![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Every time I shut my eyes, a blank face stares at me
I watch a lot of B-movies. It goes with the genre; A-noir is not a contradiction in terms, but most of the movies now classified as film noir were originally produced as B-pictures, the cheaper, shorter, quicker features intended to run as the bottom half of a double bill. Studios could and did churn them out, never imagining that more than half a century later these unimproving mass-market entertainments would have given rise to an entire aesthetic as well as a field of study. Obviously, it improves my life that they did. The plethora just means that for every weird little treasure gifted me by local arthouses or streaming services, I also encounter my fair share of movies that have just about one thing going for them. Sometimes it's an actor, sometimes it's a character, sometimes it's a scene. In Richard Fleischer's Follow Me Quietly (1949), it's a concept so good and so eerie that it almost haunts the movie it belongs to into being better than it is. Almost.
Hastily produced by RKO after its first year of micro-mismanagement by Howard Hughes, Follow Me Quietly is a police procedural so low-budget, its backlot city can't even afford a name. For months now, its streets have been stalked by a serial killer known only as "the Judge." He kills on rainy nights; he leaves cut-up letters decrying the immorality of his victims; his crime scenes are scattered with physical evidence that leads maddeningly nowhere, half-smoked cigarettes and strands of hair and even a dropped glove and hat no use in the days before DNA profiling. They sit like museum pieces in a glass cabinet in the office of Lieutenant Harry Grant (William Lundigan), the lead detective who was put on the case because of his "imagination" but may now be dissolving, like so many profilers after him, into the abyss which he pursues. He sits up all night at his desk, brooding over a pile of crime-scene photos and crank letters until his slender, sarcastic partner (Jeff Corey, pre-blacklist; his entire plot function is kibitzing, but I'm here for it) snaps the shades up on daylight and reminds Grant that just this kind of obsessing landed "one of the best men we ever had in Homicide . . . in the bughouse." An undeterred Grant goes right on talking about the Judge. "If I could only see his face," he all but prays as the camera closes in on his own, sleepless and angry, baring his teeth with frustration. "I'd give a year's pay just to look at his face." Instead he has a dummy constructed to match all known particulars of the Judge—his height, his weight, his hair, his clothes—and presents it to an audience of detectives in the line-up room, himself voicing a kind of ventriloquist's catechism compiled from the Judge's taunting letters as Corey's Sergeant Collins interrogates the dummy onstage. He explains earnestly, "It'll give the men something more to go on than the usual routine bulletin description." It looks more like sympathetic magic than forensic science, especially when the pinstriped, greying figure with its back to the audience suddenly pivots around to reveal an absence of face as blank and uncanny as the no-features of a noppera-bō. To see it clearly as a mannequin as the detectives crowd around to inspect the thing that gave them such a jolt does not make it look any more reasonable. It is empty, anonymous, waiting. It could be anyone, which makes it everyone. It is a fetish. Grant takes to leaving it around his office, propped up in a spare chair with its back to the door as if gazing out the window; he nicknames it "Deadpan" and talks to it when he's alone. One night it begins to rain, hard and drumming in the gutters; he leaves his paperwork and stands in the shadows at the dummy's shoulder, asking it restless questions between drags on his cigarette, the ones he has no answers for this time.
"It's raining, Deadpan. Does that mean anything to you? You figure on going someplace tonight? Where are you now? The pool room, or a saloon? Maybe with a girl, eh? No, not you. You're all frustration. Tell me where you're going. Maybe I'll meet you there. How about a date—a blind date, with me?"
This last is answered snarkily by Collins, who has come to pull his partner away for his nightly sanity break: "Look, if you want to talk to a dummy, why don't you talk to me?" They banter a little, Grant reiterates his conviction that the Judge will strike in that night's rain, Collins retorts unflatteringly that Grant is "getting more like the Judge every day." He's resisted even jokingly treating the dummy as an animate thing, but when Grant exits before him, leaving him alone in the darkened, rain-rattled room with the silent audience of Deadpan, he's unnerved enough to tell it, "You give me the willies!" He bangs the door shut behind him. The office is quiet, and dark, and raining, and Deadpan stands up.
