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This whole situation's out of Wonderland
It would be a cheap shot to call No Escape (1953) a C-noir, but it's a really cheap film. It economizes on everything from its premise to its theme song. Its location shooting looks like stock footage even when it isn't. The mystery couldn't telegraph more of itself if it used Western Union and the public service narration singularly fails to notice that the denouement makes it out a liar. In short, it is a rackety piece of work even for Poverty Row and it left me fervently hoping some critic out there is studying film noir as a romance genre, because I believe things of its central relationship that I have bounced off cold in category romances; it drove home just how many of these marginal, existential narratives are love stories, too. Doylistically, it may be an inevitable consequence of Hollywood convention, but thematically, is there anything more destabilizing than falling in love, more dangerous than trusting yourself to a stranger? It may not be much to write home about as a crime picture, but I did ship it.
Produced by Matt Freed and Hugh Mackenzie under the one-and-done banner of Matthugh Productions, No Escape was written and directed by Charles Bennett and right down to the reuse of a key name is legible as a remix of his acclaimed stage play turned seminal British sound feature Blackmail (1929), scrubbing the last benefit of the doubt from its police detective and transferring the difference in sympathy not only to the heroine traumatized by her involvement in a murder, but to the stranger who knows too much about it. Toward that end, the film introduces us first to John Tracy (Lew Ayres) as he goes about his washed-up rounds on San Francisco's Pacific Street, technically a cocktail pianist and truthfully a barfly, recycling most of his tips directly into the night's dose of oblivion plus whatever he can cadge on the side by swallowing—it goes down easier after a bottle on somebody else's tab—his pride. He has the kindness to spot a cash-strapped B-girl the funds to go home alone, but a similar effort of magnanimity toward an actual customer leaves him humiliated and stewing up to a tour-de-force of self-sabotage as he crashes woozily through a fresh crime scene, a glass of the dead man's booze in one hand and a torn page of vital evidence in the other. "Looks like you framed yourself," he'll find himself brutally informed, a small man even more rumpled and wincing by daylight, rapidly losing the confidence to stand talking with a policeman in plain sight. "The fingerprints, the motive, and the weapon. And your only defense is your word." Nightmarishly, for Pat Peterson (Marjorie Steele) whose evening began with a lovers' quarrel and ended by fighting off date rape, the reverse seems to hold true. To the best of her knowledge, she was the last person to see the debonair artist she agreed to let run her home alive, unless she saw him dead after blunt force trauma was required to get clear of his sudden love nest of a studio, but she'll never prove it from the physical evidence, viz. the unknown whereabouts of a flirtatious sketch of "Pat, the Pride of Pinker's" and her forgotten gloves which she learns to her horror were protectively spoliated by her boyfriend in the SFPD, Detective Simon Shayne (Sonny Tufts). "Listen, darling," he justifies his tampering, soothing and smothering her instinct to turn herself in, "you didn't mean to kill that man. It was self-defense. But your facing trial won't help anyone . . . If you give yourself up, I'll tell I hid those gloves. You'll be smashing me, too." The stakes are set for a contest of truth and convenience played out among these three characters who each have some knowledge of the same crime, with justice as much of a potential casualty as scrambling Tracy or stricken Pat and all around them the tightening seine of official interest as infallibly advertised by the documentary-style prologue. "No escape," the uncredited narrator tolls over shots of ferries and bridges, train stations and airports, a highway patrolman's palm blacking out the lens as he flags down even the camera on the Great Highway: "No escape!"
