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You're up early for a loser
I had planned to see The Big Combo (1955) tonight at the Brattle, but circumstances prevented. Have a completely different movie instead.
On Friday, the Brattle was showing Macao (1952).![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and I had originally gotten this movie out of the library in January because Boyd McDonald had rated it very highly in Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985); he calls the romantic relationship between Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum "a rare and touching display of authentic heterosexual passion" and describes Russell in especially irresistible terms:
It is clear in Macao that Russell and Mitchum want a piece of one another's ass, if I have that imprecise heterosexual locution right, and their first meeting, in which Mitchum, the minute he lays eyes on Russell, grabs her without so much as a hello and kisses her, is thus unnecessarily, excessively heterosexual. But the meeting, absurd though it is, escapes burlesque; Russell and Mitchum are both so comprehensively and consistently outrageous that such an introduction seems not only possible but probable . . . Anyone who treasures cool virility cannot fail to be favorably impressed by Russell; her easy masculine style is more admirable than the showy machismo of men, for, unlike them, she does not prey upon the vulnerable but merely counterattacks when men prey upon her. She stole Mitchum's wallet, after all, while he was trying to steal something that is also worth money, especially in the "straight" world: a kiss. In that world, a kiss can sometimes lead—and does so lead in Macao—to half a man's income for life.
When we saw it announced as part of the '50's noir series, we figured it would be even better in 35 mm. It was. The approving reactions ofgaudior and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants vindicated our belief. But it wasn't any more noir.
The plot sounds like one if you describe it: it has fugitive criminals, undercover detectives, stolen diamonds, knives in the dark, loaded dice, torch singing, men with shady pasts, women of ambiguous loyalty, hard-boiled dialogue, and cinematographic style up the yazoo. Going by the location shooting, it should at least have managed the kind of exotic action-adventure of which World for Ransom (1954) is the really cheap example. The establishing shots introduce Macao as "the crossroads of the Far East . . . the Monte Carlo of the Orient" as the newsreel declamation of the narrator would have it; we cut from documentary footage of junks, sampans, and the skyline of mid-century Macao to the neon-gilded streets of an RKO backlot and presently to a nighttime chase through a maze of waterways, fishing nets hanging across the action like the layering of stage sets. Our protagonists are each supplied with an appropriately doubtful backstory as they come through Portuguese customs: Mitchum is Nick Cochran, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Signal Corps whose talents these days run more toward running guns, fencing jewelry, and skirting the margins of international waters; Russell is Julie Benson, a singer who just spent three weeks in Hong Kong and the same in Saigon and most of whose declared money is Mexican, as she doesn't declare the American bills she lifted off Cochran on the boat from Hong Kong; and William Bendix is Lawrence C. Trumble, a very friendly traveling salesman whose list of wares changes every time someone asks. By entering Macao, all three come within the purview of Brad Dexter's Vincent Halloran, high-rolling casino owner and diamond-smuggling kingpin, who has reason to suspect that one of the new arrivals is a policeman sent incognito from New York City to take him back to the States; I'm afraid that as a heavy, he's on the bland side, but fortunately he's accompanied by Gloria Grahame as an epically unimpressed moll with the fanciest gloves this side of the Suez ("The lady of the loaded dice," Nick hails her the morning after she rolled him two triple sixes in a row and then took him to the cleaners, and in return she greets him with the title of this post) and Philip Ahn as a knife-throwing second-in-command who effortlessly out-charismas his ostensible boss. Thomas Gomez facilitates and deflates as Lieutenant Sebastian—Felizardo José Espirito Sebastian when he's got his "gold braid" on—a man who just wants to throw his weight around and finds to his continual disappointment that he never has to.