It's an astonishing moment. For just those few seconds it is possible that a bare-bones and otherwise conventional thriller has jumped the tracks into the supernatural—that by obsessing over the effigy of the killer, talking to it, talking for it, making it the vessel for the faceless force that roams his city's streets, Grant has invested it with life. It resonates uneasily with the equivalence already established between Grant and the Judge, with the awareness that the dummy's no-face could belong equally to cop or criminal or even both at once; it suggests that whether the dummy is possessed by the Judge or the imprint of Grant's obsession, there may no longer be any difference between the two. It says nothing as clearly as ghost or poppet or golem. It just moves when it shouldn't and we don't have to see its face because we know, nightmare-like, it doesn't have one. Then the figure that rose from the chair reaches behind a filing cabinet and pulls out what is obviously the real, rag-limbed Deadpan, arranges it in the pose he has vacated, and slips out the door. And we never have any idea what on earth the Judge was doing in Grant's office, impersonating his own dummy, and that's the problem with Follow Me Quietly.
It is not the only problem with Follow Me Quietly. At just under 60 minutes, the film is short even for a second feature, but instead of economizing on its atmosphere, it doubles down on its plot and the tradeoff isn't worth it. Dummy aside, the procedural elements of clues and cranks and witness interviews have all the magnetism of drying paint, and the less said the better about the tickybox romance between Grant and Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick), the tarnished but plucky reporter for a trashy true-crime mag who at one point pursues her story all the way to the efficiency apartment where Grant is taking a shower in a scene I have to imagine was intended to be racy, because I can't see excruciating awkwardness as a desirable goal. I can ignore a lot of surface boilerplate in a movie that has its deep symbols lined up, as is often the case in a genre as oneiric as film noir. I can't ignore when a movie doesn't commit to its dream logic. We are given this one tremendous moment of collapse between categories—in/animate, in/organic, un/known, un/real—stranded in a movie that seems totally unaware of its power, like someone either deleted or never wrote the rest of the pattern of obsession and doubling and merging and anonymity that would have scaffolded this breach of the uncanny into the everyday. It is almost there. Late in the third act, it seems to be surfacing again with our first good look at the Judge, a conservatively dressed, average-built figure whose face is invisible beneath his hat as he slowly crosses the empty, sun-washed street to his staked-out apartment: he looks so exactly like Deadpan that until he tilts his head back to reveal the tired, homely, apprehensive face of a middle-aged man with round-rimmed glasses (Edwin Max), we might almost be persuaded that even the real Judge has no face of his own. And then it's gone for good in the climactic chase through the pipes and catwalks of a gasworks, which is much more vividly shot than anything else in the movie, but Grant is chasing something real now, a living, struggling villain quite separate from the hero, all that bughouse obsessing concretely and sanely paid off, and we know how it has to end.
I really cannot tell if these traces are fossil, embryonic, or inadvertent. The screenplay was written by Lillie Hayward from a story by Francis Rosenwald and Anthony Mann, who had left the material with RKO when he moved on to Eagle-Lion; neither TCM nor the AFI Catalog could tell me much beyond that. It's just so full of gaps. Deadpan all but disappears from the movie following its big scene; it's glimpsed maybe once more in the daylit background of Grant's office, unambiguously a dummy with its gloved hands stiffly upturned in its lap and its blank visible under the pulled-down brim of its hat. Grant never discovers the substitution, nor is there any payoff to the infiltration of police headquarters by a wanted serial killer, not even when the audience might reasonably wonder whether the Judge committed that night's murder out of compulsion or because Grant more or less dared him to. I get that this film was ultimately not interested in the uncanny beyond its ability to deliver a hell of a shock, but then I'm not sure why making real-world sense was also too much to ask. A crazy killer does crazy things, that's all you need to know. The budget did not extend to context this year.
All the same, that one image of serial killer as crystallized obsession as awful object is so strange and so potent that I am not sorry to have seen it, even if I had to see the rest of Follow Me Quietly to get it. Maybe it would have fared better if it had contained Whit Bissell. This model brought to you by my lifelike backers at Patreon.
