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I like popcorn when I see a movie
Hell Bound (1957) begins with a perfect crime. Deftly, dispassionately, narrated at each stage in the clinically hard-bitten style that rolls procedural over into pulp, a freighter returning from the Far East to the Port of Los Angeles is fleeced of its cargo of military surplus narcotics through the synchronized complicity of a shipwrecked fisherman, an ailing health officer, and a sharp-eyed nurse, all punching the clock of a drug-smuggling scheme worth $250,000 legally and on the open market? "The sky's the limit," the narrator promises as the last of the accomplices casually posts a brick of dope through the good old USPS. "Ounces of big, white, fluffy, happy clouds."
The perfect crime doesn't exist. It's a fiction, an advertisement, an eight-minute demo reel screened as proof of concept by amoral freelancer Jordan (John Russell) for the syndicate boss he hopes to hook as his backer for the high-stakes job. The real crime with which the main action of this whacky-smacky boilermaker of early grindhouse and late noir is concerned is as doomed as its title, a one-way illustration of the Peter-principle gulf between strong-arming and masterminding. You, the viewer, could carve a better heist out of a banana. To be scrupulously fair to Jordan, it isn't his decision to substitute his money man's mistress for the lonely scorcher of an ambulance nurse he's been grooming to slip the stash out of the health officer's jacket after the man's carried ashore in a self-induced state of insulin shock, though he really should have been prepared for the metaphor of crime-as-cinema to extend as far as the casting couch, but he's got no one to blame but himself for the rest of his crew. Where his 16 mm hard sell promised a square-shouldered, seaworthy "Accomplice A" and a crisp, crew-cut "Accomplice B," Jordan sweetens a health officer out of the lugubrious resentments of Herbert Fay Jr. (Stanley Adams) and bare-knuckles back-alley "butcher boy" Stanley Thomas (George Mather) into playing the castaway—the former is invaluable for his diabetes, but the itchy arm of the latter sets him up as a liability, especially when the application of violent blackmail does more to push him off the wagon than reconcile him to his role. Not that Jordan would seem to care, when his own unstable impulse control has already cost the life of one accessory (Sammee Tong) and alienated their original inside woman Jan (Margo Woode). It's not a fatal flaw, just the last straw that the formerly languid and self-seeking Paula (June Blair) begins to fall genuinely for Eddie Mason (Stuart Whitman), the sweet-natured intern who's been penciled in as the mule precisely because he's not in on the con. From here on there's not much more to the movie than watching the wheels come off in all directions, but it happens fast and outrageously and with a gratifying surfeit of location shooting all around the dockyards and railyards of Wilmington and San Pedro and Terminal Island, which doesn't count as padding when it's so industrially enthralling. "So you hired yourself a boat and a bunch of actors and you made a picture. Anything went wrong," Harry Quantro (Frank Fenton) observed presciently as the lights came up on the clever infomercial that faked out the start of the film, "you could do it over again. But how about when it comes to the real thing?" If there's a moral to the surreally brutal ending in the scrapyards of National Metal and Steel where the dead Red Cars of the Pacific Electric Railway are stacked three high in a rat-run of compacting bumpers and windows knocked out like teeth, perhaps it's as simple as sticking to the pictures next time.
