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Stick with me, snooks, and I'll stake you to a carload of hats
Rabbit, rabbit. Let's talk about Phantom Lady (1944).
This is the flawed B-picture, the New York noir with two indelible scenes, a female protagonist with unusual agency, and some maddening script problems. It is almost a very good movie. It was directed by Robert Siodmak from Cornell Woolrich's 1942 novel of the same name and produced by Joan Harrison, a former Hitchcock screenwriter and one of Hollywood's few female producers of the time. The cast is A-list to B-plus and the cinematography takes high-contrast advantage of the nascent noir genre to create evocative, artificial tableaux of a city everyone seems to haunt and hardly anyone seems to live in. The sound work is equally expressionistic, frequently conveying key points from offscreen with dialogue or sound effects alone. We spent most of the intermission trying to figure out how we could have fixed the plot.
The premise is crackerjack. On the outs with his wife, engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) spends the evening at a Broadway revue with a melancholy stranger in a memorable hat (Fay Helm; the hat is credited to Kenneth Hopkins as "Phantom Hat Creator") before returning home to find that his wife has been strangled with one of his own ties. He should have an ironclad alibi. He has an existential nightmare. He doesn't know his date's name; he met her at a bar and she insisted on anonymity. Everyone the police interview, from the bartender who served them to the cabbie who drove them to the theater to the star of the revue who gave the stranger the stink-eye from the stage—they were wearing the same hat—either can't recall her positively enough for an identification or outright denies there was a woman with him at all. His trial is a formality. He's convicted in a montage of jeering cross-examination and silently furious reaction shots of his devoted secretary, played by the excellent Ella Raines. Her name is Carol, but everyone calls her "Kansas" after the home state whose accent she has long left behind; she has a curious, dark-browed, deerlike face whose quiet, scary intensity the film will make much of. Without resources or assistance, she decides to clear the name of the man she loves by finding his mysterious alibi, the "phantom lady" whose absent presence already dominates the film. Eventually she will acquire an ally in the inspector who closed the case against her boss (Thomas Gomez, whom I like wherever I find him), but she never yields center stage to him; the focus remains on her resolve, her courage, her sometimes foolhardiness, and her downright ruthlessness at times. Even when the story starts to disintegrate around her, Raines never melts like a heroine who's ready for her man to step in.
Besides Raines' performance, the film's strength lies in two early excursions into the nighttime underworld of New York where Scott and the phantom lady so briefly crossed paths. In the first, Kansas sets her sights on the bartender who knows more than he told the police. Night after night, she buys a whiskey and water and sits at the far end of his bar, not drinking, not speaking, staring at him until closing time, passionless and terrifying as a Fury. "She's been sitting there all night," he protests to his boss with a nervous strain in his voice, but the man sees only a regular customer, an unaccompanied girl trying to catch the barman's eye for a refill, not the petrifying head of the Gorgon. The night she follows him home, through rain-silvered streets and a deserted elevated station where circles of streetlight isolate hunter and prey like spotlights, her heels clicking inexorably behind his quickening footsteps, she begins to frighten the audience: we can't tell what she wants from him, if it's information or purely vengeance for his part in the framing of the man she loves. She corners him for the first, but she gets the second as lagniappe. Tell me how many seventy-one-year-old movies you've seen where the most dangerous thing on the city's streets is a woman alone and unarmed. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) pointed in this direction with Margaret Tallichet's pursuit of Peter Lorre, but didn't go as far: Jane could be menaced by her quarry when his true nature was revealed. Kansas' never has a chance.
The second setpiece is even stronger. Because Scott remembered the phantom lady catching the eye of the drummer at the revue, Kansas gets the man's information from Inspector Burgess and makes herself over into musician bait, a "hep kitten" in tawdry, slinky black—fishnet stockings, stiletto heels, cheap jewelry, a beauty mark and a mouth full of cracking gum—slung into a front-row seat with one shapely ankle tapping out the time, heavily darkened eyes come-hithering at the grinning little tomcat behind the kit. He turns out to be Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook, Jr.), a sharp-suited firecracker of a trap drummer with the sexual confidence of a man six inches taller and less prone to ironic character death. He talks a mile a minute and mostly jive; he takes her to a private cellar room where a wild jam session is underway and shows off for her with a sexually charged drum solo that I am amazed got past the censors in '44. Seriously, they can't have been looking at the screen. The jazz quintet whose rhythmic shadows crowd the room even closer and smokier than its cinderblock walls are very hot and very good. Cliff starts with a cocky, promising grin, flashing the sticks like an obvious metaphor; as he picks up the pace, his grin tightens, his face sweats, his eyes widen. Kansas stands over him, laughing, but we cannot hear the sound over Cliff's pyrotechnic frenzy. It is a bravura display. He's as good a drummer as he thinks he is1 and he's building to a climax in every sense of the word. She jerks her head, slides her eyes toward the door. He throws away his sticks, grabs his coat and hat, and follows her swiftly out of the room, pausing only at the door to doff his hat to his fellow musicians as the piano skitters and the bass thrums on. The audience may now smoke their cigarettes if they've brought them.
