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They say it ain't a crime unless they catch you at it
It wouldn't be hard to work up a ghost out of They All Come Out (1939). A rail-hopping, road-thumbing drifter introduced short the price of his deluxe diner plate and about to hitch himself a ride into crime, Tom Neal in his first starring feature could be warming up for his most famous, hopeless, defining role in Detour (1945), just as his baby-faced, embittered short cut to the slammer all too neatly presages the actor's incarceration for what he would defend as manslaughter as involuntary and unbelievable as any of the misfortunes of Al Roberts. The part haunted him like radiation from one end to the other of his scandal-tangled life; it makes the sense of the film's own nightmare to find it encysted in the bright future of his B-start at MGM. History may or may not recur as farce after tragedy, but it can show up for irony any time it feels like.
The fly in this hauntologically attractive framing is the film itself. They All Come Out was written by John C. Higgins and directed by Jacques Tourneur and cannot with the best of intentions and a crowbar be made to fit into the lineage of their future specialties in film noir; it was promoted from the two-reeler ranks of MGM's Crime Does Not Pay (1935–47) and as such serves up an especially square helping of the Production Code. Whether dramatizing the wages of personal sins like gambling or embezzling, the more organized rackets of protection and counterfeiting, or the institutional bad apples of political machines and the police, the short subjects of this popular, topical series—during the war, it widened its remit to include espionage, sabotage, and even the global crime of Nazism itself—could be categorized unironically as anti-noir, doing their docudrama best to scare their viewers straight with a relentlessly authoritative combination of po-faced didacticism and grisly deterrence. Got a fail-safe plan for collecting your ill-gotten gains after prison, like Robert Taylor in Buried Loot (1935)? With the cops infallibly onto your scheme from the start, you'll have hideously acid-scarred your face for $200,000 worth of nothing. Tempted to scam the insurance companies by participating in staged automobile accidents in the Oscar-winning Torture Money (1937)? Too late by the time you discover the cost in back-alley road rash and real broken bones. Catching all the crooked breaks from till-dipping to manslaughter to murder like Barry Nelson in The Luckiest Guy in the World (1947)? Fear not, your streak will run out as bluntly and absurdly as if God's own hand bank-shot a bullet your guiltily bystanding way. Even the entries which do not rely on some kind of gotcha to punch their morals home take such conservative care not to make their crimes look accidentally interesting that when a sterling rookie is revealed as a secret hood in Joseph Losey's A Gun in His Hand (1945), the extent of his corruption is a penny-ante string of warehouse robberies whose gimmick of call boxes and burglar alarms hardly seems worth the cover of police academy. MGM treated the series as a kind of minor league for new talent before and behind the camera and it is fun to watch the early efforts especially of writers, directors, and actors who would become associated with more complicated explorations of crime, but the total humorlessness of the house style makes the project hard to take seriously even in single installments and after more than one even the most upstanding viewer may find themselves longing for some profitable mayhem committed with impunity.
They All Come Out might still have fared better as a short. Dedicated to the United States Department of Justice whose cooperation enabled its location shooting at multiple correctional facilities from Atlanta to Alcatraz and introduced by the combined authorities of a former attorney general and current director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it opens pacily enough with the convergence of the "interstate bandits" who acquire Neal's Joe Cameron for the price of a meal and a bed and the self-respect of fixing the car that ferried him from Birmingham to Hot Springs, the Depression-dream of easy money for nothing more than sticking it to the law and order that threw him off freight trains and pinched him for vagrancy and never kept him from starving. "It's the cops," he agrees grimly, accepting a cigarette from Rita Johnson's Kitty Carson, his sleek blonde savior of a moll in the market for a driver. "Always the cops. They run the country. Guy can't walk through any town without some big loudmouth copper wants to know all about him," explaining perhaps why he doesn't just shake the speed cop who whines up on their tail during his first getaway but neatly sideswipes the officer into a passing tree. Cornered by an old un-acquaintance in the last reel, forced maliciously into a robbery of the straight job he was working late in Cleveland, the same slam-bang license governs his realization that a gun in his face is nothing compared to the welding torch in his hand