It may be possible to describe this movie so that it sounds merely like an extra-scuzzy artifact of the transitional period when low-budget noir began to diffuse into the exploitation genres. Baroquely scripted by Richard Landau and given deadpan direction by William J. Hole Jr., day-bleak cinematography by Carl E. Guthrie, and a jittery score by exotica pioneer Les Baxter, Hell Bound verges on the psychotronic. Having provocatively boasted that "there isn't any part of the anatomy I don't know—even with my eyes closed," the glib, tight-sweatered Paula obviously has a short sharp lesson in the realities of nursing in store, but it seems rather accelerated that it should arrive in the form of an adorable orphan never waking up as she helplessly strokes his hair on her very first emergency call. Jordan carries a flick-knife sheathed in a book of matches, commits murder by Plymouth Belvedere in full view of the old San Pedro Viaduct, introduces himself under the ever-so-subtle alias of "Mr. Natas of Western Pharmaceutical." The beating of Stanley is staged radio-style in an office at night, so that we hear the worst of it in the darkness out of which emerge little cameos of violence, one man flung battered and weeping against a wall in slats of streetlight while the other sneeringly leaves the running commentary of his incriminating tape unwinding on the half-lit desk, administering slaps like punctuation to the recorded woman's damning words. When the rattled junkie runs to his dealer for "help," he finds his dark-glassed, stonefaced "Daddy" (Dehl Berti) in the front row of a strip joint, drinking a glass of milk while his service dog patiently watches the mechanical smiles and bumps and grinds. I would be remiss if I did not mention the foot fetishism: Paula signals her sexual readiness by slipping off her shoes, rubbing one silk-sheathed foot against the other with all the languorous friction of implication, to the point where she can be rebuffed by a man offering her her shoes back. "You know what I think?" Jordan growls when he catches her in the aftermath of a tryst with Eddie, tearfully preparing to disappear into the night for both their sakes. "I'll tell you what I think. I think you took your shoes off—only this time you thought you could step out of them and run!" The dialogue makes Black Mask sound like Dickens. "It's like she's got two heads on her shoulders," Quantro brags of his girlfriend in her first and most fatale scene, when she slides suddenly back in her recliner in an upskirt bid for Jordan's attention—"one of them for just thinking." The bribing of Herbie is negotiated in terms of a "nice, fat little genie." Eddie flirts with Paula by gallantly offering, "Any time you feel like splitting a clavicle again, it'd be a pleasure to help," while a suspicious Jan, right before ditching her cat's-eye glasses as meltingly as a librarian in a porno, needles her conveniently arrived lover that his "whistle is off-key." As the stripper (Virginia De Lee) finally peels her top with a wide-eyed over-the-shoulder wriggle, Daddy pushes a cup of coffee toward his sweating customer and smirks: "Take two packets of sugar. It'll steady your nerves." Honestly, it only heightens the wild ride of the movie that all of this raw pulp weirdness is spackled into the cracks of a practically neorealist L.A., and at 69 minutes the action is running flat out. You could unwrap a candy and miss a love scene, a drug deal, or a murder. You can't miss the heist, but that's only because a certain magnitude of kablooey is difficult to ignore.
Because her apparent murder forms the nastiest scene in the picture—slapped, beaten, and finally knifed in full view of the audience, her discarded shoes kicked contemptuously over to her bare and motionless feet—I appreciated immensely that Paula does not just survive Jordan, she drops a dime on the bastard from her hospital bed and collects the reward of Eddie rushing to her side for the HEA while behind him a betrayed Jan triggers the manhunt that will end in the surprisingly hardcore spectacle of Jordan crouched in what he mistook for a disused freight car, his mouth opening in an unheard scream as sharp-edged tons of scrap metal cascade over him from the magnet crane that has been swinging back and forth all this while at the end of the line, the efficient routine of the yard taking one more piece of trash out. I hadn't thought villains died with that kind of irony until the '80's. Couldn't happen to a nicer psychopathic wannabe.
If you have gathered the impression that Hell Bound is a thoroughly unimproving cinematic experience, I can't imagine what else the filmmakers were going for: it fascinates me taxonomically, it's pushing the taboos of the Production Code, and it kept me and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch entertained for an hour at the end of a rough day, which may partly explain why we hollered at the screen like a midnight movie, but it is also just a film that lends itself well to callbacks. I am charmed by its deconstruction of its subgenre simultaneous with its gleeful lean into the extremes of its preferred tropes. Out of a sprung clockwork of nihilism, it produces delight. It's grimy, it's gonzo, and it doesn't give a damn. Sometimes that's all you want out of life. Quarter of a million couldn't hurt, of course. This limit brought to you by my thinking backers at Patreon.