If you came to this picture for a manhunt, then even under its alternate title of City on a Hunt I am afraid you will be better served by The Naked City (1948), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), or even He Walked by Night (1948). Whether through plotting or pacing, No Escape never achieves more than an intermittent frisson of the frantic urban chase promised by its opening blast of copaganda. Instead it offers a weird core of poetic realism, almost pre-Code in the tenderness and attention afforded its imperfect protagonists which is conspicuously absent from its rather perfunctory crime moves, but perhaps not so surprising when the first sign of their affinity for one another is their disfavor with the law. It is certainly not a case of kindred spirits across a crowded room. Tracy's routine depends on pleasing his patrons, which makes it cruel of Pat to use him to pay her volatile boyfriend back for his churlish behavior on a date, but his own insistent chivalry in calling her a taxi after the bust-up barely avoids creeping and his self-fulfilling self-deprecation spoils the rest with double-edged digs like "The moral embraces one fundamental principle—whenever you meet someone richer than yourself, make a friend." Arriving at her door the next morning with hungover bad timing, he looks his seediest and least sympathetic all movie, playing down to the worst of his reputation just to bait the hulking cop who's already treating him like a chiseler—"No, Pat. I've heard of this guy. Scrapes a dirty living any way he can. And now he looks to cash in," in a charade that costs real dough. And yet even as he shivers on a bed of newspapers with the police in full cry after him and his rummy but loyal associate Turnip (Renny McEvoy) fantasizes about slapping a confession out of the real murderer, Tracy's sympathies drift automatically toward the one person he knows to be in a worse spot than himself: "The girl, who else?" Did he but know it, the feeling's mutual. Far from guiltily or complacently accepting a providentially served scapegoat in the silence her boyfriend presses ever more forcefully on her, Pat has abandoned the safe little boxes of home and headquarters and set out on a hunt of her own, much more efficiently and effectively than any of the sweeps and roadblocks so fetishized by the narrative. With a pair of tickets to Los Angeles in her purse, she's got an escape route worked out as far as Mexico, collecting a startled and suspicious Tracy from a streetcar at the corner of Market and Powell as deftly as if she's worked undercover all her life. "If you don't want to be caught, don't look like you expect it . . . Keep your head. Look like I'm with you. For heaven's sakes, act normal." For a moment, the plot could lift off into one of those exhilarating, shadow-sided odysseys that have been known to occur in wrong-man thrillers. Even when they are forced back to the banality of her apartment, however, less through the diligent offices of the police than the officious interference of the man she boosted the tickets from, the close quarters and the isolating night serve just as well to bring out the element of mutual rescue that has been building in their interactions, as Tracy noodles lackadaisically on the piano and Pat ignores the shrill repeated clatter of Simon's calls and they circle without directly acknowledging the question of the price of the "peace of mind" she can't go on forever without, until she leans far too speculatively, suddenly out of the opened window, as if the answer is down in the street between lights and Tracy won't let her find it.
As ham-handed as the film can be with its emotional logic, it is razor-accurate of it to observe in this moment that whether Pat was moving toward suicide or just contemplating the idea, she doesn't like being wrestled back from it and especially not by a man who has been coasting indifferently toward his own death for years. "I thought you liked things easy," she hisses at him, merciless as his long-pickled conscience; for once he isn't smart-mouthed at all, no comebacks that he hasn't already failed to convince himself with. "I committed a crime, but yours is much bigger, because you've let yourself be beaten by life . . . You've lost all your guts. You're living for today because tomorrow doesn't exist. You're cheap and you're dirty and you're a coward—" It should be risible that they fall into one another's arms, the shoddiest of slap-slap-kiss clichés. It feels chaotic and cathartic; it makes sense. "Let's face it," Tracy sighs, holding her as fiercely and wonderingly as if she's the most important thing he's ever had not to fuck up in his life, "you're a simple little fool and you don't know where you're going or what you're doing . . . And in spite of all of it, you're still a blind optimist, aren't you? You stay that way." There's no hypocrisy in their shared bent toward self-sacrifice, merely the silly, inarguable, heartbreakingly human capacity to despair of one's own self and gear up to fight God for the sake of someone else. Tracy doesn't just have the death-wish of a bargain-counter Sydney Carton, he really doesn't want to see a woman destroyed for defending herself against an assault that should never have become tangled into her law-and-order lover-man's career. Long before he's anything to her but the tedious drunk of the night before, Pat can't countenance an innocent bystander taking the fall for her crime, no matter how wasted and negligible his life may have been. "And had you on my mind for the rest of my life?" she challenges, when Tracy reminds her that she could have gotten away with murder. Wryly, he offers the counterpoint: "Might have been better than having me on your hands." The stories are in no other wise comparable, but I suppose it was around that line and his unsuccessfully trying one more time to claim the credit for the murder that threatens her that I thought, I love you, but the world's not changed. Neither of them can even voice a future that doesn't begin in the contrafactual, but you'd like them to get another fifty years of it all the same.
