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My theory is that everyone is a potential murderer
[I was writing this post at four in the morning and my brain fell over. I finished it just now. Please enjoy several thousand words on film noir. I don't know why I bothered setting myself a minimum wordcount with this project.]
My sleep schedule is a disaster. Tonight![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I reorganized half the kitchen shelves and then went out for dinner. I am very tired, but I am also very tired of not talking about movies.
The great thing about seeing Strangers on a Train (1951) on the same bill with Double Indemnity (1944), as I did last night at the Brattle withjinian and Rush-That-Speaks, is that as a double feature they deliver two complementary portraits of very different modes of sociopathy. I am not talking about Barbara Stanwyck.
Seen in a year of Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal and David Tennant's Kilgrave, Strangers' Bruno Antony looks startlingly prescient: handsome, charming, wealthy, spoiled, utterly careless of other people's desires and lives. At first he appears no more than an infatuated fan, recognizing Farley Granger's amateur tennis star from the sports section and the society pages and alternately flattering and disconcerting him with helpful, intrusive questions about the other man's marital situation. He has a bright, winning affect, a shade over-eager, but so contrite when Guy startles at a piece of sensitive information that it's difficult for the other man to disengage without seeming rude; over double scotches and dissimilar lunches, he inserts himself so confidently and deftly into the private affairs of Guy Haines that it's not until the whirlwind encounter is over that Guy can even acknowledge how bizarre the whole meeting was.1 What Bruno proposes with dreamy seriousness is an exchange of murders: Guy's unfaithful wife for Bruno's overbearing father, with nothing to tie each perpetrator to his respective victim but a glancing acquaintance on a train. "The one who had the motive isn't there. Each fellow murders a total stranger." If it sounds like anything to Guy, it's the resentful fantasy of a dilettante with too much money in his pockets and too much time on his hands. He goes to meet his classy girlfriend (Ruth Roman) and her outspoken younger sister (the absolutely delightful Patricia Hitchcock, basically voicing the subtext), daughters of a distinguished American senator; he's too busy being furious with his wife's punitive about-face on the subject of divorce to think much about a weird stranger's "theory." But we are following Bruno, and we watch him stalk Guy's wife through the glittering underworld of an amusement park, ostentatiously and flirtatiously, until he strangles her in a lover's lane while her fallen eyeglasses reflect a bravura shot of her crumpling death. And the next thing Guy knows, Bruno is handing him a trophy of the cracked eyeglasses, proud as a cat with half a dead mouse, and insisting that Guy follow through on his half of the deal. Guy can protest all he wants that he never agreed to the "criss-cross"—Bruno is smilingly, reproachfully unmoved. He wants something, he feels he is owed it, and he will not take no for an answer.
Bruno was Robert Walker's last full part—he would die within two months of the film's release, his official last role in My Son John (1952) completed with outtakes from Strangers—and he is astonishing in it, boyish, mercurial, relentless, and crucially, indefinably off. Hitchcock attempts to explain him with Freud,2 but Walker's performance sidesteps aetiologies and simply presents a person who is missing some critical circuitry. True to type, he sees people in strict terms of their usefulness to him; otherwise he might as well not be aware of them at all. He boasts of himself as "a very clever fellow." Chiseling, undeserving Miriam Haines (Laura Elliott) is his first murder, but not, we can tell, the first person he's ever hurt. He's not difficult to clock. He is merely insulated. At a party hosted by the senator's family, he nearly chokes another guest to death when the sight of the sister's glasses reminds him of that transfixing moment as the carousel tootled "And the Band Played On" and Miriam's life went out under his hands. Does anyone call the police? Of course not; they can't have the scandal. "First thing you know, they'll be talking about orgies." Besides, it was that engagingly eccentric, impeccably French-speaking Bruno Antony, not some maniac off the street; he's left to recover in an upstairs room as if he just had a little too much to drink and then escorted out of the house by Guy, who is panicked and chokingly angry and so repulsed by Bruno's friendly persistence that he actually punches the man, but still can't let him leave the room without fixing his undone tie for him, while Bruno meekly and smugly submits to the ministrations. His self-confidence is unassailable and for most of its runtime the film bears him out. He has the cash and the connections to follow Guy all over D.C. like a dark-dressed fetch, watching over him from the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. His mother stonewalls for him; his father is not available to be told about his "lunatic son." When Guy threatens to go to the police, Bruno lightly reminds him that "I didn't even know the girl." He has always gotten what he wanted, even when what he wanted was to get away with something. We are offered no reason why he should not go on in the same casually destructive way, unless Guy can pin him for Miriam's murder, and there seems little opportunity for that so long as Bruno keeps his head. Guy is the one who stammers and flushes with guilt when he has done nothing worse than once wish his wife dead, which was not at all the same thing as really wanting her killed; Bruno lies coolly, constantly for all we know, without a raise of pulse or perspiration. When the police finally notice him, it's only because he failed to observe his own rule, the "stranger" half of the murder-swap—entangling himself in Guy's life rather than preserving a safe anonymous distance. Of course he forgets that rules apply to him, even ones he created himself. He's never had trouble from breaking them before. The last words in the picture are very nearly his and they're as sweetly self-serving as you would expect.