I regret to report that the film pretty much collapses after this scene. There are two substantial problems with the remainder of Phantom Lady and they are, unfortunately, the identities of the murderer and the eponymous lady herself. The former is glaringly obvious from the moment the character is mentioned in absentia; he's confirmed as soon as he appears, making every succeeding scene a superfluous cat-and-mouse between Kansas and a character whom every law of detective fiction screams that she should know better than to trust. I believe the film wrote itself into this corner, whereas the novel concealed the killer's identity until the climax, but I don't know what the scriptwriter thought he would gain by tipping his hand. It does nothing for the tension and in fact rather undercuts Kansas, whose bullshit detectors have been surprisingly sensitive up to now. I'm not sure who to blame for the film's efforts at criminal psychology, a box of pseudo-psychiatric jargon that leaves Franchot Tone striving manfully with a mixed assortment of facial tics and gazing reverently at his hands as though someone slipped him 'shrooms between takes. The phantom lady herself is built up to such a pitch of nearly supernatural mystery that almost any explanation would underwhelm, but it really doesn't help that the one we get comes so far out of left field that it appears to belong to another genre and, more fatally, bears no thematic relevance to the rest of the plot. The haunted stranger who won't tell anyone their name is as potent a figure of noir as the cynic with a bruised past or the morally ambiguous lover. I'm not saying she should have turned out a femme fatale, but![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I both independently formed the idea that she was on the run from a noir plot of her own, which seemed such an appropriate doubling of Kansas' quest that it jarred all the more when the script effectively reduced the phantom to a red herring. Lastly, and I realize this is more of a personal preference than a structural complaint, it disappointed me that after two knockout mini-investigations of suborned witnesses, we never got another. I would have paid good money for a real scene between Raines and Aurora Miranda,2 the temperamental revue star who denies ever owning the same hat as anyone else. Instead Tone's Marlow (no relation) comes to dominate the proceedings and he is, frankly, the least interesting character in the picture. I saw better psychopaths last week.
All of this said, the film is worth seeing if you can find it. Kansas is a striking heroine in a genre that tends to allow its bad girls more agency than its good ones, and it is especially entertaining from a contemporary perspective that she is rewarded for her efforts with the plot candy of her love object—Scott is not without personality, but after the first twenty minutes his primary narrative function is to motivate Kansas' heroism. Ella Raines has gone on my list of actresses to pay attention to and Elisha Cook, Jr. is a standout. The basement jazz scene is justly famous and worth the ticket price alone.3 Naturally, to the best of my knowledge, Phantom Lady is not available on DVD in this country. Somebody pester Universal.
Next up, Black Angel (1946). This gig courtesy of my hep backers at Patreon.
1. Credit for Cliff's drumming goes either to Dave Coleman or Buddy Rich, according to IMDb or the rest of the internet. The point is that it's world-class. Five foot five he may be, with a face like a dissipated choirboy, but Cliff is the real thing. Most of Cook's characters only wish they were. It's a nice change, even if it's a short-lived triumph. Rush-That-Speaks and I almost brought an Elisha Cook, Jr. bingo card to the theater on the assumption that whoever he played was going to meet a sticky end—shot, poisoned, sexually demeaned, set up, sent up, probably knifed sometime . . . We'd neglected to include "strangled" on the list of possible fates, but we'd still have been right.
2. Carmen's younger sister. She gets a flamboyantly Hollywood-Latin number called "Chick-ee-Chick" about which probably the less said the better, except that she puts it over like a pro and the ability to carry off ridiculous hats plainly runs in the family. She has a vibrant voice, an expressive face, and I was depressed to come home and find that her most notable appearance on film was Disney's The Three Caballeros (1944).
3. I didn't realize until I was done with this review that it is apparently impossible to mention Phantom Lady in any critical context without discussing the basement jazz scene. I cannot argue with this convention. It was a hell of a thing to see. In the same way that Eli Wallach has been known to serve as a life-changing experience, I recommend the experience of viewing Elisha Cook, Jr. as a dynamo of raw sexual energy. I do not expect it to happen again any time soon. Also, considered as a five-minute musical interlude, it's just some really good hot jazz.
