Entry tags:
This rotten line of work—the rotten class of people you have to put up with—
It's the last week of July and I haven't said anything substantial about a movie all month. Let's start with some noir.
The Brattle screened Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949) last week as part of their repertory series of femmes fatales. I had a great time seeing it with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants, but so far it's done nothing to disrupt my sense that the centrality of this archetype to first-generation film noir—the deceiving woman, the deadly woman, the woman who is the downfall of men—is overrated, because Burt Lancaster's Steve Thompson needs no encouragement from Yvonne De Carlo's Anna to drop his life down the drain. In point of fact, he makes his first and most fatal decision without any input from her at all: the decision to go looking for her in the first place.
I appreciate that the film warns us outright to take very little of its narrative at face value. It opens with a disembodied point-of-view shot floating high above nighttime Los Angeles, the camera's attention dropping like a falcon onto the theatrical tableau of a man and a woman embracing in a darkened lot, suddenly spotlit like horny teenagers in the high-beams of a parking car. Her name is the first and most important word in the film: "Anna." She answers him in kind: "Steve. I had to see you." Their dialogue is passionate and elliptical and what we can understand of it serves as a preview of the film's eponymous theme: they are affirming not only their loyalty to one another but their mutual resolve to betray another man. When they part, the camera follows Steve indoors, through the noisy bar and the crowded floor of the nightclub to which the parking lot belongs, into a violent confrontation in a private room which I can best describe as a fake that isn't. After all parties involved have unilaterally stonewalled the police, their conversation reveals that the staged fight, "a phony, strictly for the cop's benefit," flared briefly into the real thing when one of the participants pulled a knife—a small betrayal, but a further sign of things to come. By the time the routine of the next day's work dissolves into a flashback of Steve stepping off a trolley with his coat over his arm and his suitcase in his hand, we should be primed to question anything he tells us. He doesn't have to be lying to us. Lying to himself will do just as well.
In fine noir tradition, he is nonetheless our sole narrator, a drifter newly returned to Los Angeles after an aimless year odd-jobbing around the country in the wake of a disastrous seven-month marriage. His family and his friends know him better than he admits to knowing himself: they are all in agreement that he should not try to see his ex-wife again and to all of them he protests that the thought never even crossed his mind. His parents are getting older, his kid brother is getting married; it was time for him to come home and take care of things. "I'm not looking for Anna." Never mind that his first act back in town was to seek out their old hangout, the Round-Up—the nightclub of the opening scenes—and quiz the new bartender and the daytime barflies about the "old crowd" with such unconvincing casualness that they took him for a "checker," an undercover investigator for the state liquor board. He fidgets with a handful of nickels, darting edgy glances at the occupied phone booth. His old friend Detective Lieutenant Pete Ramirez (Stephen McNally1) gently insists on driving him home and making sure he gets through the door, as though Steve's addiction to Anna were as physically disabling as drunkenness or a drug habit. When our hero winds up the night loitering at the edge of the dance floor where Anna shakes her hair and rolls her hips to the wild flute and percussion of Esy Morales and His Rhumba Band in the second great jazz scene I've seen filmed by Robert Siodmak,2 his voiceover is eager to impress on the audience the fatalism of a bad hand in a rigged game, an inescapable tragic destiny: "From the start, it all went one way. It was in the cards, or it was fate, or a jinx, or whatever you want to call it. But right from the start." It's a great line, but it's arrant horse puckey. He could have gone to the movies with the brother he hasn't seen in a year and the fiancée he's hardly met; he could have gone bowling with his father. He could have stayed at home and quietly read the news with his mother. Instead he goes straight for Anna and it turns out that his family and his friends were right. Not because she's a heartless schemer, not because he has better prospects, not because they don't still have a sexual current between them that snaps on humming like a power grid at nothing more than the catch and cling of gazes across a crowd. They should not be together because their relationship is toxic. They can't keep from sniping at one another, falling back into their old fights. Steve criticizes her clothes and her spending habits, possessively disparages her willingness to accept the attentions of sharp-dressed local crook Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea)—the man who pulled a knife in the opening scenes. Anna responds with defensive viciousness, mocking the idea of a man expecting fidelity from his divorced wife: "What did you expect me to do, sit at home and mope?" He mimicks her voice like a spiteful schoolboy. She needles him that he can be "a nice guy—when you want to." They catch themselves, apologize, start to separate, wind up making another date. Rinse, repeat. It staggers Steve like a thunderbolt, but the audience is not wholly surprised to find out a few months later that she's run off to Yuma to marry Slim. He's a bad choice—a bad man, a bad husband—but he always wanted her and he never called her a "cheap little no-good tramp" like Steve who alternately obsessed over her and left her dangling while his family wrote her off as a bad influence and his old friend Ramirez openly threatened her with jail time if she didn't leave his buddy alone. She tried to change her life for something better. She got something worse. Now Steve is horrified; now he wants to make it up to her. He's back at his old job, working for a respected security outfit as a driver of armored cars; he contacts Slim ("Why come to us?"–"'Cause you're the only crooks I know") and lays out his plan for Slim's gang to hijack the car in return for a two-way split with Steve.3 Conventional wisdom claims that the successful holdup of an armored car "can't be done," but Steve insists that "it can . . . if you have an inside man."