Much less flamboyant, but perhaps even more plausible, is the all-round heel played by Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. A thirty-five-year-old insurance salesman in 1938 Los Angeles, Walter Neff doesn't have Bruno's old money or his personal style, but he's just as morally bankrupt and he's nowhere near as easy to spot. Nothing about him automatically pings the viewer's spider-sense. He's a slick talker, but that comes with the job; he's a loner, but his colleagues will cover for him in a pinch and his boss trusts him implicitly, for reasons that will form the film's real tragedy. His cynical interest in a client's wife is sleazy, but opportunistic cheating is a far cry from cold-blooded murder. And yet as soon as the question of an insurance scheme is raised by Stanwyck's bored, almost contemptuously available Phyllis Dietrichson, Walter has a plan to dispose of her husband ready and waiting and he'll do it for no better reason than to prove that he's a better criminal than his cigar-chewing, absent-minded bloodhound of a boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson in the role I saw him in before any of his gangster pictures, with the predictable yet mildly unfortunate result that I find him adorable in several roles where I'm not supposed to3) is a claims adjuster. This last point is vital. Noir criticism and even mainstream reviews tend to read Phyllis as the instigating femme fatale and Walter as her compliant sap, the classic constellation of the ensnaring woman and the man tempted to his ruin. That's the way Walter tells it, after all: "I fought it. Only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough." The trouble with this interpretation is that it presumes Walter as a reliable narrator, an accurate assessor of his feelings and truthful reporter of his own motives. Maybe it's something about the development of irony as a narrative technique since the '40's, but I can't understand why anyone would make this mistake. Bruno wouldn't admit to it in front of witnesses, but he knows full well what he's doing when he snaps his fingers in recognition of a man he's been stalking or gaslights the man's girlfriend or lies with his last breath to the police. Walter Neff has the self-awareness of tarmac. He thinks he's the hero.
I am aware that MacMurray is best known for his paternal roles in Disney comedies; I have some fragmentary memory of seeing The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) at summer camp, although I get it mixed up with It Happens Every Spring (1949). Nonetheless, the roles in which I know him best are Walter in Double Indemnity, Keefer in The Caine Mutiny (1954), and Sheldrake in The Apartment (1960). It surprises me when I catch him on TCM and he isn't a heel. What makes Walter stand out from the pack is not only that he goes "straight down the line" to murder, but that he's so self-deluding about it. His Dictaphone voiceover makes him the narrative authority of the film, but events as they play out continually undercut him. He knows that he shouldn't have agreed to the murder, but he rationalizes it to himself as Phyllis' influence: "And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all. That the hook was too strong. That this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning," conveniently eliding the fact that while she offered the inspiration, he planned out the act. When he gets around to admitting that he spent years looking for a chance to "crook the house [. . .] and do it smart," he blames Dietrichson for making him take it: "He was married to a woman he didn't care anything about and I did," even though the film is pointedly clear that neither lust nor romance is really a factor in Walter and Phyllis' folie à deux.4 He romances Phyllis' nineteen-year-old stepdaughter to keep her from going to the police and states this fact casually, as if it were just the reasonable thing to do. By the time he's planning to murder Phyllis and frame her boytoy—the stepdaughter's former boyfriend—for both killings, he's blown past one ethical horizon after another and I genuinely believe it never occurs to him that he shouldn't. He tries to excuse himself for those behaviors he's been taught are wrong; the fact that he doesn't call attention to the others implies that he doesn't see them as such. He is missing that capacity as surely as he's missing the ability to be sincere in anything other than being out for himself. So he can present himself as weak and easily led, but the audience knows that isn't his problem. What the audience doesn't know—what I can't decide—is how much Walter knows. Phyllis assesses them both accurately in her final scene: "We're both rotten." He insists on correcting her to his own advantage: "Only you're a little more rotten." Maybe he's just playing the part to the end, but I'm afraid he believes it. Either way, though, it's a brilliant disguise, stretching a thin ordinary superficiality over a real moral abyss. I'm just chagrined that it seems to have taken in so many critics for so long. Throughout the movie, people who believe what Walter Neff tells them either die or live to regret it. Why on earth should the audience extend him the slightest trust?
