he needs to be a recurring character.  Elliott plays him like any other detective, without any particularly distinctive traits.  Really the only thing he does is have an unusual amount of faith in the parolee… another unremarkable performance by Jimmy Lydon.  It’s an amnesia story, which I usually find a bit hokey.  There is some tension as you wonder how the situation will resolve itself, but the ending is pretty anticlimactic.  Landres’s direction is also very flat, and the whole thing has all the pizzazz and finesse of a made-for-TV movie.

There are two great supporting performances, although way too brief.  Meg Randall (Without Warning) is terrific as the flirty, sassy waitress who encounters Lydon after the amnesia strikes.  She reminded me Shelley Winters in some of her noir roles.  And then there’s the amazing Timothy Carey.  I don’t know if Carey could do anything that would make me dislike him, even when he glances at the camera it just makes me love him more, few actors are so memorable and idiosyncratic.  Tina Carver is fair as the femme fatale, but hardly one that stands out.  Everyone else is pretty forgettable.  The movie is an easy 60 minutes and maybe worth watching just for Carey and Randall, but I can’t really recommend it.  Rating: Poor

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Don Kikhot

I still haven’t read the second half of the Cervantes novel (shame on me) but I wanted to see this since I’d heard somewhere or other that it was the best adaptation.  The postmodern attempt by Orson Welles (“finished” by Jess Franco, most likely for the worse) had some intriguing elements but was far too flawed to satisfy.  This was a much better experience.  One tends to think of Soviet Russia as being culturally isolated — probably an unfair assumption, but so it goes – and it’s a bit surprising to see a Soviet adaptation of “Don Quixote,” much less one so skillfully executed.  I know less than nothing about 17th century Spain, but it certainly was believable to me… except for the fact that everyone speaks Russian, of course.  The landscapes are gloriously captured in lovely widescreen color vistas.

More importantly, the character of Don Quixote is wonderfully brought to life.  Nikolai Cherkasov had previously starred as the title roles in Aleksandr Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, and played Gorky twice (and once he was FDR!).  He brings to Quixote the necessary dignity and nobility, letting himself be the butt of the joke without ever appearing to be in on it.  There’s no wink to his performance, he plays it straight, with steadfast belief in his ideals, as outmoded as they may be.  It begs the central question of the novel (erm, what I’ve read of it)… is it better to be a virtuous fool or a knowing cynic?  And one can’t overlook Sancho Panza, played here by Yuri Tolubeyev.  He tackles the role with comic gusto, and his devotion to Quixote, though laced with skepticism, is endearing and sweet.  He gets one of the film’s finest moments, as he rules in a matter of justice in the “island” he believes that he governs.  Does this “fool” rule any worse than the disinterested Duke?

Naturally, at 100 minutes the film is a severely truncated version of the story, but it’s a surprisingly charming and funny work.  I swear I’m gonna finish that book one day.  Rating: Very Good

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