And almost nothing about the plot that proceeds from these characters and their intersecting motivations is worth describing further, because McDonald is quite right that what matters about this movie is the fine mutual chemistry of Russell and Mitchum, which appears to be based on neither of them caring what their movie is actually supposed to be doing. If Macao were the film noir its plot synopsis looks like, Julie would be defensively tough ("Why don't you take that chip off your shoulder?"–"Every time I do, someone hits me over the head with it") and Nick would be world-weary ("I've been lonely in Times Square on New Year's Eve") and they would lay down their cynicism for one another out of recognition as fellow drifters with unexpectedly dovetailing dreams ("You mean you'd go for a life like that?"–"Like a shot"). Whatever emotion it is that these characters actually feel, however, it goes way past world-weariness or toughness or cynicism and into full-bore behold-the-field-in-which-I-grow-my-fucks territory, as if they're making only the most cursory gestures toward the requirements of their genre, and it is very plainly a great part of the attraction, the rest being the physical compatibility which is so self-evident that it's only a matter of when, not if, so they don't sweat it. The plot wheels on around them with its contraband nylons and beaded curtains and marked money and kidnappings and chases and international police and every so often they check in with it and then return to flirting their way toward a foregone conclusion, projecting an utterly convincing sense of being too cool for school, but comfortably. I may not be able to convey how delightful an effect this is. The film had a famously troubled production history—Josef von Sternberg is the credited director, but Robert Stevenson, Nicholas Ray, and Mel Ferrer all had a hand in the reshoots after von Sternberg was either fired or walked. There are three screenwriters credited on IMDb and five more listed as uncredited and none of them is Mitchum himself, who is supposed to have supplied last-minute material when everyone else hit a wall during rewrites. I should explain that the film was being produced by Howard Hughes, after which you will also understand why it is that Jane Russell's breasts are basically never out of shot. It should have been a trainwreck.
Instead, while I have no difficulty believing that the divers hands, the dragging production, and personal conflicts like the initial friction between von Sternberg and his stars account for much of the aimless feel of the movie, it's somehow just fun. The sets are nice and the costumes are impressive and the location shots are worth all the bribes the second unit director had to shell out to everyone from customs officers to harbor fishermen. There's no tension to speak of, but who cares? Mitchum gets a rooftop chase scene so incompetent, a cat side-eyes him after he falls off an awning, and Russell does a good "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)." Her belligerent jaw goes well with his heavy eyes. Outside of their film-stock-melting rapport, Macao's high points are individual moments like the priceless scene in which the ineffably American Trumble loudly requests "Me wannee shavee, chop-chop" from the Japanese woman in the barber shop and spit-takes his cigar when she lathers him up and breezily replies, "So who do you like this year, the Giants or the Dodgers?" I am also fond of the argument between Julie and Nick which ends when she menaces him with an electric fan, he blocks with a pillow, and the feathers fly like a shout-out to Harry Langdon. Now and then a serious line goes by and it's good. Showing how she used to work as a fortune-teller—before she was a singer and after she was a cigarette girl—Julie takes Nick's hand: "I see that you've been very lonely and that you're worried about money and there's something in your past that you regret very much and you've been looking for something for a long, long time."–"Guilty," he responds, and Julie smiles. "Not just you," she tells him gently. "Everybody. Everybody's lonely and worried and sorry. Everybody's looking for something." I won't argue that the movie's plausibility as a noir or even an adventure would have improved with a better-played antagonist—I didn't recognize Brad Dexter from The Magnificent Seven (1960) because he seemed to have left all his personality south of the Rio Grande—or if the script had done more with Grahame and Ahn, who really look like they could be running Halloran's operation more lucratively in their sleep. But mostly it feels like hanging out with some very attractive people in a snappily spoken setting with nice black-and-white photography and if they're happy by the last line, you know what? So are we. It's a charmer of a last line, too. This endorsement brought to you by my laid-back backers at Patreon.
On Friday, the Brattle was showing Macao (1952).
rushthatspeaks and I had originally gotten this movie out of the library in January because Boyd McDonald had rated it very highly in Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985); he calls the romantic relationship between Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum "a rare and touching display of authentic heterosexual passion" and describes Russell in especially irresistible terms:It is clear in Macao that Russell and Mitchum want a piece of one another's ass, if I have that imprecise heterosexual locution right, and their first meeting, in which Mitchum, the minute he lays eyes on Russell, grabs her without so much as a hello and kisses her, is thus unnecessarily, excessively heterosexual. But the meeting, absurd though it is, escapes burlesque; Russell and Mitchum are both so comprehensively and consistently outrageous that such an introduction seems not only possible but probable . . . Anyone who treasures cool virility cannot fail to be favorably impressed by Russell; her easy masculine style is more admirable than the showy machismo of men, for, unlike them, she does not prey upon the vulnerable but merely counterattacks when men prey upon her. She stole Mitchum's wallet, after all, while he was trying to steal something that is also worth money, especially in the "straight" world: a kiss. In that world, a kiss can sometimes lead—and does so lead in Macao—to half a man's income for life.