So I find it fascinating that, as far as I can tell from glancing through criticism on both films, it is assumed that the audience will sympathize with Walter, but recognize Bruno as bad news—is this because there's a woman involved in Walter's story and we're all primed to blame la belle dame sans merci? Is it because Bruno is queer as a Burgess novel and we're supposed to fear for Guy's virtue as well as his ethics? I'd prefer a less misogynistic/homophobic answer, but that's nice work if you can get it. Point me at some feminist or queer criticism of noir and maybe we'll get some useful analysis. In the meantime, I think they're both brilliant performances and I try to avoid falling in with people who resemble either of them in real life.
1. Rush-That-Speaks noted afterward that, as a cis man in 1951, Guy is uniquely vulnerable to Bruno's boundary-pushing, because anyone who was socialized female would have known to flee the conversation—screaming, if necessary—after the first few minutes when Bruno revealed his knowledge of Guy's private life and cornered him into accepting lunch in his compartment rather than the dining car. Women learn as a matter of survival that people who can't take even a minor rejection are not safe to be around and even less safe to be alone with, and if you have to tell the porter that a strange man is bothering you, it's better than getting hurt. Guy has no real understanding of stalkers, no reason to envision himself as prey, and no ready defenses against a conversation that makes him uncomfortable for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard Bruno is hitting on him. Incidentally, I appreciated very much that while Bruno is obviously gay and interested in Guy, it does not factor directly or even implicitly into his villainy: Guy doesn't reciprocate, so Bruno gets no leverage there. The primary relevance of his sexuality is his ability to employ it as a smokescreen—if his invasive behavior can be explained as aggressive cruising, why look further for a killer checking out his chosen accomplice? That said, in Bruno's earnest efforts to persuade Guy into murder and his apparent genuine hurt that Guy neither appreciates the favor of his wife's death nor wants to return it, I am not sure there's no foreshadowing of Bryan Fuller's "murder husbands." I kind of assume anyone who writes a TV show in which psychopaths as are common as cab drivers has seen this movie.
2. Mrs. Antony is indulgent and overprotective; Mr. Antony is distant and domineering. Don't forget to allow for Bruno's undisguised queerness and you can do the math. It's the least convincing part of the film and one of the reasons I am grateful to Walker for playing his sociopath as matter-of-factly as he does. Aside from the accidental near-strangling at the party, he never has a moment of conventional cinematic craziness, nothing that looks like delusions or mania rather than a sulky, slightly wounded young man saying terrible things as if he can't see what's wrong with them. The revelation that he does know what he's saying, that he's not incapable of drawing moral distinctions, he just doesn't care, is one of the nastiest stomach-drops of the movie. The viewer can agree that the Antonys are a deeply dysfunctional household, but psychoanalyzing at them isn't going to change a thing.
3. Seriously, this plays havoc with Little Caesar (1931). But Keyes is a sweetheart, therefore the person who gets hurt most in this story. Seeing the film a second time, it struck me that we're led to expect someone quite different from Walter's combative introduction: "You think you're such a hot potato as a claims manager, such a wolf on a phony claim . . . Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson." But when we meet the subject of this address, he's not a blowhard or an arrogant incompetent, he's a colorful character who smokes like Stromboli (but never remembers to carry matches), doesn't fool anyone with his constant shouting, and is deeply, visibly attached to Walter. His compulsive fact-checking is played for some comedy, Columbo-style; Walter kids him, "You wouldn't even say today is Tuesday unless you looked at the calendar. Then you'd check to see if it was this year's or last year's calendar. Then you'd find out who printed the calendar and find out if their calendar checked with the World Almanac's calendar." But he really is as good as his reputation. When the Dietrichson claim comes across his desk, he pulls the supposedly "perfect" train accident apart almost as effortlessly as Walter put it together. His instincts are unerring: except, classically, where his heart is concerned. His blind spot for Walter is foreshadowed by his tragicomic anecdote about the one time he was almost married, until he started investigating his bride-to-be: "And the stuff that came out! [. . .] She already had one husband, a professional pool player in Baltimore. And as for her brother . . ." So too with Walter, he gets wise at the last minute, but that's not fast enough to avoid getting his heart broken a second time. I don't think it ever occurs to Walter to feel bad about betraying Keyes, either. He may mean it when he says, "I love you, too," but he still needed to win this game.
