Series shines light on hoods, dames, and dark deeds of film noir
As is only right, the Harvard Film Archive celebrates summer by heading into the dark. It was the same impulse so many Americans had after the end of World War II. We'd won, and everything was great. Except when it wasn't.
Hollywood felt the same unease, and over the next two decades American and expatriate European directors turned out a flood of tough, uncompromising works we now know as film noir. At the time, though, they were just movies - thrillers, melodramas, guy-on-the-run diversions. Some made it to iconic status, but many didn't and were tossed away once their runs were over.
It's a wrong that Haden Guest, the archive's director, would like to correct with "Unseen Noir," which begins Friday and runs through May 26. "Many of the directors in the series are known for individual films, but their others are equally strong," Guest said, speaking by telephone from his Cambridge office. "The series is also an introduction to the non-canonized directors. It's a very sort of noir idea - these films were sitting at the end of the bar, waiting for someone to buy them a drink." And that's just what the HFA did.
Fittingly, the series offers double features each night, all the better to savor the unexpected richness on the genre's edges. Friday's kickoff is "He Ran All the Way" (1951) by blacklisted director John Berry. John Garfield is Nick Robey, a stickup man who gets the loot but not the clean escape he'd wanted. Enter Shelley Winters as Peggy Dobbs, a woman who first rebuffs Nick and then hungrily takes him in, unaware that he's on the lam. Things don't turn out as either had hoped.
The chaser is "Try and Get Me" (1950), a double feature in its own right. The film stars Frank Lovejoy as Howard Tyler, an out-of-work husband and father who's drawn into the web of Jerry Slocum, a psycho-slickster played with magnetic authority by Lloyd Bridges. Jerry needs a driver for his job, which just happens to be knocking over filling stations. Would Howard be interested? After a boilermaker and a shot of humiliation, sure. Director Cy Endfield had more up his sleeve than making an afternoon time-killer, though: In the second half, the film earns its original title, "The Sound of Fury," pitilessly examining the dangerous self-justifications of the press ("Our circulation could stand a little crime wave," the local rag's editor says), the hypnotic pull of the mob, and the potential for violence within all of us.
Saturday's standout is "Nightfall" (1957), directed by Jacques Tourneur a decade after "Out of the Past." Based on the book by David Goodis, the film features the sharp dialogue and haunted characters you'd expect, to say nothing of gorgeous cinematography and a ravishing print. Instead of dark-haired, slow-to-anger Robert Mitchum, the movie's antihero is Aldo Ray, blond and thick-necked, out of the Navy and on the run. You see, this friend of his met an untimely end and the cops think he did it. A bigger problem, though, are the two hoods looking for $350,000 in missing cash. Plus there's the insurance investigator who won't go away, and this dame played by Anne Bancroft. She'll take your breath away, and does.
Tourneur's film is preceded by "My Name Is Julia Ross" (1945), which despite having Joseph H. Lewis at the helm is closer to "Dark Shadows" than "Dark Passage." The plucky title character (Nina Foch in Nancy Drew mode) takes a job as a secretary in London and ends up locked away in a seaside castle, swathed in silk and denied her real name. "Gaslight" is the primary reference here, with lurking footmen and knife-wielding family members aplenty. Is it noir? Not in our current narrow conception of the genre, and that's one of the points Guest is making with this series.
If you're looking for a shock treatment of weirdness and wonder, try Sunday. It features four films that run the gamut from over-the-top Expressionism to lovers in peril - sometimes both at the same time.
"Stranger on the Third Floor" (1940), directed by Boris Ingster, is the opener, and up front seems like a standard big-city courtroom drama. A punk with a record (Elisha Cook Jr., just getting into the swing of his career) is accused of murder, and an ambitious reporter happens to be the key witness. The reporter gets his conviction and the raise that should spell happiness, but he's tortured by doubt. Was the right man caught? The film's centerpiece is a dream sequence that reveals the Latvian-born director's dark vision of just how wrong our system of justice could be. Even after we and our reporter "wake up," the fear and uncertainty remain.
André De Toth's "Pitfall" (1948), showing with a newly struck print, is one of the series' real finds. Dick Powell, who played Philip Marlowe in 1944's "Murder, My Sweet," is John Forbes, a veteran who never saw action and is now bored with everything he should be thankful for - secure job, beautiful home, loving wife. That Jane Wyatt gets third billing as his spouse tells the story: In second position is Lizabeth Scott, who plays Mona Stevens, more girl gone wrong than femme fatale. Her boyfriend Smiley (never was there a more intentionally inappropriate name) showered her with ill-gotten gifts, and Forbes has to recover his company's money. Forbes baits the hook himself during a speedboat ride and swallows it deep with a shared drink. "If, for some reason, you ever want to feel out of step with the rest of the world, the only thing to do is sit around a cocktail lounge in the afternoon. . .," Mona coos. And out of step Forbes soon is.
The dark force that powers the film isn't Forbes's naive fantasies or Mona's erotic sizzle, however, but Raymond Burr, hulking and malevolent as MacDonald, a private detective who takes a poisonous fancy to Scott's character. Burr was a one-man wrecking crew in noir classics such as "Raw Deal" and "Desperate," and here he plays it cool, tailing his erstwhile employer, Forbes; needling a jailed Smiley with tales of his girlfriend's infidelity; showing up at Mona's house at all hours. "I've tried to be nice. . .," she says, but he isn't taking no for an answer.
One of the delights of the film is its tone, which swerves between suburban comedy of manners and hard-boiled drama. The music nimbly leads each shift, and you can almost see the orchestra sawing away in the pit. Forbes might have it bad, but getting there never felt so good.
The series finishes with a double shot of Phil Karlson's work, "99 River Street" (1953) and "The Brothers Rico" (1957). The first is a bleak tale of a luckless boxer wrongfully accused of murdering his unfaithful wife (Guest calls the film "a gem that's held together really well"), while the second is a study of how a cruel world twists and destroys even that most sacred of institutions, the crime family. Neither film is available on DVD, so if you're in a noir mood next Monday, there's no better reason to hide from the sun.
Leighton W. Klein can be reached at leightonwalter@yahoo.com.
Correction: Because of reporting errors, a story in Sunday's Movies section about the Harvard Film Archive "Unseen Noir" series incorrectly identified an actor and character in the film "Try and Get Me." Frank Lovejoy portrayed Howard Tyler in that film. Also, the story gave the wrong title for the 1944 movie in which Dick Powell played the character Philip Marlowe; the film was "Murder, My Sweet. 