And of course this plan goes due south by way of pear-shaped, but it essential that none of it is Anna's idea. She betrays him in the end, but the heist itself has been such a welter of double-crosses all along—including on the part of Steve, who proposed it only in order to take his cut and run off with Anna, another man's wife—the wife of a man who beats her, whose big spending doesn't make up for his heartless jealousy—that the audience would be surprised only if she stayed true to him. The script takes unusual care to distinguish that she wasn't playing him from the start; she was just as hooked on their bad romance as her ex-husband until she wasn't and then she hoped he could get her away safe from Slim. Their love scenes were so seamlessly convincing because they were real. It's just that when the chips are down, she'll look out for herself before anyone else, and it bewilders her that Steve doesn't seem to feel the same. "People get hurt—I can't help it! I can't help it if people don't know how to take care of themselves!" But even that assessment, delivered half in frustration and half in pity as she prepares to run out on her wounded lover, is closer to Steve's version of himself than the truth. I have seen shockingly little of Burt Lancaster outside of classics like Sweet Smell of Success (1957) or curiosities like The Crimson Pirate (1952)—and like many people of my generation, I believe I met him first as Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams (1989)—but as Steve Thompson he does an impressive, anti-sympathetic job as a man who can neither admit what he wants nor own up to the actions he'll take to get it. He looks like a regular guy, a high school football hero perhaps with his rugged shoulders and his feathery hair and his slow grin; he's well-liked by his coworkers, well-loved by his family, and not undeserving of it. He's not a sociopath in disguise. He's just astoundingly passive-aggressive. The vagueness, the amiable passivity that looks at first like shyness or the aftershock of a bad marriage runs all the way to the core of him; he is fatally incapable of analyzing his own motives or even the potential consequences of his desires, perhaps because to do so might confront him with some aspects of himself he might not like very much. "A man eats an apple," he philosophizes in flashback, "he gets a piece of the core stuck between his teeth. He tries to work it out with some cellophane off a cigarette pack. What happens? The cellophane gets stuck in there, too. Anna. What was the use?" But he wasn't drifting helplessly on tides too strong to fight, overwhelmed by the siren song of fate in the form of a woman: he tracked her down, insisted on rekindling their relationship, made himself responsible for her happiness when all signs pointed to impossible. Anna at least owns her choices, even when she recognizes them as selfishly motivated or mistakes. In the last moments of his life, all Steve can find to say for himself, as though it had nothing to with him personally, is "What a pity it didn't work out."