4. Phyllis admits as much by the end; Walter sticks to his story, but the viewer gets the sense that he's trying to sell himself on it as much as Phyllis or Keyes. Otherwise we watch them go through the motions of a fatal attraction, but Phyllis is barely making the effort of pretense and Walter flirts with the same calculated fast talk he uses to pitch insurance policies. They make love exactly once that we could discern, the night after the murder of Dietrichson. They have the most chemistry in their last scene together, right before their fatal exchange of shots. What draws them together really looks like the thrill of mutual manipulation, each of them playing the other, playing the affair. The difference is that Walter needs his "crazy twist" to be recognized and appreciated, hence this boastful confession he's leaving for Keyes. Phyllis just wants to get away with it.
I am afraid this is the somewhat cut-down version of the compare-and-contrast I wanted, but Phantom Lady (1944) and Black Angel (1946) are playing at the Brattle in about an hour and I can't guarantee I won't be thinking about them by the time I come home. I had never seen Strangers on a Train and I thought it was terrific; I had seen Double Indemnity once about eight years ago and I was delighted to see it again. I did not expect the thematic link between the movies, so good job there, Brattle programmer. This dual review brought to you by my perfectly stable backers at Patreon.
My sleep schedule is a disaster. Tonight
rushthatspeaks and I reorganized half the kitchen shelves and then went out for dinner. I am very tired, but I am also very tired of not talking about movies.The great thing about seeing Strangers on a Train (1951) on the same bill with Double Indemnity (1944), as I did last night at the Brattle with
jinian and Rush-That-Speaks, is that as a double feature they deliver two complementary portraits of very different modes of sociopathy. I am not talking about Barbara Stanwyck. Seen in a year of Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal and David Tennant's Kilgrave, Strangers' Bruno Antony looks startlingly prescient: handsome, charming, wealthy, spoiled, utterly careless of other people's desires and lives. At first he appears no more than an infatuated fan, recognizing Farley Granger's amateur tennis star from the sports section and the society pages and alternately flattering and disconcerting him with helpful, intrusive questions about the other man's marital situation. He has a bright, winning affect, a shade over-eager, but so contrite when Guy startles at a piece of sensitive information that it's difficult for the other man to disengage without seeming rude; over double scotches and dissimilar lunches, he inserts himself so confidently and deftly into the private affairs of Guy Haines that it's not until the whirlwind encounter is over that Guy can even acknowledge how bizarre the whole meeting was.1 What Bruno proposes with dreamy seriousness is an exchange of murders: Guy's unfaithful wife for Bruno's overbearing father, with nothing to tie each perpetrator to his respective victim but a glancing acquaintance on a train. "The one who had the motive isn't there. Each fellow murders a total stranger." If it sounds like anything to Guy, it's the resentful fantasy of a dilettante with too much money in his pockets and too much time on his hands. He goes to meet his classy girlfriend (Ruth Roman) and her outspoken younger sister (the absolutely delightful Patricia Hitchcock, basically voicing the subtext), daughters of a distinguished American senator; he's too busy being furious with his wife's punitive about-face on the subject of divorce to think much about a weird stranger's "theory." But we are following Bruno, and we watch him stalk Guy's wife through the glittering underworld of an amusement park, ostentatiously and flirtatiously, until he strangles her in a lover's lane while her fallen eyeglasses reflect a bravura shot of her crumpling death. And the next thing Guy knows, Bruno is handing him a trophy of the cracked eyeglasses, proud as a cat with half a dead mouse, and insisting that Guy follow through on his half of the deal. Guy can protest all he wants that he never agreed to the "criss-cross"—Bruno is smilingly, reproachfully unmoved. He wants something, he feels he is owed it, and he will not take no for an answer.
