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You haven't gone as far as you can until you're dead
If you pass out in a photograph by Weegee, Guilty Bystander (1950) is one of the places you might wake up. New York City never looked grittier, grungier, or more starkly ordinary than in this gutter-level B-noir, lurching from bender to bender on a last-ditch quest through the docklands and subways and dive bars of Brooklyn that might be nothing more than a fool's errand. The plot is Gordian and the budget equivocal, but the atmosphere hits with the terrible clarity of a hangover. You want to fuck up in Code-era Hollywood, you want to be in a film noir, and in this picture, brother, have you come to the right place.
In the archetypal catalogue of fuck-ups racing the clock for their children's lives, Zachary Scott's Max Thursday sounds like one of the toughest and looks like he'd lose a thumb war with a wet noodle. Peeling himself half-dressed off an unmade bed, he's still tall, dark, and hard-shouldered, but the lean body is less impressive sweating through an A-shirt, the rake's mustache fraying into stubble; the fox's face looks as though the only heart he's been chewing on is his own. Technically he's employed as the house detective of the Riverview Hotel, a dingily nautical fleabag at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it's more of a favor on the part of Mary Boland's Smitty, the magnificent old broad of a manager who keeps him in cigarettes and booze. "The clients of my high-class rat's nest don't like no sober house dick," she reminds him from behind the front desk, brassily, motherly, gimlet-eyed; he's trying to sober up for the first time in two years. The quietly blonde, carefully self-possessed visitor who climbed the stairs to his room as if she were navigating a circle of hell was his ex-wife Georgia, played by Faye Emerson in their fourth and last screen pairing. They haven't spoken since their marriage drowned in a quart of rye. She asked him to find their kidnapped son. There are neo-noirs that only wish they could be as exhausted and cynical as his knee-jerk reaction, mumbled face-down into the wrinkled sheets: "The whole world's desperate and I'm tired. Go away." Even when he agrees, it's in cagey, brusque ellipsis, snapping over his shoulder as if distracted by the photo in his hand of a child he hasn't seen since infancy, "He's mine, too, you know." Then he emerges with a rough shave, looking about as badly pressed as his suit and hungover to the roots of his hair, and as we watch him shakily stand off a drink, pester a fin out of Smitty, and explode with anxiety at an unoffending cigarette machine, we understand the real engine of this story is not going to be the whereabouts of Jeff Thursday, but the tension between his father's stubbornness and self-sabotage. Max doesn't get past his first suspect before he's done three shots of Pernod and woken up in the Tombs under a suspicion of murder that Georgia has to lie him out of. In a smuggler's warehouse in Red Hook, he pays for the tenuous lead of a mug shot with a literal slap in the face and the much more painfully mocking reminder of his fall from grace, the darling of the tabloids and the disgrace of the NYPD. He's sober enough meeting with his ex-wife to calm her fears with sympathy rather than machismo—and settle her for the night with a drink of her own and a tranquilizer, hello the '50's—but he can't play the teetotaler trying to pump a B-girl on the job, which means he stumbles home with a bullet in his shoulder and without the brother-in-law he was trying to save and we can't tell whether the fusillade of liquor he slugs down his throat is anesthetic for the home surgery or just addiction. Justifying his inglorious performance in the stairwell where he pushed a girl into the line of fire and played dead while his quarry was dragged half-conscious past him, he explains bitterly, "I didn't shoot first because I didn't have a gun. And I didn't have a gun because I couldn't hit a pop bottle in front of my nose!" He's trembling like wire, his voice strained to the point of tears, crashing so fast from acid honesty to the well-worn groove of self-pity that it's oxygen to the audience when Georgia broadsides him with the reality check of his ego vs. their son's life, shut up at eleven. A noble goal has never been an assurance of success, however, and the film's denouement stretches out the awful possibility that while Max might survive a close shave with an out-of-town triggerman and the A train, the siren songs of self-doubt and the bottle might do for him just as surely as the blast of a .25 caliber rifle. He's really not a hard-boiled hero; he's pretty runny around the edges. It keeps him plausible no matter how many pulp switchbacks the plot takes.