and the go-for-broke gruesomeness with which Joe turns the spark-splashing acetylene on his extortionist—clinched with two fists to the man's seared chin just in time for the witness of Kitty and an astounded night watchman—would stack up against any of Crime Does Not Pay's Grand Guignol. The problem is that in between these two points of hard-boiled interest come forty minutes of informercial for the American penal system and not even the loneliness of auto camps or all-night cafés can grit up its soft-soap hard sell. Forget the screws, the stoolies, the shivs and the injustices of The Big House (1930) or Brute Force (1947) or Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954). The modern penitentiary is an opportunity for self-improvement staffed by shrewdly compassionate authorities who serve more as guidance counselors than wardens, debating the social and criminal histories of their convict population before charting the safest and most productive course for each of them, as witnessed by the fates of the Reno Madigan gang. The youngest and least hardened offenders, Joe and Kitty who came up clawing out of broken homes into broken promises are the hopeful success stories, granted the chances they were denied on the outside by the minimum-security support of the Industrial Reformatory at Chillicothe and the Federal Industrial Institution for Women at Alderton. The surgical reconstruction of his never-healed wrist affords him the able-bodied opportunity to train as a machinist, she brushes up on her beautician's skills after some disillusioning real talk about the outlaw life, their eventual good conduct earns them the pen-pal privileges through which they contemplate the former mirage of a future on the level. As explained by the superintendent who shares her movie's scorn for subtext, "You're here to be helped—although you don't seem to realize it." Back at USP Atlanta, Edward Gargan's Bugs Jacklin is beginning to take the hint, since it turns out that the big lug of a recidivist wants clumsily and sincerely to make good for his estranged wife and their four-year-old son who in a gag I didn't expect from the 1930's sets off the metal detector on visiting day with a stash of bottlecaps. Even Groper Crane, the twitchy little triggerman played by John Gallaudet as though Elisha Cook Jr. and Dwight Frye were otherwise engaged, proves amenable to rehabilitation when his delusions of women hiding in his pockets to sneak his cigarettes refer him out of prison entirely and into psychiatric care, such that after some basket-weaving and a few sessions with Charles Lane, he can cheerfully dismiss his lifelong, paranoid, intrusive thoughts: "Ever since you explained why I had them, they ain't been bothering me at all." He is last seen spading the grounds of Springfield's Hospital for Defective Delinquents, a name regardless of its eugenicist antecedents I can't believe no punk band ever picked up. As for the unregenerate Reno Madigan, a slickster in the mode of a cut-rate George Raft, actually Bernard Nedell? Warehouse him on the Rock, let him dissolve into the clang of bells and the foghorn booming spectrally beyond the bars of his cell: a strange, sour note among all the reformist cheer, but well within the punitive prescriptions of Crime Does Not Pay. Compressing this material would not make it less sententious, but at least it would only hit the viewer over the head once that Joe who expressed such vivid contempt for railroad bulls and stop-and-frisk policing now accepts his salvation through the benevolent oversight of the carceral state. Instead, even the final scene in night court cannot resist reminding us through the paroled lovebirds of Joe and Kitty, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated:
"I don't know if you realize what you've done tonight. A known criminal tried to force you back into crime. A year or so ago, you both might have tried to settle this in your own way. But tonight you didn't. You both turned instinctively to the police. Your thinking is right. You have nothing to fear from now on."
Such a relief, don't you just want to throw a brick? More than any criteria of plot or style, this complacency is what keeps They All Come Out off the lists of proto-noir: there are no uncertainties in its world, only just deserts. The social dimensions of crime, the dust-bowl desperations of the country recede before the reassurance of the rectitude of the law. Joe Cameron could have hitched himself as far westward as California, but he would never have found himself on the lost highways of Detour, the shifting spaces of noir where staying in your lane never guarantees they won't move away the road. Tourneur would investigate them for RKO, but MGM wasn't even interested in the map. The photography by Clyde De Vinna and Paul C. Vogel has some nice, cheap, low-key set-ups when it isn't being Traveltalks for Prisons. The arithmetic lesson was done better in Fritz Lang's You and Me (1938). Let Tom Neal rest; the ghost in this picture is how much talent it leaves lifeless on the screen. This crime brought to you by my known backers at Patreon.