The perfect crime doesn't exist. It's a fiction, an advertisement, an eight-minute demo reel screened as proof of concept by amoral freelancer Jordan (John Russell) for the syndicate boss he hopes to hook as his backer for the high-stakes job. The real crime with which the main action of this whacky-smacky boilermaker of early grindhouse and late noir is concerned is as doomed as its title, a one-way illustration of the Peter-principle gulf between strong-arming and masterminding. You, the viewer, could carve a better heist out of a banana. To be scrupulously fair to Jordan, it isn't his decision to substitute his money man's mistress for the lonely scorcher of an ambulance nurse he's been grooming to slip the stash out of the health officer's jacket after the man's carried ashore in a self-induced state of insulin shock, though he really should have been prepared for the metaphor of crime-as-cinema to extend as far as the casting couch, but he's got no one to blame but himself for the rest of his crew. Where his 16 mm hard sell promised a square-shouldered, seaworthy "Accomplice A" and a crisp, crew-cut "Accomplice B," Jordan sweetens a health officer out of the lugubrious resentments of Herbert Fay Jr. (Stanley Adams) and bare-knuckles back-alley "butcher boy" Stanley Thomas (George Mather) into playing the castaway—the former is invaluable for his diabetes, but the itchy arm of the latter sets him up as a liability, especially when the application of violent blackmail does more to push him off the wagon than reconcile him to his role. Not that Jordan would seem to care, when his own unstable impulse control has already cost the life of one accessory (Sammee Tong) and alienated their original inside woman Jan (Margo Woode). It's not a fatal flaw, just the last straw that the formerly languid and self-seeking Paula (June Blair) begins to fall genuinely for Eddie Mason (Stuart Whitman), the sweet-natured intern who's been penciled in as the mule precisely because he's not in on the con. From here on there's not much more to the movie than watching the wheels come off in all directions, but it happens fast and outrageously and with a gratifying surfeit of location shooting all around the dockyards and railyards of Wilmington and San Pedro and Terminal Island, which doesn't count as padding when it's so industrially enthralling. "So you hired yourself a boat and a bunch of actors and you made a picture. Anything went wrong," Harry Quantro (Frank Fenton) observed presciently as the lights came up on the clever infomercial that faked out the start of the film, "you could do it over again. But how about when it comes to the real thing?" If there's a moral to the surreally brutal ending in the scrapyards of National Metal and Steel where the dead Red Cars of the Pacific Electric Railway are stacked three high in a rat-run of compacting bumpers and windows knocked out like teeth, perhaps it's as simple as sticking to the pictures next time.
It may be possible to describe this movie so that it sounds merely like an extra-scuzzy artifact of the transitional period when low-budget noir began to diffuse into the exploitation genres. Baroquely scripted by Richard Landau and given deadpan direction by William J. Hole Jr., day-bleak cinematography by Carl E. Guthrie, and a jittery score by exotica pioneer Les Baxter, Hell Bound verges on the psychotronic. Having provocatively boasted that "there isn't any part of the anatomy I don't know—even with my eyes closed," the glib, tight-sweatered Paula obviously has a short sharp lesson in the realities of nursing in store, but it seems rather accelerated that it should arrive in the form of an adorable orphan never waking up as she helplessly strokes his hair on her very first emergency call. Jordan carries a flick-knife sheathed in a book of matches, commits murder by Plymouth Belvedere in full view of the old San Pedro Viaduct, introduces himself under the ever-so-subtle alias of "Mr. Natas of Western Pharmaceutical." The beating of Stanley is staged radio-style in an office at night, so that we hear the worst of it in the darkness out of which emerge little cameos of violence, one man flung battered and weeping against a wall in slats of streetlight while the other sneeringly leaves the running commentary of his incriminating tape unwinding on the half-lit desk, administering slaps like punctuation to the recorded woman's damning words. When the rattled junkie runs to his dealer for "help," he finds his dark-glassed, stonefaced "Daddy" (Dehl Berti) in the front row of a strip joint, drinking a glass of milk while his service dog patiently watches the mechanical smiles and bumps and grinds. I would be remiss if I did not mention the foot fetishism: Paula signals her sexual readiness by slipping off her shoes, rubbing one silk-sheathed foot against the other with all the languorous friction of implication, to the point where she can be rebuffed by a man offering her her shoes back. "You know what I think?" Jordan growls when he catches her in the aftermath of a tryst with Eddie, tearfully preparing to disappear into the night for both their sakes. "I'll tell you what I think. I think you took your shoes off—only this time you thought you could step out of them and run!" The dialogue makes Black Mask sound like Dickens. "It's like she's got two heads on her shoulders," Quantro brags of his girlfriend in her first and most fatale scene, when she slides suddenly back in her recliner in an upskirt bid for Jordan's attention—"one of them for just thinking." The bribing of Herbie is negotiated in terms of a "nice, fat little genie." Eddie flirts with Paula by gallantly offering, "Any time you feel like splitting a clavicle again, it'd be a pleasure to help," while a suspicious Jan, right before ditching her cat's-eye glasses as meltingly as a librarian in a porno, needles her conveniently arrived lover that his "whistle is off-key." As the stripper (Virginia De Lee) finally peels her top with a wide-eyed over-the-shoulder wriggle, Daddy pushes a cup of coffee toward his sweating customer and smirks: "Take two packets of sugar. It'll steady your nerves." Honestly, it only heightens the wild ride of the movie that all of this raw pulp weirdness is spackled into the cracks of a practically neorealist L.A., and at 69 minutes the action is running flat out. You could unwrap a candy and miss a love scene, a drug deal, or a murder. You can't miss the heist, but that's only because a certain magnitude of kablooey is difficult to ignore.