It helps that the plot is switchbacking around a city that feels as unheroically real as he does. Most of the interiors of Guilty Bystander were shot on the silent-era stages built by the Fox Film Corporation on Manhattan's West 56th Street, but the exteriors are Brooklyn guerrilla-style, three million stories in the naked borough. The streetlights flare in the evening fog beside the East River with its cranes and barges hooting as desolately as train whistles, but the Third Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal is folding its wooden-planked leaves closed in a bright flat overcast that's almost the antithesis of noir. The back sides of warehouses are brick-scuffed and blowing with old papers, mazed with crates and sacks and stenciled drums; a freight elevator makes a spectacular cage of shadows, but a gangster's office on the third floor is unemphatically daylit. For the show-stopping third-act chase scene, the New York City Board of Transportation licensed a late night's filming on the platform and tracks of the Court Street Station, decommissioned in 1946, and I fully believe that two men could dodge and feint one another for their lives, grapple for a gun, and race up the stairs of a shuttered exit and back down into the tunnels while the trains rattle indifferently past with their empty strobe-light windows and a young couple neck against a pillar like they ignore this sort of thing every night. The Tombs play themselves, wincingly white-tiled and subterranean as their name. It's not all images à la sauvette—between the Weimar-honed art direction of Leo Kerz and the poverty row ingenuity of DP Gerald Hirschfeld, there are moments of fabulous expressionism not excluding a set painted directly with shadows, Caligari in Brooklyn Heights—but it never feels curated out of proportion to its characters. The Riverview isn't a den of thieves, it's a low-rent residential hotel with the normal ratio of hookers and dice games to second-shift working poor. The closest thing in the film to a traditional noir grotesque is J. Edward Bromberg's Varkas, pessimistically taking his pulse as his naturally menacing temperament wars with his doctor's orders; he glares at Max immediately after slapping him, muttering ruefully, "I got to stop doing things like that, it's bad for me." Kay Medford's Angel in her flimsy raincoat and beret is just a cute chiseler punching above her weight and the film isn't disingenuous enough to pretend that she deserves her wrenching exit. The professional thugs guarding their import-export interests could be the detectives down at the station, playing checkers and blowing off a drunk man's urgent calls.
Especially with an ex-cop moving through this dime-a-deal milieu, it is all the more striking that the police play so little part in the turn of events. Once he's committed to finding his son, Max dismisses his former colleagues as more of a liability than a resource: "I've got to get him before those police badges start showing up in all the wrong places and this whole mess explodes." To Sam Levene's Captain Tonetti, he is even astonishingly blunter, repudiating his old friend's appeal to the thin blue line with disillusioned vitriol. "Ask Georgia," he begins tersely. "Ask her what [cops] are like in the house. They like to shove people around. They're bad for their kids. Neglect their wives. They like violence. They carry guns. They're muscle men that like to use their muscles, you know that . . . But what does a muscle man do when he can't use his muscles?" His own answer to that question finishes with the ironic prop of a water glass tightly clenched in his hand: "One day you take a drink to help. The next time, you decide maybe two would be better. Then one day you decide to take three drinks and not walk in at all." I would like the film even better, of course, if it walked back none of this remarkable monologue, but I remind myself it's a rare release in the days of the PCA that doesn't equate a happy ending with the status quo. It's enough that Georgia after two acts of patient Griselda pries a bullet out of her ex-husband as expertly as any gangland doctor and packs a couple of hard truths into the wound with the mercurochrome; it's enough that Smitty between one abrasive, affectionate word and the next deepens electrifyingly from a loser's den mother to a lone wolf in her own right; it's enough that the dialogue is full of contagiously pulp jewels like "You're so wound up, you're going to throw a spring," "Don't give me no schmooze about no doc," and the epically withering brush-off "You make me feel like I got wrinkles in my stockings." It's enough that when the powder burns of the plot and its somewhat flashed-forward resolution have faded, what's left is drunk and dogged, self-destructive Max Thursday, whose heroism if he has any consists of persisting in the face of his own failures, of which we witness not a few. It's admirable, it's maddening, it's a cold equation. He won't have any fewer reasons to drink himself to death if he outlives his kid.
Guilty Bystander was the second of three films produced for the short-lived, New York-based independent outfit Laurel Films by the director-and-editor, also husband-and-wife team of Joseph and Geraldine Lerner; it was adapted by Don Ettlinger from Wade Miller's 1947 novel of the same name, though in truth it resembles nothing so much as the down-and-out explorations of David Goodis or Ed McBain. I would like to eat my hat if it wasn't an influence on noir descendants like Time Without Pity (1957) and Small Town Crime (2017), but I am given to understand it was a nearly lost film for decades, becoming widely available only when restored by Nicolas Winding Refn in 2019 from the last known 35 mm print. I am enormously grateful for it. I can take or leave the orchestral score by Dmitri Tiomkin, but I haven't seen the Gowanus Canal in at least five years. It looks fantastic: f/8 and it's there. This schmooze brought to you by my high-class backers at Patreon.