Bruno was Robert Walker's last full part—he would die within two months of the film's release, his official last role in My Son John (1952) completed with outtakes from Strangers—and he is astonishing in it, boyish, mercurial, relentless, and crucially, indefinably off. Hitchcock attempts to explain him with Freud,2 but Walker's performance sidesteps aetiologies and simply presents a person who is missing some critical circuitry. True to type, he sees people in strict terms of their usefulness to him; otherwise he might as well not be aware of them at all. He boasts of himself as "a very clever fellow." Chiseling, undeserving Miriam Haines (Laura Elliott) is his first murder, but not, we can tell, the first person he's ever hurt. He's not difficult to clock. He is merely insulated. At a party hosted by the senator's family, he nearly chokes another guest to death when the sight of the sister's glasses reminds him of that transfixing moment as the carousel tootled "And the Band Played On" and Miriam's life went out under his hands. Does anyone call the police? Of course not; they can't have the scandal. "First thing you know, they'll be talking about orgies." Besides, it was that engagingly eccentric, impeccably French-speaking Bruno Antony, not some maniac off the street; he's left to recover in an upstairs room as if he just had a little too much to drink and then escorted out of the house by Guy, who is panicked and chokingly angry and so repulsed by Bruno's friendly persistence that he actually punches the man, but still can't let him leave the room without fixing his undone tie for him, while Bruno meekly and smugly submits to the ministrations. His self-confidence is unassailable and for most of its runtime the film bears him out. He has the cash and the connections to follow Guy all over D.C. like a dark-dressed fetch, watching over him from the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. His mother stonewalls for him; his father is not available to be told about his "lunatic son." When Guy threatens to go to the police, Bruno lightly reminds him that "I didn't even know the girl." He has always gotten what he wanted, even when what he wanted was to get away with something. We are offered no reason why he should not go on in the same casually destructive way, unless Guy can pin him for Miriam's murder, and there seems little opportunity for that so long as Bruno keeps his head. Guy is the one who stammers and flushes with guilt when he has done nothing worse than once wish his wife dead, which was not at all the same thing as really wanting her killed; Bruno lies coolly, constantly for all we know, without a raise of pulse or perspiration. When the police finally notice him, it's only because he failed to observe his own rule, the "stranger" half of the murder-swap—entangling himself in Guy's life rather than preserving a safe anonymous distance. Of course he forgets that rules apply to him, even ones he created himself. He's never had trouble from breaking them before. The last words in the picture are very nearly his and they're as sweetly self-serving as you would expect.
Much less flamboyant, but perhaps even more plausible, is the all-round heel played by Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. A thirty-five-year-old insurance salesman in 1938 Los Angeles, Walter Neff doesn't have Bruno's old money or his personal style, but he's just as morally bankrupt and he's nowhere near as easy to spot. Nothing about him automatically pings the viewer's spider-sense. He's a slick talker, but that comes with the job; he's a loner, but his colleagues will cover for him in a pinch and his boss trusts him implicitly, for reasons that will form the film's real tragedy. His cynical interest in a client's wife is sleazy, but opportunistic cheating is a far cry from cold-blooded murder. And yet as soon as the question of an insurance scheme is raised by Stanwyck's bored, almost contemptuously available Phyllis Dietrichson, Walter has a plan to dispose of her husband ready and waiting and he'll do it for no better reason than to prove that he's a better criminal than his cigar-chewing, absent-minded bloodhound of a boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson in the role I saw him in before any of his gangster pictures, with the predictable yet mildly unfortunate result that I find him adorable in several roles where I'm not supposed to3) is a claims adjuster. This last point is vital. Noir criticism and even mainstream reviews tend to read Phyllis as the instigating femme fatale and Walter as her compliant sap, the classic constellation of the ensnaring woman and the man tempted to his ruin. That's the way Walter tells it, after all: "I fought it. Only maybe I didn't fight it hard enough." The trouble with this interpretation is that it presumes Walter as a reliable narrator, an accurate assessor of his feelings and truthful reporter of his own motives. Maybe it's something about the development of irony as a narrative technique since the '40's, but I can't understand why anyone would make this mistake. Bruno wouldn't admit to it in front of witnesses, but he knows full well what he's doing when he snaps his fingers in recognition of a man he's been stalking or gaslights the man's girlfriend or lies with his last breath to the police. Walter Neff has the self-awareness of tarmac. He thinks he's the hero.