That the murder of Peter Hayden (James Griffith) was really committed by Simon can be suspected so early in the film that I can't tell if it's meant to come as the shock to the viewer in the home stretch that it is to our fleeting sleuths of protagonists, but it has one clever feature in that it makes sense of the detective's efforts not to railroad Tracy per se, but to scare him out of town with the magnitude of the case against him, since any comparison of his evidence with Pat's would reveal the discrepancies in their stories—heel-taps where a drink was refused, the radio playing instead of a record scratching around, a three-hour lacuna elided in the impression that he stumbled straight onto the scene she had just fled, his break-in overwriting her struggle—which pointed to the involvement of a third person as soon as they actually compared notes instead of running on assumptions. "We're sane," Tracy exclaims as the truth in all of its hopeful ignorance dawns on them, "for the first time in days." Alas that in one of the time-honored noir blunders, they have already phoned the news to their false friend. No Escape doesn't rate the intelligent skepticism of The Prowler (1951) or Guilty Bystander (1950), but it seems either inconceivable or insulting that we should be intended to accept its programmatic boosting for the inexorable justice of the police when they are represented most vividly and repellently by Simon, whose bullish suppression of the woman he supposedly loves is scarcely more palatable than his boast as he forces the two of them out onto the fire escape and into a last-minute roof chase at gunpoint, "You heard me. I'm a cop. I can shoot you in the way of my job." In fairness to the fictional SFPD, Pat and Tracy are saved in the nick of time by the trick shooting of some of its less corrupt members, but only after Tracy in an access of absolutely useless and endearing heroism has hurled himself onto a man who could snap him like a breadstick before blowing his head off. No matter how many times the narrator blares, "But you still can't get out of San Francisco, not once the police spring the trap" or "Because the night brings no relief to the hunted," the vaunted dragnet of the title does not, for example, catch our heroes. Especially in contrast to the aid and comfort of marginal figures like Turnip and the unapologetic Olga Lewis (Gertrude Michael) who lets herself be collared with Pat's ID just to stall security at the Third and Townsend Depot, the local shields come off close to third wheels. At least they clear out in time for the cute final image of Turnip helping a dazed Tracy to his feet as Pat reminds him that he has his first audition in years later on in the morning. They exit in a heartening glow of affection. I just hope either sleep or coffee happens before then.
I have gathered that Ayres' career in the '50's was not much to write home about unless you like Donovan's Brain (1953), but he is an ornament to this film and not just because it needs all the help it can get. Ayres in his mid-forties had grown out of the vulnerable beauty of his youth and not yet attained the distinguished charm of his later years, but the wear and tear works nicely for a character like John Howard Tracy, a self-inflicted sad sack with more sarcasm than spine; he hasn't lost the wry, engaging smile, but his face looks as slept-in as his suit and his well-marinated self-pity sloshes over in mordant little cracks that go unnoticed only by the equally shellacked. Even if he's doing it just to needle Simon, he really does shake the other man down for $25 in exchange for the telltale sketch of Pat and when the detective snarls at him, "Why don't you drop dead?" plucks the bills from his fingers in cherubic reply: "Good question. Don't know the answer." Until she tracks him down mid-dragnet, he's more than willing to trade what he knows about Pat to get the heat off himself, if he weren't too scared to trust himself to the law. She unkindly but not unjustly summarizes his current employment as "picking up tips from stupid people." When we learn from rifling his scrapbook that he was once a successful composer of popular songs like "Manhattan Mania" and "East River Blues" who wiped out post-war with the self-produced flop of a folk opera that cost him his savings on top of his self-confidence, he suggests an embittered, middle-aged echo of another musical wastrel, the sweet, dissolute, desperate Ned Seton in Holiday (1938): like casting Richard Barthelmess in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the part is ghosted with the actor's younger presence. For the record, I find it infuriatingly distracting of this production to have dubbed him, especially with an easy-listening baritone that doesn't faintly match the actor's own dry tenor. Tracy doesn't need to sound like a crooner. I've heard composers sing, all right? I've heard Ayres sing, too; he doesn't have much of a voice and he doesn't need one. It makes the most effective delivery of the title number not the orchestral version that pulls out all the stops at a late-night party, but his early sprechstimme of the incomplete first verse, wistful and ironic rather than merely smooth: No escape from the dreams that have haunted me, schemes that have taunted me through the years . . . Of course it circles around to mean love in the end, which he discovers playing it to its true audience of Pat. No escape from you. I like Black Angel (1946), I don't care that Bennett lifts from it, too. Steele was unknown to me before this movie and I was delighted to discover that the streamlined blonde with four films to her name is better remembered as a sculptor, specifically of the statue of James Joyce in Dublin nicknamed "The Prick with the Stick." She doesn't look like she's working at all, holding the screen with Ayres who started in silent film with Garbo. I bet she was a fantastic Maggie the Cat on Broadway.