Criss Cross screened as a double feature with the earlier Siodmak-Lancaster collaboration The Killers (1946), but its true complement is Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) with Fred MacMurray rationalizing and disclaiming his way "straight down the line" when any audience member with half an attention span can see that Barbara Stanwyck provided the excuse, not the inspiration, for murder. Steve is neither as clever nor as smug about his crimes, but he's about as self-aware. He's cheating himself from the start and he doesn't even know it. I can't say that Criss Cross is my favorite film by Robert Siodmak, though it has much to recommend it besides the characters I've sketched above. The dialogue by Daniel Fuchs is some of the most stylized I've heard in the genre, full of double-talk and rhetorical questions; the cinematography by Franz Planer can turn on a dime between expressionist interiors and unsentimental location shots of Los Angeles, including the now-familiar lost terraces and tenements of Bunker Hill. The smaller supporting parts like the long-suffering staff of the Round-Up are fantastic. I still probably prefer Phantom Lady (1944) despite its third-act collapse just because there's nothing in Criss Cross to equal Ella Raines and Elisha Cook, Jr., not even Dan Duryea.4 But it makes me wonder if, as with the housewife noirs I am now actively cataloguing, I can find a genre-making third example of a film noir where a man is not just an unreliable but an irresponsible narrator. Either way, I am in agreement with Skygiants that it's hard to count the female lead as a femme fatale when the male lead's independently terrible life decisions are what's driving the plot. This distinction brought to you by my backers with better impulse control at Patreon.
1. I like McNally—he's very good in the atomic-age noir Split Second (1953)—but Latino he is not. Don't tell me Ricardo Montalbán wasn't free that week.
2. Her dance partner is Tony Curtis in his screen debut, a baby-faced beauty with a side-combed crest of soft black hair, so young he doesn't even get a credit. He looks into Anna's face so intently as they dance, you expect him to be important, but he disappears back into the crowd as soon as she's done. He has no lines. He has those very dark eyebrows, that smiling full mouth. I looked for him in crowd scenes at the Round-Up thereafter, even when he kept not appearing, which I guess is what you call star quality.
3. The planning itself is a wonderful pulp interlude starring Alan Napier as Finchley, a slender, shabby, educated recluse who lives in a boarding house so dilapidated it approaches an illustration by Phiz and works as a sort of beta-reader for heists and robberies. He's an underworld legend, almost literally: "Gee whiz, I thought he was dead!" He plays chess with himself in his book-piled threadbare bedroom and his expertise can be bought for a month's credit at the local liquor store, with a down payment preferred in the form of a bottle on the table as he thinks out loud. His advice is precise, cautious, and unfailingly correct. Nothing that goes wrong with the heist is Finchley's fault. Then again, they didn't ask him for his opinions on the people involved.
4. I recognize that I have said almost nothing about Duryea when usually he's the only thing in a picture I can talk about. For much of Criss Cross' runtime, Slim is more of a plot motivation than a character, distinguished primarily by the flashiness of his attire—his boldly cut all-black ensemble with white suspenders and wide white 1940's tie has to be seen to be appreciated if not believed—and Duryea's ability to suggest a kind of vulpine amusement with his thin-toned dialogue; he only gets interesting in the second half. His best scene has him stepping out of the pure theatrical blackness of a door open to the night, a wounded avenging angel in plain shirtsleeves and an expression poised curiously between exhausted pain and grim humor. It is the only time he's vulnerable, physically, emotionally; he knows he's lost. He has one thing left to do. He blinks involuntarily at the first two shots, as if the report or the recoil or the effect of bullets fired at close range startles or hurts him; by the third shot he only tightens his mouth in a flickering wince. Even before he hears the sirens rising, his face is already troubled, strangely open now that there's no longer anyone to watch him. He steps painfully out into the darkness to an unknown but almost certainly unpleasant fate. The film leaves Anna and Steve where it found them, in each other's arms.