The fly in this hauntologically attractive framing is the film itself. They All Come Out was written by John C. Higgins and directed by Jacques Tourneur and cannot with the best of intentions and a crowbar be made to fit into the lineage of their future specialties in film noir; it was promoted from the two-reeler ranks of MGM's Crime Does Not Pay (1935–47) and as such serves up an especially square helping of the Production Code. Whether dramatizing the wages of personal sins like gambling or embezzling, the more organized rackets of protection and counterfeiting, or the institutional bad apples of political machines and the police, the short subjects of this popular, topical series—during the war, it widened its remit to include espionage, sabotage, and even the global crime of Nazism itself—could be categorized unironically as anti-noir, doing their docudrama best to scare their viewers straight with a relentlessly authoritative combination of po-faced didacticism and grisly deterrence. Got a fail-safe plan for collecting your ill-gotten gains after prison, like Robert Taylor in Buried Loot (1935)? With the cops infallibly onto your scheme from the start, you'll have hideously acid-scarred your face for $200,000 worth of nothing. Tempted to scam the insurance companies by participating in staged automobile accidents in the Oscar-winning Torture Money (1937)? Too late by the time you discover the cost in back-alley road rash and real broken bones. Catching all the crooked breaks from till-dipping to manslaughter to murder like Barry Nelson in The Luckiest Guy in the World (1947)? Fear not, your streak will run out as bluntly and absurdly as if God's own hand bank-shot a bullet your guiltily bystanding way. Even the entries which do not rely on some kind of gotcha to punch their morals home take such conservative care not to make their crimes look accidentally interesting that when a sterling rookie is revealed as a secret hood in Joseph Losey's A Gun in His Hand (1945), the extent of his corruption is a penny-ante string of warehouse robberies whose gimmick of call boxes and burglar alarms hardly seems worth the cover of police academy. MGM treated the series as a kind of minor league for new talent before and behind the camera and it is fun to watch the early efforts especially of writers, directors, and actors who would become associated with more complicated explorations of crime, but the total humorlessness of the house style makes the project hard to take seriously even in single installments and after more than one even the most upstanding viewer may find themselves longing for some profitable mayhem committed with impunity.
They All Come Out might still have fared better as a short. Dedicated to the United States Department of Justice whose cooperation enabled its location shooting at multiple correctional facilities from Atlanta to Alcatraz and introduced by the combined authorities of a former attorney general and current director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it opens pacily enough with the convergence of the "interstate bandits" who acquire Neal's Joe Cameron for the price of a meal and a bed and the self-respect of fixing the car that ferried him from Birmingham to Hot Springs, the Depression-dream of easy money for nothing more than sticking it to the law and order that threw him off freight trains and pinched him for vagrancy and never kept him from starving. "It's the cops," he agrees grimly, accepting a cigarette from Rita Johnson's Kitty Carson, his sleek blonde savior of a moll in the market for a driver. "Always the cops. They run the country. Guy can't walk through any town without some big loudmouth copper wants to know all about him," explaining perhaps why he doesn't just shake the speed cop who whines up on their tail during his first getaway but neatly sideswipes the officer into a passing tree. Cornered by an old un-acquaintance in the last reel, forced maliciously into a robbery of the straight job he was working late in Cleveland, the same slam-bang license governs his realization that a gun in his face is nothing compared to the welding torch in his hand and the go-for-broke gruesomeness with which Joe turns the spark-splashing acetylene on his extortionist—clinched with two fists to the man's seared chin just in time for the witness of Kitty and an astounded night watchman—would stack up against any of Crime Does Not Pay's Grand Guignol. The problem is that in between these two points of hard-boiled interest come forty minutes of informercial for the American penal system and not even the loneliness of auto camps or all-night cafés can grit up its soft-soap hard sell. Forget the screws, the stoolies, the shivs and the injustices of The Big House (1930) or Brute Force (1947) or Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954). The modern penitentiary is an opportunity for self-improvement staffed by shrewdly compassionate authorities who serve more as guidance counselors than wardens, debating the social and criminal histories of their convict population before charting the safest and most productive course for each of them, as witnessed by the fates of the Reno Madigan gang. The youngest and least hardened offenders, Joe and Kitty who came up clawing out of broken homes into broken promises are the hopeful success stories, granted the chances they were denied on the outside by the minimum-security support of the Industrial Reformatory at