Since I can see no reason to watch No Escape for anything but free unless either a restoration or a theater or both is involved, I am pleased to be able to point toward Tubi. I can say little about the cinematography except that I wouldn't have recognized DP Benjamin H. Kline from the shadow-crammed style of Detour (1945) and the score by Bert Shefter has the doubtful virtue of not totally overworking the theme, but its people and their feelings for one another are real even when their city is pasted on and sometimes a movie doesn't need much more. In conclusion, I am fascinated by the reorganization from Blackmail and resolved to check out Lew Ayres in more noir. This escape brought to you by my sane backers at Patreon.
Produced by Matt Freed and Hugh Mackenzie under the one-and-done banner of Matthugh Productions, No Escape was written and directed by Charles Bennett and right down to the reuse of a key name is legible as a remix of his acclaimed stage play turned seminal British sound feature Blackmail (1929), scrubbing the last benefit of the doubt from its police detective and transferring the difference in sympathy not only to the heroine traumatized by her involvement in a murder, but to the stranger who knows too much about it. Toward that end, the film introduces us first to John Tracy (Lew Ayres) as he goes about his washed-up rounds on San Francisco's Pacific Street, technically a cocktail pianist and truthfully a barfly, recycling most of his tips directly into the night's dose of oblivion plus whatever he can cadge on the side by swallowing—it goes down easier after a bottle on somebody else's tab—his pride. He has the kindness to spot a cash-strapped B-girl the funds to go home alone, but a similar effort of magnanimity toward an actual customer leaves him humiliated and stewing up to a tour-de-force of self-sabotage as he crashes woozily through a fresh crime scene, a glass of the dead man's booze in one hand and a torn page of vital evidence in the other. "Looks like you framed yourself," he'll find himself brutally informed, a small man even more rumpled and wincing by daylight, rapidly losing the confidence to stand talking with a policeman in plain sight. "The fingerprints, the motive, and the weapon. And your only defense is your word." Nightmarishly, for Pat Peterson (Marjorie Steele) whose evening began with a lovers' quarrel and ended by fighting off date rape, the reverse seems to hold true. To the best of her knowledge, she was the last person to see the debonair artist she agreed to let run her home alive, unless she saw him dead after blunt force trauma was required to get clear of his sudden love nest of a studio, but she'll never prove it from the physical evidence, viz. the unknown whereabouts of a flirtatious sketch of "Pat, the Pride of Pinker's" and her forgotten gloves which she learns to her horror were protectively spoliated by her boyfriend in the SFPD, Detective Simon Shayne (Sonny Tufts). "Listen, darling," he justifies his tampering, soothing and smothering her instinct to turn herself in, "you didn't mean to kill that man. It was self-defense. But your facing trial won't help anyone . . . If you give yourself up, I'll tell I hid those gloves. You'll be smashing me, too." The stakes are set for a contest of truth and convenience played out among these three characters who each have some knowledge of the same crime, with justice as much of a potential casualty as scrambling Tracy or stricken Pat and all around them the tightening seine of official interest as infallibly advertised by the documentary-style prologue. "No escape," the uncredited narrator tolls over shots of ferries and bridges, train stations and airports, a highway patrolman's palm blacking out the lens as he flags down even the camera on the Great Highway: "No escape!"