Because her apparent murder forms the nastiest scene in the picture—slapped, beaten, and finally knifed in full view of the audience, her discarded shoes kicked contemptuously over to her bare and motionless feet—I appreciated immensely that Paula does not just survive Jordan, she drops a dime on the bastard from her hospital bed and collects the reward of Eddie rushing to her side for the HEA while behind him a betrayed Jan triggers the manhunt that will end in the surprisingly hardcore spectacle of Jordan crouched in what he mistook for a disused freight car, his mouth opening in an unheard scream as sharp-edged tons of scrap metal cascade over him from the magnet crane that has been swinging back and forth all this while at the end of the line, the efficient routine of the yard taking one more piece of trash out. I hadn't thought villains died with that kind of irony until the '80's. Couldn't happen to a nicer psychopathic wannabe.
If you have gathered the impression that Hell Bound is a thoroughly unimproving cinematic experience, I can't imagine what else the filmmakers were going for: it fascinates me taxonomically, it's pushing the taboos of the Production Code, and it kept me and
spatch entertained for an hour at the end of a rough day, which may partly explain why we hollered at the screen like a midnight movie, but it is also just a film that lends itself well to callbacks. I am charmed by its deconstruction of its subgenre simultaneous with its gleeful lean into the extremes of its preferred tropes. Out of a sprung clockwork of nihilism, it produces delight. It's grimy, it's gonzo, and it doesn't give a damn. Sometimes that's all you want out of life. Quarter of a million couldn't hurt, of course. This limit brought to you by my thinking backers at Patreon.
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I think that is an excellent way of thinking of this movie!
Deus ex magnet crane?
It could only have been less subtle if he had fallen into a trash compactor!
Who went to see this sort of thing at the time?
I have no idea, but they got their money's worth.
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The shoes!
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I believe you yelled, "Who's next, Dr. Acula?"
For a while as the accomplices all began to fall out I wondered if there really was going to be a supernatural ending to all this, Mr. Natas collecting these hell bound souls as they-- nope, no, it's just Jordan being an edgy jerk.
Claude Rains, he was not.
no subject
From here on there's not much more to the movie than watching the wheels come off in all directions, but it happens fast and outrageously and with a gratifying surfeit of location shooting all around the dockyards and railyards of Wilmington and San Pedro and Terminal Island, which doesn't count as padding when it's so industrially enthralling. --honestly, apart from anything else, I'd watch it for the location shooting. I've said it before, but I'd love a modern serial set in a transshipment port. So much potential for so many stories.
when low-budget noir began to diffuse into the exploitation genres What's encompassed by exploitation genres? What are exploitation genres... I know remarkably little about film. (I could try googling this I realize ... okay, back from Wikipedia, that tells me this: "An exploitation film is a film that attempts to succeed financially by exploiting current trends, niche genres, or lurid content"--and then there's a list of different types, which must be the genres? The only one I'd heard of is blaxploitation, and even with that, I'd always been unclear on exactly what it meant. Ahh, Wikipedia, you lifesaver.)
the glib, tight-sweatered Paula obviously has a short sharp lesson in the realities of nursing in store, but it seems rather accelerated that it should arrive in the form of an adorable orphan never waking up as she helplessly strokes his hair on her very first emergency call. --Holy wow, yeah! ... And this prepares me for your paragraph describing how the film ends.
"Mr. Natas of Western Pharmaceutical." --I was clueless about the reference, but typing "Natas" provided the answer.
You could unwrap a candy and miss a love scene, a drug deal, or a murder. --That made me laugh. What a great, hardboiled line.
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We were not expecting it to be as full-blast bananas as it was. It just looked fast, cheap, and fun. And it was all of these things! But also buck wild!
--honestly, apart from anything else, I'd watch it for the location shooting. I've said it before, but I'd love a modern serial set in a transshipment port. So much potential for so many stories.
Hell Bound is absolutely worth watching for the locations. I don't even mean that in a deprecating way. It was worth it for the graveyard of Red Cars alone. I love these snapshots of time. And I would still love to see your series set in a modern working port.
--and then there's a list of different types, which must be the genres?
Yes—there's sort of an explosion in the '60's of movies identified as exploitation films, of which Hell Bound really feels like a sign of the times with its drugs, its ultraviolence, its melodrama cranked up to eleven . . .
--Holy wow, yeah! ... And this prepares me for your paragraph describing how the film ends.
We were not, in fact, prepared for the film to go there in terms of the magnet crane, but we were extremely pleased that Paula had not really been brutally, misogynistically disposed of. She deserved her happy ending! And some real classes in first aid!
--That made me laugh. What a great, hardboiled line.
Thank you!