I am aware that MacMurray is best known for his paternal roles in Disney comedies; I have some fragmentary memory of seeing The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) at summer camp, although I get it mixed up with It Happens Every Spring (1949). Nonetheless, the roles in which I know him best are Walter in Double Indemnity, Keefer in The Caine Mutiny (1954), and Sheldrake in The Apartment (1960). It surprises me when I catch him on TCM and he isn't a heel. What makes Walter stand out from the pack is not only that he goes "straight down the line" to murder, but that he's so self-deluding about it. His Dictaphone voiceover makes him the narrative authority of the film, but events as they play out continually undercut him. He knows that he shouldn't have agreed to the murder, but he rationalizes it to himself as Phyllis' influence: "And right then it came over me that I hadn't walked out on anything at all. That the hook was too strong. That this wasn't the end between her and me. It was only the beginning," conveniently eliding the fact that while she offered the inspiration, he planned out the act. When he gets around to admitting that he spent years looking for a chance to "crook the house [. . .] and do it smart," he blames Dietrichson for making him take it: "He was married to a woman he didn't care anything about and I did," even though the film is pointedly clear that neither lust nor romance is really a factor in Walter and Phyllis' folie à deux.4 He romances Phyllis' nineteen-year-old stepdaughter to keep her from going to the police and states this fact casually, as if it were just the reasonable thing to do. By the time he's planning to murder Phyllis and frame her boytoy—the stepdaughter's former boyfriend—for both killings, he's blown past one ethical horizon after another and I genuinely believe it never occurs to him that he shouldn't. He tries to excuse himself for those behaviors he's been taught are wrong; the fact that he doesn't call attention to the others implies that he doesn't see them as such. He is missing that capacity as surely as he's missing the ability to be sincere in anything other than being out for himself. So he can present himself as weak and easily led, but the audience knows that isn't his problem. What the audience doesn't know—what I can't decide—is how much Walter knows. Phyllis assesses them both accurately in her final scene: "We're both rotten." He insists on correcting her to his own advantage: "Only you're a little more rotten." Maybe he's just playing the part to the end, but I'm afraid he believes it. Either way, though, it's a brilliant disguise, stretching a thin ordinary superficiality over a real moral abyss. I'm just chagrined that it seems to have taken in so many critics for so long. Throughout the movie, people who believe what Walter Neff tells them either die or live to regret it. Why on earth should the audience extend him the slightest trust?
So I find it fascinating that, as far as I can tell from glancing through criticism on both films, it is assumed that the audience will sympathize with Walter, but recognize Bruno as bad news—is this because there's a woman involved in Walter's story and we're all primed to blame la belle dame sans merci? Is it because Bruno is queer as a Burgess novel and we're supposed to fear for Guy's virtue as well as his ethics? I'd prefer a less misogynistic/homophobic answer, but that's nice work if you can get it. Point me at some feminist or queer criticism of noir and maybe we'll get some useful analysis. In the meantime, I think they're both brilliant performances and I try to avoid falling in with people who resemble either of them in real life.
1. Rush-That-Speaks noted afterward that, as a cis man in 1951, Guy is uniquely vulnerable to Bruno's boundary-pushing, because anyone who was socialized female would have known to flee the conversation—screaming, if necessary—after the first few minutes when Bruno revealed his knowledge of Guy's private life and cornered him into accepting lunch in his compartment rather than the dining car. Women learn as a matter of survival that people who can't take even a minor rejection are not safe to be around and even less safe to be alone with, and if you have to tell the porter that a strange man is bothering you, it's better than getting hurt. Guy has no real understanding of stalkers, no reason to envision himself as prey, and no ready defenses against a conversation that makes him uncomfortable for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard Bruno is hitting on him. Incidentally, I appreciated very much that while Bruno is obviously gay and interested in Guy, it does not factor directly or even implicitly into his villainy: Guy doesn't reciprocate, so Bruno gets no leverage there. The primary relevance of his sexuality is his ability to employ it as a smokescreen—if his invasive behavior can be explained as aggressive cruising, why look further for a killer checking out his chosen accomplice? That said, in Bruno's earnest efforts to persuade Guy into murder and his apparent genuine hurt that Guy neither appreciates the favor of his wife's death nor wants to return it, I am not sure there's no foreshadowing of Bryan Fuller's "murder husbands." I kind of assume anyone who writes a TV show in which psychopaths as are common as cab drivers has seen this movie.
2. Mrs. Antony is indulgent and overprotective; Mr. Antony is distant and domineering. Don't forget to allow for Bruno's undisguised queerness and you can do the math. It's the least convincing part of the film and one of the reasons I am grateful to Walker for playing his sociopath as matter-of-factly as he does. Aside from the accidental near-strangling at the party, he never has a moment of conventional cinematic craziness, nothing that looks like delusions or mania rather than a sulky, slightly wounded young man saying terrible things as if he can't see what's wrong with them. The revelation that he does know what he's saying, that he's not incapable of drawing moral distinctions, he just doesn't care, is one of the nastiest stomach-drops of the movie. The viewer can agree that the Antonys are a deeply dysfunctional household, but psychoanalyzing at them isn't going to change a thing.