The Brattle screened Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949) last week as part of their repertory series of femmes fatales. I had a great time seeing it with
skygiants, but so far it's done nothing to disrupt my sense that the centrality of this archetype to first-generation film noir—the deceiving woman, the deadly woman, the woman who is the downfall of men—is overrated, because Burt Lancaster's Steve Thompson needs no encouragement from Yvonne De Carlo's Anna to drop his life down the drain. In point of fact, he makes his first and most fatal decision without any input from her at all: the decision to go looking for her in the first place.I appreciate that the film warns us outright to take very little of its narrative at face value. It opens with a disembodied point-of-view shot floating high above nighttime Los Angeles, the camera's attention dropping like a falcon onto the theatrical tableau of a man and a woman embracing in a darkened lot, suddenly spotlit like horny teenagers in the high-beams of a parking car. Her name is the first and most important word in the film: "Anna." She answers him in kind: "Steve. I had to see you." Their dialogue is passionate and elliptical and what we can understand of it serves as a preview of the film's eponymous theme: they are affirming not only their loyalty to one another but their mutual resolve to betray another man. When they part, the camera follows Steve indoors, through the noisy bar and the crowded floor of the nightclub to which the parking lot belongs, into a violent confrontation in a private room which I can best describe as a fake that isn't. After all parties involved have unilaterally stonewalled the police, their conversation reveals that the staged fight, "a phony, strictly for the cop's benefit," flared briefly into the real thing when one of the participants pulled a knife—a small betrayal, but a further sign of things to come. By the time the routine of the next day's work dissolves into a flashback of Steve stepping off a trolley with his coat over his arm and his suitcase in his hand, we should be primed to question anything he tells us. He doesn't have to be lying to us. Lying to himself will do just as well.
In fine noir tradition, he is nonetheless our sole narrator, a drifter newly returned to Los Angeles after an aimless year odd-jobbing around the country in the wake of a disastrous seven-month marriage. His family and his friends know him better than he admits to knowing himself: they are all in agreement that he should not try to see his ex-wife again and to all of them he protests that the thought never even crossed his mind. His parents are getting older, his kid brother is getting married; it was time for him to come home and take care of things. "I'm not looking for Anna." Never mind that his first act back in town was to seek out their old hangout, the Round-Up—the nightclub of the opening scenes—and quiz the new bartender and the daytime barflies about the "old crowd" with such unconvincing casualness that they took him for a "checker," an undercover investigator for the state liquor board. He fidgets with a handful of nickels, darting edgy glances at the occupied phone booth. His old friend Detective Lieutenant Pete Ramirez (Stephen McNally1) gently insists on driving him home and making sure he gets through the door, as though Steve's addiction to Anna were as physically disabling as drunkenness or a drug habit. When our hero winds up the night loitering at the edge of the dance floor where Anna shakes her hair and rolls her hips to the wild flute and percussion of Esy Morales and His Rhumba Band in the second great jazz scene I've seen filmed by Robert Siodmak,2 his voiceover is eager to impress on the audience the fatalism of a bad hand in a rigged game, an inescapable tragic destiny: "From the start, it all went one way. It was in the cards, or it was fate, or a jinx, or whatever you want to call it. But right from the start." It's a great line, but it's arrant horse puckey. He could have gone to the movies with the brother he hasn't seen in a year and the fiancée he's hardly met; he could have gone bowling with his father. He could have stayed at home and quietly read the news with his mother. Instead he goes straight for Anna and it turns out that his family and his friends were right. Not because she's a heartless schemer, not because he has better prospects, not because they don't still have a sexual current between them that snaps on humming like a power grid at nothing more than the catch and cling of gazes across a crowd. They should not be together because their relationship is toxic. They can't keep from sniping at one another, falling back into their old fights. Steve criticizes her clothes and her spending habits, possessively disparages her willingness to accept the attentions of sharp-dressed local crook Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea)—the man who pulled a knife in the opening scenes. Anna responds with defensive viciousness, mocking the idea of a man expecting fidelity from his divorced wife: "What did you expect me to do, sit at home and mope?" He mimicks her voice like a spiteful schoolboy. She needles him that he can be "a nice guy—when you want to." They catch themselves, apologize, start to separate, wind up making another date. Rinse, repeat. It staggers Steve like a thunderbolt, but the audience is not wholly surprised to find out a few months later that she's run off to Yuma to marry Slim. He's a bad choice—a bad man, a bad husband—but he always wanted her and he never called her a "cheap little no-good tramp" like Steve who alternately obsessed over her and left her dangling while his family wrote her off as a bad influence and his old friend Ramirez openly threatened her with jail time if she didn't leave his buddy alone. She tried to change her life for something better. She got something worse. Now Steve is horrified; now he wants to make it up to her. He's back at his old job, working for a respected security outfit as a driver of armored cars; he contacts Slim ("Why come to us?"–"'Cause you're the only crooks I know") and lays out his plan for Slim's gang to hijack the car in return for a two-way split with Steve.3 Conventional wisdom claims that the successful holdup of an armored car "can't be done," but Steve insists that "it can . . . if you have an inside man."