Chillicothe and the Federal Industrial Institution for Women at Alderton. The surgical reconstruction of his never-healed wrist affords him the able-bodied opportunity to train as a machinist, she brushes up on her beautician's skills after some disillusioning real talk about the outlaw life, their eventual good conduct earns them the pen-pal privileges through which they contemplate the former mirage of a future on the level. As explained by the superintendent who shares her movie's scorn for subtext, "You're here to be helped—although you don't seem to realize it." Back at USP Atlanta, Edward Gargan's Bugs Jacklin is beginning to take the hint, since it turns out that the big lug of a recidivist wants clumsily and sincerely to make good for his estranged wife and their four-year-old son who in a gag I didn't expect from the 1930's sets off the metal detector on visiting day with a stash of bottlecaps. Even Groper Crane, the twitchy little triggerman played by John Gallaudet as though Elisha Cook Jr. and Dwight Frye were otherwise engaged, proves amenable to rehabilitation when his delusions of women hiding in his pockets to sneak his cigarettes refer him out of prison entirely and into psychiatric care, such that after some basket-weaving and a few sessions with Charles Lane, he can cheerfully dismiss his lifelong, paranoid, intrusive thoughts: "Ever since you explained why I had them, they ain't been bothering me at all." He is last seen spading the grounds of Springfield's Hospital for Defective Delinquents, a name regardless of its eugenicist antecedents I can't believe no punk band ever picked up. As for the unregenerate Reno Madigan, a slickster in the mode of a cut-rate George Raft, actually Bernard Nedell? Warehouse him on the Rock, let him dissolve into the clang of bells and the foghorn booming spectrally beyond the bars of his cell: a strange, sour note among all the reformist cheer, but well within the punitive prescriptions of Crime Does Not Pay. Compressing this material would not make it less sententious, but at least it would only hit the viewer over the head once that Joe who expressed such vivid contempt for railroad bulls and stop-and-frisk policing now accepts his salvation through the benevolent oversight of the carceral state. Instead, even the final scene in night court cannot resist reminding us through the paroled lovebirds of Joe and Kitty, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated:
"I don't know if you realize what you've done tonight. A known criminal tried to force you back into crime. A year or so ago, you both might have tried to settle this in your own way. But tonight you didn't. You both turned instinctively to the police. Your thinking is right. You have nothing to fear from now on."
Such a relief, don't you just want to throw a brick? More than any criteria of plot or style, this complacency is what keeps They All Come Out off the lists of proto-noir: there are no uncertainties in its world, only just deserts. The social dimensions of crime, the dust-bowl desperations of the country recede before the reassurance of the rectitude of the law. Joe Cameron could have hitched himself as far westward as California, but he would never have found himself on the lost highways of Detour, the shifting spaces of noir where staying in your lane never guarantees they won't move away the road. Tourneur would investigate them for RKO, but MGM wasn't even interested in the map. The photography by Clyde De Vinna and Paul C. Vogel has some nice, cheap, low-key set-ups when it isn't being Traveltalks for Prisons. The arithmetic lesson was done better in Fritz Lang's You and Me (1938). Let Tom Neal rest; the ghost in this picture is how much talent it leaves lifeless on the screen. This crime brought to you by my known backers at Patreon.
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Not every black-and-white crime picture is film noir, but some of them really make sure you know it.
I can take this style of semidocumentary, self-congratulating movie that kisses the ass of the government and/or security forces if the story keeps some sort of grit and nuance to make it interesting (like "Port of New York", or "T-men", or "Apenas un delincuente").
And I have always wanted to rip the official voiceover right off T-Men. On the bright side, I have never seen Apenas un delincuente, so thank you for reminding me of its existence. It got a restoration from the Film Noir Foundation a few years ago.
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for nothing more than sticking it to the law and order that threw him off freight trains and pinched him for vagrancy and never kept him from starving. --and this. Curse you, meaningless law-and-order!
the go-for-broke gruesomeness with which Joe turns the spark-splashing acetylene on his extortionist --On the other hand: Eeep!
The problem is that in between these two points of hard-boiled interest come forty minutes of informercial for the American penal system Oh God, preserve me.
As explained by the superintendent who shares her movie's scorn for subtext, "You're here to be helped—although you don't seem to realize it." --TEXT AND SUPERTEXT ONLY, BABY.
Such a relief, don't you just want to throw a brick? --Laughing and laughing.
Thank you so much for this American example of rehabilitation and reeducation and the iron beneficence of the state. Now how about seeing to that hunger problem, eh, most just and most righteous state?
