The Brattle showed its double feature in the wrong order on Monday night. Or maybe we just came in at the wrong point in the bill. Either way, the second film sent out us out cheerfully snarking, but the opener is the one I'm still thinking about more than twenty-four hours later. I appear to have spent 2600 words attempting to articulate why.
Crack-Up (1946) is fun, but it gets silly in the second half despite a promising start—Pat O'Brien as a former art historian with the MFAA, now a free lecturer at theMet Manhattan Museum, who suffers some kind of dissociative episode and believes he was in a train accident on a commuter line out of Grand Central when in fact he was smashing around the classical wing like a bull in a shop full of Samian ware; he realizes quickly enough that he was set up to be discredited, but why? What's going on at the museum that a man of his expertise shouldn't find out? Claire Trevor gets a break from molls and fatales playing O'Brien's elegant and independently employed girlfriend, Herbert Marshall has an urbane hand in the proceedings as a man of no apparent position who yet has the authority to get the police to back off; Wallace Ford as the police backs off and does a skeptical slow burn. The cinematography is decent except when it flashes back to O'Brien's perception of the crash and then it's great. If the film had played straight with its material, it would have been a solid entry in the disbelieved protagonist mystery genre—The Lady Vanishes (1938), Foreign Correspondent (1940), eventually Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)—but instead it decoys and red-herrings and ends up explaining itself with drugs and hypnosis, which is just dumb, while relegating the payoff of the legitimately compelling art/insurance fraud plot to the literal background. I was seeing the double feature with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants and we enjoyed Crack-Up all the way through, but it really is like watching two slightly grating halves of different movies and the second is a lot stupider. We walked out wanting the third option where the protagonist actually talks to the obviously trustworthy confidante halfway through.
Act of Violence (1948) has its clunky moments, but all together it's a knockout. Robert Ryan is simultaneously a horror-show monster and a sympathetic member of the walking wounded, Van Heflin's hollow hero is the best I've ever seen him, and Mary Astor slams her supporting part out of the park as an aging prostitute who draws the protagonist into a Dickensian underworld in the middle of Los Angeles. The picture opens with no credits, just an echt-noir sequence of a man in a trenchcoat and a fedora taking a gun from a dresser, packing a bag, catching a bus from shadow-spiked New York City to sun-drenched California while the title card comes up like a promise. This is Ryan, his face craggy and corrugated, expressionless except for its tightened eyes. He's six foot four and the camera shoots him like he's eight feet tall. He drags one leg with an audible rasp, a snakelike signature. Disembarking in idyllic Santa Lisa, he halts briefly at a crosswalk while a Memorial Day parade passes by, all proud brass and flags; he is the war's unwelcome shadow, cutting through the celebratory ranks at his own disruptive, disabled pace. We saw the name of his quarry in a phone book: "Enley, Frank R." Now we meet the man himself (Heflin), a successful building contractor with an adoring young wife and towheaded toddler being cheered by his community for his war record and his work on the new housing development, one of those pre-fab model layouts that mushroomed all over the country after World War II. He's liked and respected, competent and loving. He's able-bodied and he has a nice smile. He's about to take a fishing trip with his next door neighbor, for God's sake—what could be more ordinary and decent than that? Heflin has a boyish, densely angled face; it can look quite different from different angles, a trick of expression and asymmetry that the camera will exploit in scenes to come. It's all playful affection with his wife as he packs for the weekend, a teasing game over whether he'll take his old bomber jacket for the weather. It's all carefree holiday up at Redwood Lake, where the still-nameless gunman stalks him as silently and efficiently as a Terminator among fantastically sculpted granite boulders, the oarlocks of his boat creaking with the tell-tale rhythm of his lame step. It's all spoilers from here or I can't talk about anything that makes this film interesting.
( You don't know what made him the way he is. I do. )
As of this post, Act of Violence appears to be available on DVD only as part of a collection, backed with the worthy, Boston-shot Mystery Street (1950). If you run into Crack-Up some late night on TV, you won't lose too many IQ points by it. What else can I say? I saw both of these movies with a half-blinding headache and I regret nothing. My immediate plans involve sleep. This haunting brought to you by my complicated backers at Patreon.
Crack-Up (1946) is fun, but it gets silly in the second half despite a promising start—Pat O'Brien as a former art historian with the MFAA, now a free lecturer at the
skygiants and we enjoyed Crack-Up all the way through, but it really is like watching two slightly grating halves of different movies and the second is a lot stupider. We walked out wanting the third option where the protagonist actually talks to the obviously trustworthy confidante halfway through. Act of Violence (1948) has its clunky moments, but all together it's a knockout. Robert Ryan is simultaneously a horror-show monster and a sympathetic member of the walking wounded, Van Heflin's hollow hero is the best I've ever seen him, and Mary Astor slams her supporting part out of the park as an aging prostitute who draws the protagonist into a Dickensian underworld in the middle of Los Angeles. The picture opens with no credits, just an echt-noir sequence of a man in a trenchcoat and a fedora taking a gun from a dresser, packing a bag, catching a bus from shadow-spiked New York City to sun-drenched California while the title card comes up like a promise. This is Ryan, his face craggy and corrugated, expressionless except for its tightened eyes. He's six foot four and the camera shoots him like he's eight feet tall. He drags one leg with an audible rasp, a snakelike signature. Disembarking in idyllic Santa Lisa, he halts briefly at a crosswalk while a Memorial Day parade passes by, all proud brass and flags; he is the war's unwelcome shadow, cutting through the celebratory ranks at his own disruptive, disabled pace. We saw the name of his quarry in a phone book: "Enley, Frank R." Now we meet the man himself (Heflin), a successful building contractor with an adoring young wife and towheaded toddler being cheered by his community for his war record and his work on the new housing development, one of those pre-fab model layouts that mushroomed all over the country after World War II. He's liked and respected, competent and loving. He's able-bodied and he has a nice smile. He's about to take a fishing trip with his next door neighbor, for God's sake—what could be more ordinary and decent than that? Heflin has a boyish, densely angled face; it can look quite different from different angles, a trick of expression and asymmetry that the camera will exploit in scenes to come. It's all playful affection with his wife as he packs for the weekend, a teasing game over whether he'll take his old bomber jacket for the weather. It's all carefree holiday up at Redwood Lake, where the still-nameless gunman stalks him as silently and efficiently as a Terminator among fantastically sculpted granite boulders, the oarlocks of his boat creaking with the tell-tale rhythm of his lame step. It's all spoilers from here or I can't talk about anything that makes this film interesting.
( You don't know what made him the way he is. I do. )
As of this post, Act of Violence appears to be available on DVD only as part of a collection, backed with the worthy, Boston-shot Mystery Street (1950). If you run into Crack-Up some late night on TV, you won't lose too many IQ points by it. What else can I say? I saw both of these movies with a half-blinding headache and I regret nothing. My immediate plans involve sleep. This haunting brought to you by my complicated backers at Patreon.