Hastily produced by RKO after its first year of micro-mismanagement by Howard Hughes, Follow Me Quietly is a police procedural so low-budget, its backlot city can't even afford a name. For months now, its streets have been stalked by a serial killer known only as "the Judge." He kills on rainy nights; he leaves cut-up letters decrying the immorality of his victims; his crime scenes are scattered with physical evidence that leads maddeningly nowhere, half-smoked cigarettes and strands of hair and even a dropped glove and hat no use in the days before DNA profiling. They sit like museum pieces in a glass cabinet in the office of Lieutenant Harry Grant (William Lundigan), the lead detective who was put on the case because of his "imagination" but may now be dissolving, like so many profilers after him, into the abyss which he pursues. He sits up all night at his desk, brooding over a pile of crime-scene photos and crank letters until his slender, sarcastic partner (Jeff Corey, pre-blacklist; his entire plot function is kibitzing, but I'm here for it) snaps the shades up on daylight and reminds Grant that just this kind of obsessing landed "one of the best men we ever had in Homicide . . . in the bughouse." An undeterred Grant goes right on talking about the Judge. "If I could only see his face," he all but prays as the camera closes in on his own, sleepless and angry, baring his teeth with frustration. "I'd give a year's pay just to look at his face." Instead he has a dummy constructed to match all known particulars of the Judge—his height, his weight, his hair, his clothes—and presents it to an audience of detectives in the line-up room, himself voicing a kind of ventriloquist's catechism compiled from the Judge's taunting letters as Corey's Sergeant Collins interrogates the dummy onstage. He explains earnestly, "It'll give the men something more to go on than the usual routine bulletin description." It looks more like sympathetic magic than forensic science, especially when the pinstriped, greying figure with its back to the audience suddenly pivots around to reveal an absence of face as blank and uncanny as the no-features of a noppera-bō. To see it clearly as a mannequin as the detectives crowd around to inspect the thing that gave them such a jolt does not make it look any more reasonable. It is empty, anonymous, waiting. It could be anyone, which makes it everyone. It is a fetish. Grant takes to leaving it around his office, propped up in a spare chair with its back to the door as if gazing out the window; he nicknames it "Deadpan" and talks to it when he's alone. One night it begins to rain, hard and drumming in the gutters; he leaves his paperwork and stands in the shadows at the dummy's shoulder, asking it restless questions between drags on his cigarette, the ones he has no answers for this time.
"It's raining, Deadpan. Does that mean anything to you? You figure on going someplace tonight? Where are you now? The pool room, or a saloon? Maybe with a girl, eh? No, not you. You're all frustration. Tell me where you're going. Maybe I'll meet you there. How about a date—a blind date, with me?"
This last is answered snarkily by Collins, who has come to pull his partner away for his nightly sanity break: "Look, if you want to talk to a dummy, why don't you talk to me?" They banter a little, Grant reiterates his conviction that the Judge will strike in that night's rain, Collins retorts unflatteringly that Grant is "getting more like the Judge every day." He's resisted even jokingly treating the dummy as an animate thing, but when Grant exits before him, leaving him alone in the darkened, rain-rattled room with the silent audience of Deadpan, he's unnerved enough to tell it, "You give me the willies!" He bangs the door shut behind him. The office is quiet, and dark, and raining, and Deadpan stands up.
It's an astonishing moment. For just those few seconds it is possible that a bare-bones and otherwise conventional thriller has jumped the tracks into the supernatural—that by obsessing over the effigy of the killer, talking to it, talking for it, making it the vessel for the faceless force that roams his city's streets, Grant has invested it with life. It resonates uneasily with the equivalence already established between Grant and the Judge, with the awareness that the dummy's no-face could belong equally to cop or criminal or even both at once; it suggests that whether the dummy is possessed by the Judge or the imprint of Grant's obsession, there may no longer be any difference between the two. It says nothing as clearly as ghost or poppet or golem. It just moves when it shouldn't and we don't have to see its face because we know, nightmare-like, it doesn't have one. Then the figure that rose from the chair reaches behind a filing cabinet and pulls out what is obviously the real, rag-limbed Deadpan, arranges it in the pose he has vacated, and slips out the door. And we never have any idea what on earth the Judge was doing in Grant's office, impersonating his own dummy, and that's the problem with Follow Me Quietly.