If you came to this picture for a manhunt, then even under its alternate title of City on a Hunt I am afraid you will be better served by The Naked City (1948), The Killer That Stalked New York (1950), or even He Walked by Night (1948). Whether through plotting or pacing, No Escape never achieves more than an intermittent frisson of the frantic urban chase promised by its opening blast of copaganda. Instead it offers a weird core of poetic realism, almost pre-Code in the tenderness and attention afforded its imperfect protagonists which is conspicuously absent from its rather perfunctory crime moves, but perhaps not so surprising when the first sign of their affinity for one another is their disfavor with the law. It is certainly not a case of kindred spirits across a crowded room. Tracy's routine depends on pleasing his patrons, which makes it cruel of Pat to use him to pay her volatile boyfriend back for his churlish behavior on a date, but his own insistent chivalry in calling her a taxi after the bust-up barely avoids creeping and his self-fulfilling self-deprecation spoils the rest with double-edged digs like "The moral embraces one fundamental principle—whenever you meet someone richer than yourself, make a friend." Arriving at her door the next morning with hungover bad timing, he looks his seediest and least sympathetic all movie, playing down to the worst of his reputation just to bait the hulking cop who's already treating him like a chiseler—"No, Pat. I've heard of this guy. Scrapes a dirty living any way he can. And now he looks to cash in," in a charade that costs real dough. And yet even as he shivers on a bed of newspapers with the police in full cry after him and his rummy but loyal associate Turnip (Renny McEvoy) fantasizes about slapping a confession out of the real murderer, Tracy's sympathies drift automatically toward the one person he knows to be in a worse spot than himself: "The girl, who else?" Did he but know it, the feeling's mutual. Far from guiltily or complacently accepting a providentially served scapegoat in the silence her boyfriend presses ever more forcefully on her, Pat has abandoned the safe little boxes of home and headquarters and set out on a hunt of her own, much more efficiently and effectively than any of the sweeps and roadblocks so fetishized by the narrative. With a pair of tickets to Los Angeles in her purse, she's got an escape route worked out as far as Mexico, collecting a startled and suspicious Tracy from a streetcar at the corner of Market and Powell as deftly as if she's worked undercover all her life. "If you don't want to be caught, don't look like you expect it . . . Keep your head. Look like I'm with you. For heaven's sakes, act normal." For a moment, the plot could lift off into one of those exhilarating, shadow-sided odysseys that have been known to occur in wrong-man thrillers. Even when they are forced back to the banality of her apartment, however, less through the diligent offices of the police than the officious interference of the man she boosted the tickets from, the close quarters and the isolating night serve just as well to bring out the element of mutual rescue that has been building in their interactions, as Tracy noodles lackadaisically on the piano and Pat ignores the shrill repeated clatter of Simon's calls and they circle without directly acknowledging the question of the price of the "peace of mind" she can't go on forever without, until she leans far too speculatively, suddenly out of the opened window, as if the answer is down in the street between lights and Tracy won't let her find it.
As ham-handed as the film can be with its emotional logic, it is razor-accurate of it to observe in this moment that whether Pat was moving toward suicide or just contemplating the idea, she doesn't like being wrestled back from it and especially not by a man who has been coasting indifferently toward his own death for years. "I thought you liked things easy," she hisses at him, merciless as his long-pickled conscience; for once he isn't smart-mouthed at all, no comebacks that he hasn't already failed to convince himself with. "I committed a crime, but yours is much bigger, because you've let yourself be beaten by life . . . You've lost all your guts. You're living for today because tomorrow doesn't exist. You're cheap and you're dirty and you're a coward—" It should be risible that they fall into one another's arms, the shoddiest of slap-slap-kiss clichés. It feels chaotic and cathartic; it makes sense. "Let's face it," Tracy sighs, holding her as fiercely and wonderingly as if she's the most important thing he's ever had not to fuck up in his life, "you're a simple little fool and you don't know where you're going or what you're doing . . . And in spite of all of it, you're still a blind optimist, aren't you? You stay that way." There's no hypocrisy in their shared bent toward self-sacrifice, merely the silly, inarguable, heartbreakingly human capacity to despair of one's own self and gear up to fight God for the sake of someone else. Tracy doesn't just have the death-wish of a bargain-counter Sydney Carton, he really doesn't want to see a woman destroyed for defending herself against an assault that should never have become tangled into her law-and-order lover-man's career. Long before he's anything to her but the tedious drunk of the night before, Pat can't countenance an innocent bystander taking the fall for her crime, no matter how wasted and negligible his life may have been. "And had you on my mind for the rest of my life?" she challenges, when Tracy reminds her that she could have gotten away with murder. Wryly, he offers the counterpoint: "Might have been better than having me on your hands." The stories are in no other wise comparable, but I suppose it was around that line and his unsuccessfully trying one more time to claim the credit for the murder that threatens her that I thought, I love you, but the world's not changed. Neither of them can even voice a future that doesn't begin in the contrafactual, but you'd like them to get another fifty years of it all the same.