This is the flawed B-picture, the New York noir with two indelible scenes, a female protagonist with unusual agency, and some maddening script problems. It is almost a very good movie. It was directed by Robert Siodmak from Cornell Woolrich's 1942 novel of the same name and produced by Joan Harrison, a former Hitchcock screenwriter and one of Hollywood's few female producers of the time. The cast is A-list to B-plus and the cinematography takes high-contrast advantage of the nascent noir genre to create evocative, artificial tableaux of a city everyone seems to haunt and hardly anyone seems to live in. The sound work is equally expressionistic, frequently conveying key points from offscreen with dialogue or sound effects alone. We spent most of the intermission trying to figure out how we could have fixed the plot.
The premise is crackerjack. On the outs with his wife, engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) spends the evening at a Broadway revue with a melancholy stranger in a memorable hat (Fay Helm; the hat is credited to Kenneth Hopkins as "Phantom Hat Creator") before returning home to find that his wife has been strangled with one of his own ties. He should have an ironclad alibi. He has an existential nightmare. He doesn't know his date's name; he met her at a bar and she insisted on anonymity. Everyone the police interview, from the bartender who served them to the cabbie who drove them to the theater to the star of the revue who gave the stranger the stink-eye from the stage—they were wearing the same hat—either can't recall her positively enough for an identification or outright denies there was a woman with him at all. His trial is a formality. He's convicted in a montage of jeering cross-examination and silently furious reaction shots of his devoted secretary, played by the excellent Ella Raines. Her name is Carol, but everyone calls her "Kansas" after the home state whose accent she has long left behind; she has a curious, dark-browed, deerlike face whose quiet, scary intensity the film will make much of. Without resources or assistance, she decides to clear the name of the man she loves by finding his mysterious alibi, the "phantom lady" whose absent presence already dominates the film. Eventually she will acquire an ally in the inspector who closed the case against her boss (Thomas Gomez, whom I like wherever I find him), but she never yields center stage to him; the focus remains on her resolve, her courage, her sometimes foolhardiness, and her downright ruthlessness at times. Even when the story starts to disintegrate around her, Raines never melts like a heroine who's ready for her man to step in.
Besides Raines' performance, the film's strength lies in two early excursions into the nighttime underworld of New York where Scott and the phantom lady so briefly crossed paths. In the first, Kansas sets her sights on the bartender who knows more than he told the police. Night after night, she buys a whiskey and water and sits at the far end of his bar, not drinking, not speaking, staring at him until closing time, passionless and terrifying as a Fury. "She's been sitting there all night," he protests to his boss with a nervous strain in his voice, but the man sees only a regular customer, an unaccompanied girl trying to catch the barman's eye for a refill, not the petrifying head of the Gorgon. The night she follows him home, through rain-silvered streets and a deserted elevated station where circles of streetlight isolate hunter and prey like spotlights, her heels clicking inexorably behind his quickening footsteps, she begins to frighten the audience: we can't tell what she wants from him, if it's information or purely vengeance for his part in the framing of the man she loves. She corners him for the first, but she gets the second as lagniappe. Tell me how many seventy-one-year-old movies you've seen where the most dangerous thing on the city's streets is a woman alone and unarmed. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) pointed in this direction with Margaret Tallichet's pursuit of Peter Lorre, but didn't go as far: Jane could be menaced by her quarry when his true nature was revealed. Kansas' never has a chance.
The second setpiece is even stronger. Because Scott remembered the phantom lady catching the eye of the drummer at the revue, Kansas gets the man's information from Inspector Burgess and makes herself over into musician bait, a "hep kitten" in tawdry, slinky black—fishnet stockings, stiletto heels, cheap jewelry, a beauty mark and a mouth full of cracking gum—slung into a front-row seat with one shapely ankle tapping out the time, heavily darkened eyes come-hithering at the grinning little tomcat behind the kit. He turns out to be Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook, Jr.), a sharp-suited firecracker of a trap drummer with the sexual confidence of a man six inches taller and less prone to ironic character death. He talks a mile a minute and mostly jive; he takes her to a private cellar room where a wild jam session is underway and shows off for her with a sexually charged drum solo that I am amazed got past the censors in '44. Seriously, they can't have been looking at the screen. The jazz quintet whose rhythmic shadows crowd the room even closer and smokier than its cinderblock walls are very hot and very good. Cliff starts with a cocky, promising grin, flashing the sticks like an obvious metaphor; as he picks up the pace, his grin tightens, his face sweats, his eyes widen. Kansas stands over him, laughing, but we cannot hear the sound over Cliff's pyrotechnic frenzy. It is a bravura display. He's as good a drummer as he thinks he is1 and he's building to a climax in every sense of the word. She jerks her head, slides her eyes toward the door. He throws away his sticks, grabs his coat and hat, and follows her swiftly out of the room, pausing only at the door to doff his hat to his fellow musicians as the piano skitters and the bass thrums on. The audience may now smoke their cigarettes if they've brought them.