And of course this plan goes due south by way of pear-shaped, but it essential that none of it is Anna's idea. She betrays him in the end, but the heist itself has been such a welter of double-crosses all along—including on the part of Steve, who proposed it only in order to take his cut and run off with Anna, another man's wife—the wife of a man who beats her, whose big spending doesn't make up for his heartless jealousy—that the audience would be surprised only if she stayed true to him. The script takes unusual care to distinguish that she wasn't playing him from the start; she was just as hooked on their bad romance as her ex-husband until she wasn't and then she hoped he could get her away safe from Slim. Their love scenes were so seamlessly convincing because they were real. It's just that when the chips are down, she'll look out for herself before anyone else, and it bewilders her that Steve doesn't seem to feel the same. "People get hurt—I can't help it! I can't help it if people don't know how to take care of themselves!" But even that assessment, delivered half in frustration and half in pity as she prepares to run out on her wounded lover, is closer to Steve's version of himself than the truth. I have seen shockingly little of Burt Lancaster outside of classics like Sweet Smell of Success (1957) or curiosities like The Crimson Pirate (1952)—and like many people of my generation, I believe I met him first as Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams (1989)—but as Steve Thompson he does an impressive, anti-sympathetic job as a man who can neither admit what he wants nor own up to the actions he'll take to get it. He looks like a regular guy, a high school football hero perhaps with his rugged shoulders and his feathery hair and his slow grin; he's well-liked by his coworkers, well-loved by his family, and not undeserving of it. He's not a sociopath in disguise. He's just astoundingly passive-aggressive. The vagueness, the amiable passivity that looks at first like shyness or the aftershock of a bad marriage runs all the way to the core of him; he is fatally incapable of analyzing his own motives or even the potential consequences of his desires, perhaps because to do so might confront him with some aspects of himself he might not like very much. "A man eats an apple," he philosophizes in flashback, "he gets a piece of the core stuck between his teeth. He tries to work it out with some cellophane off a cigarette pack. What happens? The cellophane gets stuck in there, too. Anna. What was the use?" But he wasn't drifting helplessly on tides too strong to fight, overwhelmed by the siren song of fate in the form of a woman: he tracked her down, insisted on rekindling their relationship, made himself responsible for her happiness when all signs pointed to impossible. Anna at least owns her choices, even when she recognizes them as selfishly motivated or mistakes. In the last moments of his life, all Steve can find to say for himself, as though it had nothing to with him personally, is "What a pity it didn't work out."
Criss Cross screened as a double feature with the earlier Siodmak-Lancaster collaboration The Killers (1946), but its true complement is Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) with Fred MacMurray rationalizing and disclaiming his way "straight down the line" when any audience member with half an attention span can see that Barbara Stanwyck provided the excuse, not the inspiration, for murder. Steve is neither as clever nor as smug about his crimes, but he's about as self-aware. He's cheating himself from the start and he doesn't even know it. I can't say that Criss Cross is my favorite film by Robert Siodmak, though it has much to recommend it besides the characters I've sketched above. The dialogue by Daniel Fuchs is some of the most stylized I've heard in the genre, full of double-talk and rhetorical questions; the cinematography by Franz Planer can turn on a dime between expressionist interiors and unsentimental location shots of Los Angeles, including the now-familiar lost terraces and tenements of Bunker Hill. The smaller supporting parts like the long-suffering staff of the Round-Up are fantastic. I still probably prefer Phantom Lady (1944) despite its third-act collapse just because there's nothing in Criss Cross to equal Ella Raines and Elisha Cook, Jr., not even Dan Duryea.4 But it makes me wonder if, as with the housewife noirs I am now actively cataloguing, I can find a genre-making third example of a film noir where a man is not just an unreliable but an irresponsible narrator. Either way, I am in agreement with Skygiants that it's hard to count the female lead as a femme fatale when the male lead's independently terrible life decisions are what's driving the plot. This distinction brought to you by my backers with better impulse control at Patreon.