In the archetypal catalogue of fuck-ups racing the clock for their children's lives, Zachary Scott's Max Thursday sounds like one of the toughest and looks like he'd lose a thumb war with a wet noodle. Peeling himself half-dressed off an unmade bed, he's still tall, dark, and hard-shouldered, but the lean body is less impressive sweating through an A-shirt, the rake's mustache fraying into stubble; the fox's face looks as though the only heart he's been chewing on is his own. Technically he's employed as the house detective of the Riverview Hotel, a dingily nautical fleabag at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it's more of a favor on the part of Mary Boland's Smitty, the magnificent old broad of a manager who keeps him in cigarettes and booze. "The clients of my high-class rat's nest don't like no sober house dick," she reminds him from behind the front desk, brassily, motherly, gimlet-eyed; he's trying to sober up for the first time in two years. The quietly blonde, carefully self-possessed visitor who climbed the stairs to his room as if she were navigating a circle of hell was his ex-wife Georgia, played by Faye Emerson in their fourth and last screen pairing. They haven't spoken since their marriage drowned in a quart of rye. She asked him to find their kidnapped son. There are neo-noirs that only wish they could be as exhausted and cynical as his knee-jerk reaction, mumbled face-down into the wrinkled sheets: "The whole world's desperate and I'm tired. Go away." Even when he agrees, it's in cagey, brusque ellipsis, snapping over his shoulder as if distracted by the photo in his hand of a child he hasn't seen since infancy, "He's mine, too, you know." Then he emerges with a rough shave, looking about as badly pressed as his suit and hungover to the roots of his hair, and as we watch him shakily stand off a drink, pester a fin out of Smitty, and explode with anxiety at an unoffending cigarette machine, we understand the real engine of this story is not going to be the whereabouts of Jeff Thursday, but the tension between his father's stubbornness and self-sabotage. Max doesn't get past his first suspect before he's done three shots of Pernod and woken up in the Tombs under a suspicion of murder that Georgia has to lie him out of. In a smuggler's warehouse in Red Hook, he pays for the tenuous lead of a mug shot with a literal slap in the face and the much more painfully mocking reminder of his fall from grace, the darling of the tabloids and the disgrace of the NYPD. He's sober enough meeting with his ex-wife to calm her fears with sympathy rather than machismo—and settle her for the night with a drink of her own and a tranquilizer, hello the '50's—but he can't play the teetotaler trying to pump a B-girl on the job, which means he stumbles home with a bullet in his shoulder and without the brother-in-law he was trying to save and we can't tell whether the fusillade of liquor he slugs down his throat is anesthetic for the home surgery or just addiction. Justifying his inglorious performance in the stairwell where he pushed a girl into the line of fire and played dead while his quarry was dragged half-conscious past him, he explains bitterly, "I didn't shoot first because I didn't have a gun. And I didn't have a gun because I couldn't hit a pop bottle in front of my nose!" He's trembling like wire, his voice strained to the point of tears, crashing so fast from acid honesty to the well-worn groove of self-pity that it's oxygen to the audience when Georgia broadsides him with the reality check of his ego vs. their son's life, shut up at eleven. A noble goal has never been an assurance of success, however, and the film's denouement stretches out the awful possibility that while Max might survive a close shave with an out-of-town triggerman and the A train, the siren songs of self-doubt and the bottle might do for him just as surely as the blast of a .25 caliber rifle. He's really not a hard-boiled hero; he's pretty runny around the edges. It keeps him plausible no matter how many pulp switchbacks the plot takes.