When we saw it announced as part of the '50's noir series, we figured it would be even better in 35 mm. It was. The approving reactions of
gaudior and skygiants vindicated our belief. But it wasn't any more noir.The plot sounds like one if you describe it: it has fugitive criminals, undercover detectives, stolen diamonds, knives in the dark, loaded dice, torch singing, men with shady pasts, women of ambiguous loyalty, hard-boiled dialogue, and cinematographic style up the yazoo. Going by the location shooting, it should at least have managed the kind of exotic action-adventure of which World for Ransom (1954) is the really cheap example. The establishing shots introduce Macao as "the crossroads of the Far East . . . the Monte Carlo of the Orient" as the newsreel declamation of the narrator would have it; we cut from documentary footage of junks, sampans, and the skyline of mid-century Macao to the neon-gilded streets of an RKO backlot and presently to a nighttime chase through a maze of waterways, fishing nets hanging across the action like the layering of stage sets. Our protagonists are each supplied with an appropriately doubtful backstory as they come through Portuguese customs: Mitchum is Nick Cochran, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Signal Corps whose talents these days run more toward running guns, fencing jewelry, and skirting the margins of international waters; Russell is Julie Benson, a singer who just spent three weeks in Hong Kong and the same in Saigon and most of whose declared money is Mexican, as she doesn't declare the American bills she lifted off Cochran on the boat from Hong Kong; and William Bendix is Lawrence C. Trumble, a very friendly traveling salesman whose list of wares changes every time someone asks. By entering Macao, all three come within the purview of Brad Dexter's Vincent Halloran, high-rolling casino owner and diamond-smuggling kingpin, who has reason to suspect that one of the new arrivals is a policeman sent incognito from New York City to take him back to the States; I'm afraid that as a heavy, he's on the bland side, but fortunately he's accompanied by Gloria Grahame as an epically unimpressed moll with the fanciest gloves this side of the Suez ("The lady of the loaded dice," Nick hails her the morning after she rolled him two triple sixes in a row and then took him to the cleaners, and in return she greets him with the title of this post) and Philip Ahn as a knife-throwing second-in-command who effortlessly out-charismas his ostensible boss. Thomas Gomez facilitates and deflates as Lieutenant Sebastian—Felizardo José Espirito Sebastian when he's got his "gold braid" on—a man who just wants to throw his weight around and finds to his continual disappointment that he never has to.
And almost nothing about the plot that proceeds from these characters and their intersecting motivations is worth describing further, because McDonald is quite right that what matters about this movie is the fine mutual chemistry of Russell and Mitchum, which appears to be based on neither of them caring what their movie is actually supposed to be doing. If Macao were the film noir its plot synopsis looks like, Julie would be defensively tough ("Why don't you take that chip off your shoulder?"–"Every time I do, someone hits me over the head with it") and Nick would be world-weary ("I've been lonely in Times Square on New Year's Eve") and they would lay down their cynicism for one another out of recognition as fellow drifters with unexpectedly dovetailing dreams ("You mean you'd go for a life like that?"–"Like a shot"). Whatever emotion it is that these characters actually feel, however, it goes way past world-weariness or toughness or cynicism and into full-bore behold-the-field-in-which-I-grow-my-fucks territory, as if they're making only the most cursory gestures toward the requirements of their genre, and it is very plainly a great part of the attraction, the rest being the physical compatibility which is so self-evident that it's only a matter of when, not if, so they don't sweat it. The plot wheels on around them with its contraband nylons and beaded curtains and marked money and kidnappings and chases and international police and every so often they check in with it and then return to flirting their way toward a foregone conclusion, projecting an utterly convincing sense of being too cool for school, but comfortably. I may not be able to convey how delightful an effect this is. The film had a famously troubled production history—Josef von Sternberg is the credited director, but Robert Stevenson, Nicholas Ray, and Mel Ferrer all had a hand in the reshoots after von Sternberg was either fired or walked. There are three screenwriters credited on IMDb and five more listed as uncredited and none of them is Mitchum himself, who is supposed to have supplied last-minute material when everyone else hit a wall during rewrites. I should explain that the film was being produced by Howard Hughes, after which you will also understand why it is that Jane Russell's breasts are basically never out of shot. It should have been a trainwreck.