I regret to report that the film pretty much collapses after this scene. There are two substantial problems with the remainder of Phantom Lady and they are, unfortunately, the identities of the murderer and the eponymous lady herself. The former is glaringly obvious from the moment the character is mentioned in absentia; he's confirmed as soon as he appears, making every succeeding scene a superfluous cat-and-mouse between Kansas and a character whom every law of detective fiction screams that she should know better than to trust. I believe the film wrote itself into this corner, whereas the novel concealed the killer's identity until the climax, but I don't know what the scriptwriter thought he would gain by tipping his hand. It does nothing for the tension and in fact rather undercuts Kansas, whose bullshit detectors have been surprisingly sensitive up to now. I'm not sure who to blame for the film's efforts at criminal psychology, a box of pseudo-psychiatric jargon that leaves Franchot Tone striving manfully with a mixed assortment of facial tics and gazing reverently at his hands as though someone slipped him 'shrooms between takes. The phantom lady herself is built up to such a pitch of nearly supernatural mystery that almost any explanation would underwhelm, but it really doesn't help that the one we get comes so far out of left field that it appears to belong to another genre and, more fatally, bears no thematic relevance to the rest of the plot. The haunted stranger who won't tell anyone their name is as potent a figure of noir as the cynic with a bruised past or the morally ambiguous lover. I'm not saying she should have turned out a femme fatale, but
rushthatspeaks and I both independently formed the idea that she was on the run from a noir plot of her own, which seemed such an appropriate doubling of Kansas' quest that it jarred all the more when the script effectively reduced the phantom to a red herring. Lastly, and I realize this is more of a personal preference than a structural complaint, it disappointed me that after two knockout mini-investigations of suborned witnesses, we never got another. I would have paid good money for a real scene between Raines and Aurora Miranda,2 the temperamental revue star who denies ever owning the same hat as anyone else. Instead Tone's Marlow (no relation) comes to dominate the proceedings and he is, frankly, the least interesting character in the picture. I saw better psychopaths last week.All of this said, the film is worth seeing if you can find it. Kansas is a striking heroine in a genre that tends to allow its bad girls more agency than its good ones, and it is especially entertaining from a contemporary perspective that she is rewarded for her efforts with the plot candy of her love object—Scott is not without personality, but after the first twenty minutes his primary narrative function is to motivate Kansas' heroism. Ella Raines has gone on my list of actresses to pay attention to and Elisha Cook, Jr. is a standout. The basement jazz scene is justly famous and worth the ticket price alone.3 Naturally, to the best of my knowledge, Phantom Lady is not available on DVD in this country. Somebody pester Universal.
Next up, Black Angel (1946). This gig courtesy of my hep backers at Patreon.
1. Credit for Cliff's drumming goes either to Dave Coleman or Buddy Rich, according to IMDb or the rest of the internet. The point is that it's world-class. Five foot five he may be, with a face like a dissipated choirboy, but Cliff is the real thing. Most of Cook's characters only wish they were. It's a nice change, even if it's a short-lived triumph. Rush-That-Speaks and I almost brought an Elisha Cook, Jr. bingo card to the theater on the assumption that whoever he played was going to meet a sticky end—shot, poisoned, sexually demeaned, set up, sent up, probably knifed sometime . . . We'd neglected to include "strangled" on the list of possible fates, but we'd still have been right.
2. Carmen's younger sister. She gets a flamboyantly Hollywood-Latin number called "Chick-ee-Chick" about which probably the less said the better, except that she puts it over like a pro and the ability to carry off ridiculous hats plainly runs in the family. She has a vibrant voice, an expressive face, and I was depressed to come home and find that her most notable appearance on film was Disney's The Three Caballeros (1944).