3. Seriously, this plays havoc with Little Caesar (1931). But Keyes is a sweetheart, therefore the person who gets hurt most in this story. Seeing the film a second time, it struck me that we're led to expect someone quite different from Walter's combative introduction: "You think you're such a hot potato as a claims manager, such a wolf on a phony claim . . . Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes. I killed Dietrichson." But when we meet the subject of this address, he's not a blowhard or an arrogant incompetent, he's a colorful character who smokes like Stromboli (but never remembers to carry matches), doesn't fool anyone with his constant shouting, and is deeply, visibly attached to Walter. His compulsive fact-checking is played for some comedy, Columbo-style; Walter kids him, "You wouldn't even say today is Tuesday unless you looked at the calendar. Then you'd check to see if it was this year's or last year's calendar. Then you'd find out who printed the calendar and find out if their calendar checked with the World Almanac's calendar." But he really is as good as his reputation. When the Dietrichson claim comes across his desk, he pulls the supposedly "perfect" train accident apart almost as effortlessly as Walter put it together. His instincts are unerring: except, classically, where his heart is concerned. His blind spot for Walter is foreshadowed by his tragicomic anecdote about the one time he was almost married, until he started investigating his bride-to-be: "And the stuff that came out! [. . .] She already had one husband, a professional pool player in Baltimore. And as for her brother . . ." So too with Walter, he gets wise at the last minute, but that's not fast enough to avoid getting his heart broken a second time. I don't think it ever occurs to Walter to feel bad about betraying Keyes, either. He may mean it when he says, "I love you, too," but he still needed to win this game.
4. Phyllis admits as much by the end; Walter sticks to his story, but the viewer gets the sense that he's trying to sell himself on it as much as Phyllis or Keyes. Otherwise we watch them go through the motions of a fatal attraction, but Phyllis is barely making the effort of pretense and Walter flirts with the same calculated fast talk he uses to pitch insurance policies. They make love exactly once that we could discern, the night after the murder of Dietrichson. They have the most chemistry in their last scene together, right before their fatal exchange of shots. What draws them together really looks like the thrill of mutual manipulation, each of them playing the other, playing the affair. The difference is that Walter needs his "crazy twist" to be recognized and appreciated, hence this boastful confession he's leaving for Keyes. Phyllis just wants to get away with it.
I am afraid this is the somewhat cut-down version of the compare-and-contrast I wanted, but Phantom Lady (1944) and Black Angel (1946) are playing at the Brattle in about an hour and I can't guarantee I won't be thinking about them by the time I come home. I had never seen Strangers on a Train and I thought it was terrific; I had seen Double Indemnity once about eight years ago and I was delighted to see it again. I did not expect the thematic link between the movies, so good job there, Brattle programmer. This dual review brought to you by my perfectly stable backers at Patreon.
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I think it is very reasonable to want to give Edward G. Robinson a hug! He gets a really raw deal!
Besides, look at that face.
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The last time I saw "Double Indemnity," it struck me that Keyes and Walter are kind of a twisted/dark version of the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin partnership, in Rex Stout's "Nero Wolfe" novels. Have you read those? The relationship is sort of hard to describe -- Holmes/Watson as filtered through 1940s crime fiction. A cranky, jaded undeniable genius boss-man who likes to lecture and a smooth, fast-talking, smart but rough around the edges protégé who's always poking to find out where a person's weak spots are. So yeah, Keyes and Walter...
But there's also something Wolfean about the unspoken emotional dynamic between Keyes and Walter, where even though it's Walter narrating the story he can't quite gloss over the part where (as you said) this story REALLY isn't about Walter being suckered by lust or greed in the form of a femme fatale. A lot of it is about Keyes too, and *just how important* it seems to be to Walter, to be able to beat "the Man" as embodied by Keyes. (A recurring theme in the Wolfe books is whether or not Wolfe and Archie can successfully lie to or manipulate each other-- again, sort of Holmes/Watson-y, if Watson were 90% as good a detective as Holmes and also hella competitive.)
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I have, and I really like the idea of Keyes and Walter as their dysfunctional reflection. (I still find Keyes more inherently adorable than I find Nero Wolfe.)
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I'd never seen him in anything before! We looked him up on IMDb expecting to find a later career and were shocked and saddened to read his death date instead. His earlier roles sound like a lot of generic boy-next-door.
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Anyway, onto the queue they both go!