That the murder of Peter Hayden (James Griffith) was really committed by Simon can be suspected so early in the film that I can't tell if it's meant to come as the shock to the viewer in the home stretch that it is to our fleeting sleuths of protagonists, but it has one clever feature in that it makes sense of the detective's efforts not to railroad Tracy per se, but to scare him out of town with the magnitude of the case against him, since any comparison of his evidence with Pat's would reveal the discrepancies in their stories—heel-taps where a drink was refused, the radio playing instead of a record scratching around, a three-hour lacuna elided in the impression that he stumbled straight onto the scene she had just fled, his break-in overwriting her struggle—which pointed to the involvement of a third person as soon as they actually compared notes instead of running on assumptions. "We're sane," Tracy exclaims as the truth in all of its hopeful ignorance dawns on them, "for the first time in days." Alas that in one of the time-honored noir blunders, they have already phoned the news to their false friend. No Escape doesn't rate the intelligent skepticism of The Prowler (1951) or Guilty Bystander (1950), but it seems either inconceivable or insulting that we should be intended to accept its programmatic boosting for the inexorable justice of the police when they are represented most vividly and repellently by Simon, whose bullish suppression of the woman he supposedly loves is scarcely more palatable than his boast as he forces the two of them out onto the fire escape and into a last-minute roof chase at gunpoint, "You heard me. I'm a cop. I can shoot you in the way of my job." In fairness to the fictional SFPD, Pat and Tracy are saved in the nick of time by the trick shooting of some of its less corrupt members, but only after Tracy in an access of absolutely useless and endearing heroism has hurled himself onto a man who could snap him like a breadstick before blowing his head off. No matter how many times the narrator blares, "But you still can't get out of San Francisco, not once the police spring the trap" or "Because the night brings no relief to the hunted," the vaunted dragnet of the title does not, for example, catch our heroes. Especially in contrast to the aid and comfort of marginal figures like Turnip and the unapologetic Olga Lewis (Gertrude Michael) who lets herself be collared with Pat's ID just to stall security at the Third and Townsend Depot, the local shields come off close to third wheels. At least they clear out in time for the cute final image of Turnip helping a dazed Tracy to his feet as Pat reminds him that he has his first audition in years later on in the morning. They exit in a heartening glow of affection. I just hope either sleep or coffee happens before then.