It is not the only problem with Follow Me Quietly. At just under 60 minutes, the film is short even for a second feature, but instead of economizing on its atmosphere, it doubles down on its plot and the tradeoff isn't worth it. Dummy aside, the procedural elements of clues and cranks and witness interviews have all the magnetism of drying paint, and the less said the better about the tickybox romance between Grant and Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick), the tarnished but plucky reporter for a trashy true-crime mag who at one point pursues her story all the way to the efficiency apartment where Grant is taking a shower in a scene I have to imagine was intended to be racy, because I can't see excruciating awkwardness as a desirable goal. I can ignore a lot of surface boilerplate in a movie that has its deep symbols lined up, as is often the case in a genre as oneiric as film noir. I can't ignore when a movie doesn't commit to its dream logic. We are given this one tremendous moment of collapse between categories—in/animate, in/organic, un/known, un/real—stranded in a movie that seems totally unaware of its power, like someone either deleted or never wrote the rest of the pattern of obsession and doubling and merging and anonymity that would have scaffolded this breach of the uncanny into the everyday. It is almost there. Late in the third act, it seems to be surfacing again with our first good look at the Judge, a conservatively dressed, average-built figure whose face is invisible beneath his hat as he slowly crosses the empty, sun-washed street to his staked-out apartment: he looks so exactly like Deadpan that until he tilts his head back to reveal the tired, homely, apprehensive face of a middle-aged man with round-rimmed glasses (Edwin Max), we might almost be persuaded that even the real Judge has no face of his own. And then it's gone for good in the climactic chase through the pipes and catwalks of a gasworks, which is much more vividly shot than anything else in the movie, but Grant is chasing something real now, a living, struggling villain quite separate from the hero, all that bughouse obsessing concretely and sanely paid off, and we know how it has to end.
I really cannot tell if these traces are fossil, embryonic, or inadvertent. The screenplay was written by Lillie Hayward from a story by Francis Rosenwald and Anthony Mann, who had left the material with RKO when he moved on to Eagle-Lion; neither TCM nor the AFI Catalog could tell me much beyond that. It's just so full of gaps. Deadpan all but disappears from the movie following its big scene; it's glimpsed maybe once more in the daylit background of Grant's office, unambiguously a dummy with its gloved hands stiffly upturned in its lap and its blank visible under the pulled-down brim of its hat. Grant never discovers the substitution, nor is there any payoff to the infiltration of police headquarters by a wanted serial killer, not even when the audience might reasonably wonder whether the Judge committed that night's murder out of compulsion or because Grant more or less dared him to. I get that this film was ultimately not interested in the uncanny beyond its ability to deliver a hell of a shock, but then I'm not sure why making real-world sense was also too much to ask. A crazy killer does crazy things, that's all you need to know. The budget did not extend to context this year.
All the same, that one image of serial killer as crystallized obsession as awful object is so strange and so potent that I am not sorry to have seen it, even if I had to see the rest of Follow Me Quietly to get it. Maybe it would have fared better if it had contained Whit Bissell. This model brought to you by my lifelike backers at Patreon.
no subject
no subject
I feel it could have organized its hour better, but the creepiness worked: I had to write this review, after all.
Also we don't name our poppet golem murderer things! It's very fraught!
Especially since he named his to sound like a comic book villain, I feel this film's hero got off really lightly.
no subject
Did you watch The Sniper? It's a much more successful serial killer film, very contemporary in some ways, to the point that I found it hard to watch.
no subject
I don't even think it would have taken that much rewriting to bring out the pattern that doesn't quite exist in the script (and which I think would have infinitely improved it)! All the right groundwork is there. The film just doesn't seem to have noticed.
Did you watch The Sniper? It's a much more successful serial killer film, very contemporary in some ways, to the point that I found it hard to watch.
I have not! I'm hoping it goes into the buffer; I was watching Follow Me Quietly before it expired. You sound like they would make a good, if difficult, double feature.
[edit] The Sniper does not appear to have gone into the buffer. I am disappointed; the Noir Alley titles usually do. Talk to me about it?
no subject
no subject
I had wondered if that were the case from the TCM article. That does sound prescient and hard to take.
no subject
no subject
It's just such a weird place for the movie to fall over! Once you've come up with an image that resonant and unsettling, why would you just leave it there?