This dual review brought to you by my perfectly stable backers at Patreon. hahaha, yeesssss....
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As far as I can tell, Bruno has never seen the point of being human in this sense.
Interesting too that he's gay and that's just by the by, rather than a main factor.
It works for me. Yes, it's another queer character who's a villain, but the script is actually very careful not to draw any kind of causal relationship between the two—it's not the weird conflation of Psycho (1960). Bruno might be some of the ways he is emotionally because of his family, but that's a separate issue from his orientation. Sort of the way James Mason's character in North by Northwest (1958) is bisexual and it has no bearing on the plot, except insofar as boyfriend Martin Landau is undeceived by Eva Marie Saint's double-agent act while Mason has believed her, being in love. You could play the same triangle with two women and one man, but sometimes that's not how it goes. I don't know that Hitchcock was great with queer characters, but at least they generally have agency and interiority and they're people.
In a nice touch of backstage irony, the casting of Farley Granger and Robert Walker meant that the straight character was being played by a gay actor and vice versa. They are both great.
(Farley Granger gets completely shortchanged in his post, but he has the interestingly shaded role of a protagonist who suddenly finds himself afflicted with a doppelgänger he didn't ask for while still wondering whether he brought it on himself. Bruno presents himself like the answer to Guy's prayers, effecting the removal of Guy's spiteful wife in order to clear the way for his love-match with Anne Morton and his political career under her father's wing; he is the seductive shadow self, fulfilling the secret, violent desires on which Guy cannot act without endangering himself. There are stories that work this way. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is one of them. The thing is that Miriam's death isn't actually what Guy wanted. He shouted down the phone to Anne that he could strangle his wife, but he's shocked and horrified when he finds out that Bruno actually went ahead and did just that. He feels terrible about it. He just wanted a divorce. Miriam dying does not actually simplify his life in any way—now he's in the middle of a murder investigation, which if it goes badly will kibosh his romance and his career a lot more finally than a vindictive wife. But Granger plays him as someone who still feels responsible for Miriam's death; after all, he had that crazy conversation with Bruno, he said all those things about her, maybe he meant them more than he thought, isn't he somehow to blame? I find this more interesting than a scenario where the protagonist never doubts his good intentions. Second-guessing himself is not a useful reaction on Guy's part, but it's an entirely believable one, and it makes him a more textured character than someone who has never even asked themselves if they could be thankful for someone else's catastrophe.)
Anyway, onto the queue they both go!
Enjoy!
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Wow, yes. This is something I think people experience a lot in life--not the actual doppelgänger (usually) but haunting pursuit by something you have a nagging sense you brought on yourself, while at the same time wanting to thrust it from you completely.
And Bruno's taking literally his wish to strangle his wife again seems like an aspect of not getting what it means to be human: mistaking hyperbole for an actual wish. We've all made that mistake sometimes, and it IS complicated, because sometimes people's hyperbole does actually represent a wish, but maybe one they're not quite ready to own (which Granger's guilty musings reflect, a bit). Then again, if Bruno likes being bad, he may just enjoy taking the hyperbole as fact, all the while recognizing it for what it is.
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You know, in this instance I honestly can't tell. He might really assume that when other people talk about murder, they mean it as much as they mean train tickets or dinner parties. He does.
Bruno is not supernatural—I really enjoy that his stalking of Guy, uncanny though it feels, is nothing that couldn't be accomplished with enough money—but there are ways in which he behaves narratively like a vampire or the Devil in a folktale; once invited in, however inadvertently, insincerely, or on a technicality, he's very hard to get out again. The combination with Guy's sense of having somehow asked for it is predictably hazardous.
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Thank you! I'm very glad.
I'll have to keep this in mind when I watch it next -- it's a perspective I hadn't considered before, but I don't think I was ever really sold on the fact that Phyllis was the sole villain.
I saw Double Indemnity for the first time in 2007 with no knowledge of the characters or the plot and it read very clearly to me as a mutual-venture murder; Dietrichson's death isn't the result of Phyllis' connivance and Walter's weakness, but the toxic combination of her need, his ego, and their amorality. Then I read a lot of criticism and now I'm involved in an ongoing quest with
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Love this sentence :-)
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Thank you.
(I like Billy Wilder a lot.)
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That is pretty much the best thing I could hear about a movie I've written about. Thank you!
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And it's wonderful to get little flashes of Rush, who has a way of asking the right questions.
Nine
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I've never read any Highsmith; I know her primarily through films and criticism. What chimes with Carol in Strangers on a Train?