I have gathered that Ayres' career in the '50's was not much to write home about unless you like Donovan's Brain (1953), but he is an ornament to this film and not just because it needs all the help it can get. Ayres in his mid-forties had grown out of the vulnerable beauty of his youth and not yet attained the distinguished charm of his later years, but the wear and tear works nicely for a character like John Howard Tracy, a self-inflicted sad sack with more sarcasm than spine; he hasn't lost the wry, engaging smile, but his face looks as slept-in as his suit and his well-marinated self-pity sloshes over in mordant little cracks that go unnoticed only by the equally shellacked. Even if he's doing it just to needle Simon, he really does shake the other man down for $25 in exchange for the telltale sketch of Pat and when the detective snarls at him, "Why don't you drop dead?" plucks the bills from his fingers in cherubic reply: "Good question. Don't know the answer." Until she tracks him down mid-dragnet, he's more than willing to trade what he knows about Pat to get the heat off himself, if he weren't too scared to trust himself to the law. She unkindly but not unjustly summarizes his current employment as "picking up tips from stupid people." When we learn from rifling his scrapbook that he was once a successful composer of popular songs like "Manhattan Mania" and "East River Blues" who wiped out post-war with the self-produced flop of a folk opera that cost him his savings on top of his self-confidence, he suggests an embittered, middle-aged echo of another musical wastrel, the sweet, dissolute, desperate Ned Seton in Holiday (1938): like casting Richard Barthelmess in Only Angels Have Wings (1939), the part is ghosted with the actor's younger presence. For the record, I find it infuriatingly distracting of this production to have dubbed him, especially with an easy-listening baritone that doesn't faintly match the actor's own dry tenor. Tracy doesn't need to sound like a crooner. I've heard composers sing, all right? I've heard Ayres sing, too; he doesn't have much of a voice and he doesn't need one. It makes the most effective delivery of the title number not the orchestral version that pulls out all the stops at a late-night party, but his early sprechstimme of the incomplete first verse, wistful and ironic rather than merely smooth: No escape from the dreams that have haunted me, schemes that have taunted me through the years . . . Of course it circles around to mean love in the end, which he discovers playing it to its true audience of Pat. No escape from you. I like Black Angel (1946), I don't care that Bennett lifts from it, too. Steele was unknown to me before this movie and I was delighted to discover that the streamlined blonde with four films to her name is better remembered as a sculptor, specifically of the statue of James Joyce in Dublin nicknamed "The Prick with the Stick." She doesn't look like she's working at all, holding the screen with Ayres who started in silent film with Garbo. I bet she was a fantastic Maggie the Cat on Broadway.
Since I can see no reason to watch No Escape for anything but free unless either a restoration or a theater or both is involved, I am pleased to be able to point toward Tubi. I can say little about the cinematography except that I wouldn't have recognized DP Benjamin H. Kline from the shadow-crammed style of Detour (1945) and the score by Bert Shefter has the doubtful virtue of not totally overworking the theme, but its people and their feelings for one another are real even when their city is pasted on and sometimes a movie doesn't need much more. In conclusion, I am fascinated by the reorganization from Blackmail and resolved to check out Lew Ayres in more noir. This escape brought to you by my sane backers at Patreon.
no subject
Tubi evidently doesn’t consider it a spoiler to put it right there in their description of the film’s premise.
I do love reading your descriptions of movies, btw.
no subject
I know! I consider it slightly unfair to the film, which does not disclose or at least confirm the information until its last ten minutes. TCM summarized it, "A woman and a songwriter suspected of murder join forces to crack the case," which was not really accurate, either, but at least didn't blow the finale straight off.
I do love reading your descriptions of movies, btw.
Thank you. I'm really glad.
no subject
the public service narration singularly fails to notice that the denouement makes it out a liar ... No matter how many times the narrator blares, "But you still can't get out of San Francisco, not once the police spring the trap" or "Because the night brings no relief to the hunted," the vaunted dragnet of the title does not, for example, catch our heroes. --LOL big-time! And night did bring them at least the relief of coming to recognize their feelings, seems like.
It may not be much to write home about as a crime picture, but I did ship it. --Adorable line ^_^
merely the silly, inarguable, heartbreakingly human capacity to despair of one's own self and gear up to fight God for the sake of someone else. --And this one: a heartache in a sentence.
bargain-counter Sydney Carton --LOVED that. Also the "absolutely useless and endearing heroism [of hurling] himself onto a man who could snap him like a breadstick before blowing his head off."
Thank you for sharing these <3
no subject
I'm glad!
--LOL big-time! And night did bring them at least the relief of coming to recognize their feelings, seems like.
I don't think the narrator in this movie knows anything except maybe what a ferry building looks like. And even then he might just have gotten lucky.
--And this one: a heartache in a sentence.
It was the thing I loved best about the film; it was very real and I don't see a lot of it in movies.
Thank you for sharing these
You're welcome. Thank you for telling me.
no subject
no subject
He's great in it. Some actors you see in a film noir and it was a nice experiment, Ayres I just want to see in noir that's more on his level. I have seen him in remarkably few things considering how much I like him. I note there's a biography, although I wish it were available in paperback.