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I meant to watch some kind of utterly unredeeming noir to chase this movie with, but instead I had a wholesome evening with my parents and my niece and the twins. There's always tomorrow without social importance!
--On the other hand: Eeep!
The Crime Does Not Pay attitude toward violence is one of those quintessentially Hollywood double standards where it's a bad thing to represent on the screen unless it's in service of a moral lesson, in which case, what the heck, go ahead and blowtorch some dude in the face! It has produced helpless snickers in me and
Oh God, preserve me.
And I like narratives about people discovering and becoming their better selves! But not when it's like watching them reprogrammed into it.
--TEXT AND SUPERTEXT ONLY, BABY.
I laughed. And then I read this line to
Thank you so much for this American example of rehabilitation and reeducation and the iron beneficence of the state. Now how about seeing to that hunger problem, eh, most just and most righteous state?
It's killing. I actually feel for the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons whose conversation with former AG Homer S. Cummings bookends the picture because he was James V. Bennett and he was a sincere advocate for prison reform who opposed capital punishment and solitary confinement and argued over and over in his published writings and public addresses that prisons should be a kind of safety net for people who needed help rather than a self-fulfilling excuse to hurt them further. He cared about rehabilitation and reintegration and prevention rather than punishment; he had a wide experience of the horrible things that people do to one another and remained adamantly skeptical of writing off anyone's humanity. Prisoners were to him an index of a society's failings, not an individual's sins. He doesn't seem to have altered these beliefs over almost three decades as a prison administrator. It didn't make him a plaster saint, but it did make me think that he would have blown several fuses over the current state of prisons for profit and three-strikes laws and I have trouble imagining that the scene in Alcatraz met with his approval; he spent most of his career trying to shut it down as inhumane. He couldn't close the gulf between his restorative ideals and the retributive practices of American justice, but he keenly felt the difference. They All Come Out doesn't even seem to recognize that there is one. It's just so much moral cardboard.
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... I have a friend who worked as a care provider for mentally challenged adults for years, and man, the abuse in that system of everyone by everyone, just DEPRESSING. The employees are paid shit and poorly trained and overworked. The managers are paid shit and overworked and told to make the impossible happen. The clients are often neglected and/or abused. All because society really doesn't care two hoots about this population, would like to not acknowledge its existence, and consequently doesn't allocate funds for it. And then you think about the other groups for whom the same holds: prisoners, the very old and very sick--if they're not fabulously wealthy, people with substance abuse problems, mentally ill people, etc. UGH.
And people like my friend who worked in that system, if they try to do a good job, they end up *literally* punished by the system, because the way it's chivied and staggered and lurched its way forward is precisely through all the abuse and tacit workarounds and so on. UGH
.... uh, that got dark. On a lighter note, my text-and-supertext remark was inspired by the navy recruiter in this Simpsons sketch talking about the three levels of messaging.
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I thought you would know them. I am sorry it is still so hard.
All because society really doesn't care two hoots about this population, would like to not acknowledge its existence, and consequently doesn't allocate funds for it.
Bennett in the '30's was pointing out that in terms of strict economy, it is monetarily more efficient to fund rehabilitation programs than to keep people locked up! Which I am sure means that he wasn't the first to notice, but either way it is not an argument we should be having a hundred years later. The other thing this conversation makes me think about is the saga of Boston's Long Island Bridge, which would have been rebuilt by now—along with the addiction recovery campus it should lead to—if not for a holotype of not-in-our-back-yardism. Instead we have the crisis at Mass and Cass. I don't understand why it frightens some people so much if some other people aren't getting enough hurt.
.... uh, that got dark. On a lighter note, my text-and-supertext remark was inspired by the navy recruiter in this Simpsons sketch talking about the three levels of messaging.
It's what it is. But I'd never seen that Simpsons sketch and it's delightful. "Hey, you! Join the Navy!"
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I'd never seen any of his pre-RKO movies! He had directed some features in France, but in Hollywood he had to work his way back up from shorts and second unit work. They All Come Out was his English-language feature debut. It did not secure him a spot on MGM's A-list, for which we can all be grateful. He did direct a Crime Does Not Pay short that I want to see, however, because it includes Dwight Frye as an arsonist.
I think Caged is the perfect response.
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That is some _1984_ nightmare fuel, a decade early.
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It is just a little bit, in almost so many words, goodthink.
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