Instead, while I have no difficulty believing that the divers hands, the dragging production, and personal conflicts like the initial friction between von Sternberg and his stars account for much of the aimless feel of the movie, it's somehow just fun. The sets are nice and the costumes are impressive and the location shots are worth all the bribes the second unit director had to shell out to everyone from customs officers to harbor fishermen. There's no tension to speak of, but who cares? Mitchum gets a rooftop chase scene so incompetent, a cat side-eyes him after he falls off an awning, and Russell does a good "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)." Her belligerent jaw goes well with his heavy eyes. Outside of their film-stock-melting rapport, Macao's high points are individual moments like the priceless scene in which the ineffably American Trumble loudly requests "Me wannee shavee, chop-chop" from the Japanese woman in the barber shop and spit-takes his cigar when she lathers him up and breezily replies, "So who do you like this year, the Giants or the Dodgers?" I am also fond of the argument between Julie and Nick which ends when she menaces him with an electric fan, he blocks with a pillow, and the feathers fly like a shout-out to Harry Langdon. Now and then a serious line goes by and it's good. Showing how she used to work as a fortune-teller—before she was a singer and after she was a cigarette girl—Julie takes Nick's hand: "I see that you've been very lonely and that you're worried about money and there's something in your past that you regret very much and you've been looking for something for a long, long time."–"Guilty," he responds, and Julie smiles. "Not just you," she tells him gently. "Everybody. Everybody's lonely and worried and sorry. Everybody's looking for something." I won't argue that the movie's plausibility as a noir or even an adventure would have improved with a better-played antagonist—I didn't recognize Brad Dexter from The Magnificent Seven (1960) because he seemed to have left all his personality south of the Rio Grande—or if the script had done more with Grahame and Ahn, who really look like they could be running Halloran's operation more lucratively in their sleep. But mostly it feels like hanging out with some very attractive people in a snappily spoken setting with nice black-and-white photography and if they're happy by the last line, you know what? So are we. It's a charmer of a last line, too. This endorsement brought to you by my laid-back backers at Patreon.
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I highly recommend it if it comes around again! I'm just sorry we didn't get the originally planned double feature with His Kind of Woman (1951), a title I am incapable of hearing except in the voice of Animal from the Muppets.
So is this review, incidentally.
Thank you!
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Corrected. Thank you.
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But then, so should Casablanca.
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Every so often, too many cooks somehow manage to cancel out, and produce a great soup despite themselves.
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Kestrell reflexively (and almost always accurately) predicts, "The gimp did it." (Which astonished people watching The Usual Suspects!) So I have to make note of the fact that, not only was the character named "Gimpy" apparently harmless, the sinister old bling beggar turned out to be both actually blind, and sincerely helpful. I am mad at Julie for not having given him anything after he led her to Nick.
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Yes! He's a perfectly ordinary accompanist (played by an interesting pianist). "Are they always this enthusiastic?"–"Always."
the sinister old blind beggar turned out to be both actually blind, and sincerely helpful.
We were also very happy about him.
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Macao would love to be classed with Casablanca—I'm not quite willing to grant it that status, but I almost name-checked the earlier film anyway because it's so obviously Macao's model, minus the politics, of course, which does make a difference. Nonetheless, it is so much better than it has any right to be.
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I didn't know he was in that. Good for him for not dying! (Aargh for being the only actual Asian.)