1. I like McNally—he's very good in the atomic-age noir Split Second (1953)—but Latino he is not. Don't tell me Ricardo Montalbán wasn't free that week.
2. Her dance partner is Tony Curtis in his screen debut, a baby-faced beauty with a side-combed crest of soft black hair, so young he doesn't even get a credit. He looks into Anna's face so intently as they dance, you expect him to be important, but he disappears back into the crowd as soon as she's done. He has no lines. He has those very dark eyebrows, that smiling full mouth. I looked for him in crowd scenes at the Round-Up thereafter, even when he kept not appearing, which I guess is what you call star quality.
3. The planning itself is a wonderful pulp interlude starring Alan Napier as Finchley, a slender, shabby, educated recluse who lives in a boarding house so dilapidated it approaches an illustration by Phiz and works as a sort of beta-reader for heists and robberies. He's an underworld legend, almost literally: "Gee whiz, I thought he was dead!" He plays chess with himself in his book-piled threadbare bedroom and his expertise can be bought for a month's credit at the local liquor store, with a down payment preferred in the form of a bottle on the table as he thinks out loud. His advice is precise, cautious, and unfailingly correct. Nothing that goes wrong with the heist is Finchley's fault. Then again, they didn't ask him for his opinions on the people involved.
4. I recognize that I have said almost nothing about Duryea when usually he's the only thing in a picture I can talk about. For much of Criss Cross' runtime, Slim is more of a plot motivation than a character, distinguished primarily by the flashiness of his attire—his boldly cut all-black ensemble with white suspenders and wide white 1940's tie has to be seen to be appreciated if not believed—and Duryea's ability to suggest a kind of vulpine amusement with his thin-toned dialogue; he only gets interesting in the second half. His best scene has him stepping out of the pure theatrical blackness of a door open to the night, a wounded avenging angel in plain shirtsleeves and an expression poised curiously between exhausted pain and grim humor. It is the only time he's vulnerable, physically, emotionally; he knows he's lost. He has one thing left to do. He blinks involuntarily at the first two shots, as if the report or the recoil or the effect of bullets fired at close range startles or hurts him; by the third shot he only tightens his mouth in a flickering wince. Even before he hears the sirens rising, his face is already troubled, strangely open now that there's no longer anyone to watch him. He steps painfully out into the darkness to an unknown but almost certainly unpleasant fate. The film leaves Anna and Steve where it found them, in each other's arms.
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No, I think you're right on both counts—I find the movies themselves much less reductive on the subject than the later criticism or even some of the characters, which makes it especially frustrating that the idea has become a kind of automatic yardstick on women in noir, the default which characters must either conform to or depart from. This is sort of what the next post ended up being about.
I do recommend Criss Cross. I don't seem to have an emotional attachment to anyone in it, but I really enjoyed its deep untrustworthiness.
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I have been hearing about Elmer Gantry for years, so I might as well make an effort to find and watch it. I think my father really likes it, too.
Yvonne de Carlo I don't know much about, but that dance scene is gold.
Siodmak was so good with music. He directed some musicals in France in the 1930's, but almost all of his American work is horror, crime, or noir. I think he may be the reason popular culture associates jazz with film noir, even though I've actually heard relatively little of it in the genre so far.
I believe Yvone De Carlo is most famous for The Ten Commandments (1956) and The Munsters (1964–65); I had previously encountered her only on the original cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Follies (1971), where she originated the anthemic survivor-blues "I'm Still Here." She's very good as Anna partly because she's a regular girl in the same way that Steve is a regular guy—when they meet in a drugstore, she's wearing slacks and an open-collared shirt and she's got her hair piled up on top of her head in a way that suggests less that she likes the style and more that she doesn't want to think about it for the rest of the day; he's wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and they look like an ordinary pair of aimless young adults, which is what they are. She's not some kind of spellbinding glamour girl. She doesn't need to be in order for Steve to be obsessed with her. The weirdest problem with their relationship is that I think they genuinely like each other, or they like each other when they're at their best. They just don't stay at their best when they're around each other for very long.