It helps that the plot is switchbacking around a city that feels as unheroically real as he does. Most of the interiors of Guilty Bystander were shot on the silent-era stages built by the Fox Film Corporation on Manhattan's West 56th Street, but the exteriors are Brooklyn guerrilla-style, three million stories in the naked borough. The streetlights flare in the evening fog beside the East River with its cranes and barges hooting as desolately as train whistles, but the Third Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal is folding its wooden-planked leaves closed in a bright flat overcast that's almost the antithesis of noir. The back sides of warehouses are brick-scuffed and blowing with old papers, mazed with crates and sacks and stenciled drums; a freight elevator makes a spectacular cage of shadows, but a gangster's office on the third floor is unemphatically daylit. For the show-stopping third-act chase scene, the New York City Board of Transportation licensed a late night's filming on the platform and tracks of the Court Street Station, decommissioned in 1946, and I fully believe that two men could dodge and feint one another for their lives, grapple for a gun, and race up the stairs of a shuttered exit and back down into the tunnels while the trains rattle indifferently past with their empty strobe-light windows and a young couple neck against a pillar like they ignore this sort of thing every night. The Tombs play themselves, wincingly white-tiled and subterranean as their name. It's not all images à la sauvette—between the Weimar-honed art direction of Leo Kerz and the poverty row ingenuity of DP Gerald Hirschfeld, there are moments of fabulous expressionism not excluding a set painted directly with shadows, Caligari in Brooklyn Heights—but it never feels curated out of proportion to its characters. The Riverview isn't a den of thieves, it's a low-rent residential hotel with the normal ratio of hookers and dice games to second-shift working poor. The closest thing in the film to a traditional noir grotesque is J. Edward Bromberg's Varkas, pessimistically taking his pulse as his naturally menacing temperament wars with his doctor's orders; he glares at Max immediately after slapping him, muttering ruefully, "I got to stop doing things like that, it's bad for me." Kay Medford's Angel in her flimsy raincoat and beret is just a cute chiseler punching above her weight and the film isn't disingenuous enough to pretend that she deserves her wrenching exit. The professional thugs guarding their import-export interests could be the detectives down at the station, playing checkers and blowing off a drunk man's urgent calls.
Especially with an ex-cop moving through this dime-a-deal milieu, it is all the more striking that the police play so little part in the turn of events. Once he's committed to finding his son, Max dismisses his former colleagues as more of a liability than a resource: "I've got to get him before those police badges start showing up in all the wrong places and this whole mess explodes." To Sam Levene's Captain Tonetti, he is even astonishingly blunter, repudiating his old friend's appeal to the thin blue line with disillusioned vitriol. "Ask Georgia," he begins tersely. "Ask her what [cops] are like in the house. They like to shove people around. They're bad for their kids. Neglect their wives. They like violence. They carry guns. They're muscle men that like to use their muscles, you know that . . . But what does a muscle man do when he can't use his muscles?" His own answer to that question finishes with the ironic prop of a water glass tightly clenched in his hand: "One day you take a drink to help. The next time, you decide maybe two would be better. Then one day you decide to take three drinks and not walk in at all." I would like the film even better, of course, if it walked back none of this remarkable monologue, but I remind myself it's a rare release in the days of the PCA that doesn't equate a happy ending with the status quo. It's enough that Georgia after two acts of patient Griselda pries a bullet out of her ex-husband as expertly as any gangland doctor and packs a couple of hard truths into the wound with the mercurochrome; it's enough that Smitty between one abrasive, affectionate word and the next deepens electrifyingly from a loser's den mother to a lone wolf in her own right; it's enough that the dialogue is full of contagiously pulp jewels like "You're so wound up, you're going to throw a spring," "Don't give me no schmooze about no doc," and the epically withering brush-off "You make me feel like I got wrinkles in my stockings." It's enough that when the powder burns of the plot and its somewhat flashed-forward resolution have faded, what's left is drunk and dogged, self-destructive Max Thursday, whose heroism if he has any consists of persisting in the face of his own failures, of which we witness not a few. It's admirable, it's maddening, it's a cold equation. He won't have any fewer reasons to drink himself to death if he outlives his kid.
Guilty Bystander was the second of three films produced for the short-lived, New York-based independent outfit Laurel Films by the director-and-editor, also husband-and-wife team of Joseph and Geraldine Lerner; it was adapted by Don Ettlinger from Wade Miller's 1947 novel of the same name, though in truth it resembles nothing so much as the down-and-out explorations of David Goodis or Ed McBain. I would like to eat my hat if it wasn't an influence on noir descendants like Time Without Pity (1957) and Small Town Crime (2017), but I am given to understand it was a nearly lost film for decades, becoming widely available only when restored by Nicolas Winding Refn in 2019 from the last known 35 mm print. I am enormously grateful for it. I can take or leave the orchestral score by Dmitri Tiomkin, but I haven't seen the Gowanus Canal in at least five years. It looks fantastic: f/8 and it's there. This schmooze brought to you by my high-class backers at Patreon.
* Noir to watch*
Re: * Noir to watch*
I will not attempt to dissuade you! I watched it cold and I regret nothing except the Production Code.
(I would love to see what happens when you write noir.)
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Good old Bromberg, he never phoned it in.
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If you like him and you haven't seen this film, you should. He's wonderful and it was his last.
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I watched it in a massive state of insomnia, so, check!
Also, ACAB from a post-Code picture! Who knew that could be a thing?
It's rare but attested! And noir is the skeptical genre, so it's where it turns up in this era—The Prowler (1951) was the first place I noticed it. It's something I appreciate even more now than in 2016.
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I'd never seen her in anything! She was incredible.