3. I didn't realize until I was done with this review that it is apparently impossible to mention Phantom Lady in any critical context without discussing the basement jazz scene. I cannot argue with this convention. It was a hell of a thing to see. In the same way that Eli Wallach has been known to serve as a life-changing experience, I recommend the experience of viewing Elisha Cook, Jr. as a dynamo of raw sexual energy. I do not expect it to happen again any time soon. Also, considered as a five-minute musical interlude, it's just some really good hot jazz.
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You know, the more I hear about this book, the more I wonder if Foster Hirsch ever saw any actual noir or if someone just described a Dashiell Hammett novel to him once and he improvised wildly from there.
Dangit, Brattle scheduling.
If it ever comes around on TCM, I'll alert you! [edit] It's playing on January 31st! We should watch it. Assuming it goes into the buffer, and I see no reason why it should not, it will be available to stream online at any time for the next several days.
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We should absolutely watch it! I don't know if we get TCM here or not (is it cable-requisite?) but if not, we'll figure something out.
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It is not cable-requisite! At least, not the way we're going to do it. TCM has an online streaming service available to subscribers; my parents have a subscription along with the rest of their cable package from RCN, but no interest in watching the movies on a computer rather than the actual TV, so they transferred the access to me. The important part of this service is not the ability to watch TCM on my laptop, although that's fun, but the fact that a decent percentage of the programming then goes into a buffer and becomes available to stream on demand for a number of days after airing. Most of the movies I watch these days are from the TCM buffer (or the Somerville Theatre, although the Brattle is giving it some competition recently). So that's what I meant above: if we get Phantom Lady, as long as it's in the buffer, we can watch it any time we like.
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And with that line, my day is made. Thank you!
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Thank you!
(The thing is, I understand it. Kansas does not find Cliff attractive; she is vamping him for information and actively repelled by his enthusiastic response, as when she pours him a drink while he's jamming and he drains it with his sticks still in hand, catches her around the shoulders without losing the beat and kisses her deeply. Her face as she turns away from him toward the camera is narrow-eyed and sullen with disgust; she redoes her lipstick in the trembling mirror as though she's applying armor. To the audience, however, he has the sexiness of competence, because that drum solo is a come-on and an expression of being turned on and as hot and heavy a session of eye-fucking as I can remember in a film of its decade, but it's also just a damn fine piece of musicianship. It's not hard to imagine real hep kittens flipping their wigs for this sawed-off, hopped-up skinsman. I have to remember that social codes have changed around jazz since Phantom Lady was made. This is dirty, dangerous music Kansas has let herself in for; if some of the smoke hanging in the chiaroscuro isn't reefer, that's only because Mezz Mezzrow wasn't allowed on set. The basic milieu is a lot seedier and scarier to the protagonist than it is to me. But it's pretty clear that most of Cliff's dough goes to girls, liquor, and recreational substances, so it's not like he can't find contemporary ladies who aren't all for it.)
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It was the high point of the film for me. The fact that the jam session itself is wordless makes it even more powerful—there's conversation to either side, but in the room there's only the music and their bodies and gazes, interacting intimately while hardly touching at all. I don't think the movie could have sustained that fever pitch for all its 87 minutes, but if it had all been of that quality, comparable to the bartender-stalking scene, I would have no complaints. It would have been a wonder. I went looking for reviews after I'd finished mine and was somewhat puzzled to find the movie as it exists so highly regarded; I think it must be remembered for its best moments or its atmosphere or its heroine. In the alternate universe of film that I am always thinking about, I hope there exists a Phantom Lady whose third act is as dense and stylish and stunning as its second-act night-journeys promised.
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Well, that can only end well. I'll look for it!
[edit] They made four films together, according to the BFI. I've heard of some of his other work; some of the ones I hadn't heard of sound great. I had no idea he was responsible for The Crimson Pirate (1952).
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Reminds me of a similar scene in Fredric Brown's debut novel, _The Fabulous Clipjoint_ (highly recommended). Wonder if he took it from the film? (TFC was serialized in 1946.)
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That is one of the pulpier titles I have encountered recently; nice. [edit] I associate Fredric Brown most strongly with Martians, Go Home (1955), that being the only novel of his I think I've read. We had a paperback in the house when I was growing up. I think it turned me off him slightly, which may not have been fair.
Wonder if he took it from the film? (TFC was serialized in 1946.)
I don't know, but I can see the scene leaving an impression.
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http://shop.tcm.com/the-phantom-lady-dvd/detail.php?p=656534
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Great! [edit] Oh, my God, do I disagree with that second reviewer. It's like the ghost of Foster Hirsch. Not every woman in a noir has to be a femme fatale! Stop trying to shove that archetype where it doesn't fit, which is possibly everywhere!