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he is fatally incapable of analyzing his own motives or even the potential consequences of his desires, perhaps because to do so might confront him with some aspects of himself he might not like very much. --I have seen this exact trait in more than one person, and it's surprising the ellipses and workarounds that people are capable of to avoid self-revelations.
Sounds like a good film!
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He may even believe it himself! He's just wrong. We thought afterward that the entire film could have simply been subtitled "OH STEVE NO."
Sounds like a good film!
It was! I don't think I fell in love with it the way I have with some other noirs like The Reckless Moment (1949) or Black Angel (1946) or Act of Violence (1948), but it's really neatly put together and I like a lot of what it's looking at. It doesn't trigger its twists and double-crosses sequentially so much as they all sort of detonate at the same time, with about the same effect on the audience as on the characters. I end up wanting to describe it as a beautifully timed mess.
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Like most formal definitions, it’s imperfect. It applies well to the private detective subset, but less so to many films that are considered noir by most people. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Criss Cross, but your review doesn’t suggest that anyone in it cares a fig for justice. Perhaps a better formulation might be about how *everything* promised by The System is illusory, and can vanish in the twinkling of an eye.
All by way of saying that I completely agree that the femme fatale is not, and never has been, a core feature of the genre.
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Okay, I spent some substantial time writing you a reply and then I couldn't fit into comments thanks to LJ-character limits, so I stuck it in a post of its own. Thank you for providing the impetus.
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PS. Have you considered publishing your movie reviews as a book? They're so well-written and though-provoking, they might attract a wider audience and also some money.
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To be fair, a couple of them have sucked!
(That would be so much fun, though.)
Have you considered publishing your movie reviews as a book? They're so well-written and though-provoking, they might attract a wider audience and also some money.
Thank you! I would love to be able to publish them as a real book. The collected reviews from 2015 are a Patreon reward that I still need to assemble and send out (because my life since September has been in a greater or lesser state of free-fall), but if that wouldn't disqualify them from being incorporated into a larger collection, I think it would be great. I have absolutely no idea who to approach with this kind of material, so if you have suggestions, I would be happy to hear them.
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1. Query nonfiction agents who handle this sort of thing (quirky yet erudite books about movies; collections of movie reviews; film criticism and analysis.) You can find out who they are by looking at acknowledgments in a bunch of those books that have been published recently. Authors usually thank their agents.
2. Query small presses, ditto. (i.e., small enough that they take direct queries from authors.) I bet there are a handful of small presses (possibly including academic) that focus on exactly this topic. I don't know what they are offhand, but it would be really easy to look up.
3. DIY. Self-publish. Pre-Amazon, nonfiction on a very specific subject used to be considered the ONLY genre where it made sense to self-pub. That's no longer true, but I think this would still be a pretty viable self-pub book. You'd probably want to tip off communities, magazines, etc for serious fans of old movies; I bet you could get some reviews and publicity. It's not a community that I know much about, but I know it exists and might really appreciate your writing.
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If I were to sell e-books, I would also want paper. I know it is old-fashioned, but it is still what I read—and remember—best.
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(Which might be stuff you know already; if so, my apologies for rehashing it.)
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The film also contains a witch-mythology which, while clearly based on pre-existing folklore, is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen on the screen. I’d be interested in hearing your take on it.
(The recommendation is tentative because the film contains a moderate amount of objectionable homophobia and misogyny. On the other hand, it’s so ludicrously over the top that we found it easy to not take these objections seriously.)
no subject
That does make me curious about the metaphysics.
(The recommendation is tentative because the film contains a moderate amount of objectionable homophobia and misogyny. On the other hand, it's so ludicrously over the top that we found it easy to not take these objections seriously.)
I appreciate the warning. I think of myself as having a fairly high tolerance for material that might cause some audiences to nope out sooner (I am objectively bad at judging what other people will consider offputting levels of violence and I don't find depressing any number of narratives which even friends of mine do), but there's always Santa Fe Trail (1940).