I figured there had been a lot of dudes in noir around here lately, so it was time for some women.
In characteristic fashion, I am beginning my survey of Ida Lupino's noirs at the wrong end: Private Hell 36 (1954) is the last of the movies she made under the auspices of the Filmakers, the production company she had formed in 1949 with her then-husband Collier Young. By the end of the eight-film run, she and Young had divorced—he was remarried to Joan Fontaine, with whom Lupino co-starred in The Bigamist (1953), while she had paired up with Howard Duff, with whom she co-stars here—and while she remained active in TV, Lupino would not direct another feature film until 1965's The Trouble with Angels and then no more after that. Earlier in her career she had joked that as a director she was the "poor man's Don Siegel," as she had once been labeled the "poor man's Bette Davis" in her B-years at Warners, so it feels wryly apropos that Siegel himself should direct her in Private Hell 36. She co-wrote the screenplay with Young. The resulting film is rough around the edges and it doesn't have a lot of money, but you could say the same for several of its characters. Where it counts, it delivers. You can't say that of all of them, and they know it.
The plot is as procedural as it gets: two L.A. cops on the trail of a hot New York $300,000 wind up stealing some of it, after which their friendship fractures and their personal lives show the strain and it all ends in perfidy in a trailer park, with only a dubiously restorative moral to paper over the latest cracks in the postwar dream. All the nuance comes out in the characters themselves, their pairing and patterning against one another, and the interlocking performances of the actors who play them. Detective Jack Farnham (Duff) is the kind of good cop who gets described as a boy scout, a serious straight arrow with a loving blonde wife (Dorothy Malone), a cute baby girl (Bridget Duff, Howard's real-life daughter with Lupino), and a tree-shaded house in the suburbs (I think it's a TV set). He has college football shoulders and a terse, tough voice, just saved from woodenness by a dry, surprising sense of humor. Smoother and less square, his partner Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) isn't crooked yet, but he's pliable—introduced over the credits with a bone-crunching fight in the drugstore he disturbed mid-robbery, he exchanges fire with one perp and collars another, but before we can fix on him as a hero, we watch him land three hard, unnecessary blows on the robber he just carried with him through the shattered glass of the storefront onto the sidewalk, Cal uppermost and pile-driving like the break-in was personal. Back at the station, he's not bothered by the fatal shooting he just committed any more than he's bothered by the news that a fellow officer less quick on the draw just traded his shield for a harp: "Ah, stop taking it so hard. He wasn't your brother." His sharp look when his partner turns somber over his own chances in the line of duty reassures us he's not a sociopath, but he's really making up for it in shallowness, freshening up for a date in the station locker room while griping about the wear and tear of justice on his brand-new suit. Admittedly he's got some cause for vanity with Cochran's thickly combed black hair and soulful, forceful brows, but that offhand, establishing self-centeredness is the reason we're not even surprised to find Cal shoving $80,000 in his pockets after he and Jack accidentally run their prime suspect off a closed road during a high-speed pursuit. A man's dead at the wheel, but who cares when the air's fluttering with hundred-dollar bills like ticker tape and confetti? Jack protests, but misses his moment to correct course before the rest of the team shows up, and the next thing he knows Cal's got their illicit finder's fee stashed in the private hell of the title, Trailer #36 of the Birmingham Trailer Park.
As with all good tales of the underworld, chiasmus ensues. Duff has one of those kite-boned, freckly all-American faces that the viewer might be tempted to take as a moral compass, but he has worried eyebrows and his mouth twists easily in on itself; it doesn't take much to make him look bewildered, indecisive, behind the eight-ball. In fact, Jack's guilt crashes him almost immediately into distance and drunkenness, blundering around his nice middle-class, magazine-glossy house like a dangerous stranger, downing whisky like soda over dinner while his wife covers with bright strained nerves for his jagged sneers and silence. Trawling for their suspect at the Hollywood Park Racetrack, he gazed at all the cash changing hands around him with a kind of disapproving awe and then lost two bucks betting on glue on the hoof: Cal's claim that he got just as greedy after the road accident is hard to refute. We heard him in his first scene with Malone's Francey, half-joking about liking his job "except on payday." But he doesn't touch the money once he has it, and he doesn't make a move to return it, either. He just hangs between inactions, compromised enough to feel bad about it, not bent enough to do him any good, and sinking in his own estimation and the audience's all the while. On the rising side of the figure, however much we might expect Cal's chemistry with the caustic lounge singer played by Lupino—Lili Marlowe of the obviously phony name, all conversational sharp elbows and mockingly unsubtle mentions of diamonds—to be the hook that pulls him deeper into crime, their relationship comes to look like the one true thing about him, the exception to his rule of reliable self-interest. The scene in which he unlaces Lili's halter top and gives her shoulders a massage is sexy to the limits of the Production Code, but it's also kind: it's late, she's tired and achy, and the warmth of his big, capable hands on her naked skin doesn't lead to lovemaking, but to an important piece of conversation. She brushes off sweet talk with her usual vinegar: "You know, somewhere in my dim past I seem to have heard this before." Cal shrugs, uninsulted: "I've said it before—to all sizes and all shapes. Only with you I mean it. Don't ask me why." He made her coffee and tucked his jacket over her for a blanket. He ties the strings of her top back up again before they kiss. They are comfortably intimate; they share the same wavelength of tough, dirty, careless wit, as if constantly vying for the most hardboiled line. We can tell she's falling for him because she talks so lightly about taking her act to Las Vegas and we can tell he's fallen for her because when she inquires what's to keep her in L.A., he all but shouts, not at all coolly or casually, "Me!" Their relationship is characteristically, sour-sweetly summarized by the one number we hear Lili perform at the Emerald Club, a Dietrich-ish warning called "Didn't You Know?"
I want you to know
That I could never feel as others do
And even though I may kiss you
I could always let you go
I've told my heart that I'll never fall in love
Didn't you know?
She addresses this sally of anti-romance directly to Cal, with affection and challenge; he looks back with the closest thing we've seen to sincerity on that normally cocky face, curiously open and content. Whatever they have between them is adult and leveling, sometime as cracklingly coded as screwball and sometimes blissfully crude. And doomed, of course, but that isn't Lili's fault.
I was familiar with Collier Young as the story author for my beloved Act of Violence (1948); learning that Lupino was involved in the early stages of the production made even more sense of the way that movie sees women, especially Mary Astor's unsentimental streetwalker and the unexpected alliance between the girlfriend and the wife of two men devastatingly locked in the trauma of their past. Private Hell 36 sets up a similar trick with its female leads. From everything the film shows us of Francey Farnham, she's a model housewife of her class and generation, with checked curtains in the kitchen and ornamental china in the dining room and a sleeveless nightie and a cigarette while she waits up for her husband at night; she looks good in an apron and a pageboy flip, cooking spaghetti for her husband's friends and showing off the kid. Given Lili's general allergy to domesticity ("Rice is for eating, not throwing"), the two women look slated to clash, but they genuinely seem to like each other. Lili helps with the dishes after dinner, duly admires the curly-headed moppet, makes plans for a girls' day out and remarks to Cal on the drive home that it's "too bad, people like that not getting along," meaning it even as she's sussing out the reasons Jack was loaded and uncommunicative and Francey stressed. For her part, when her husband rather hypocritically prevents her from bringing their daughter out at dinner, as though Cal's presence is some kind of moral contaminant, Francey leads Lili firmly into Bridget's bedroom; she doesn't bat an eye seeing Lili swing her bare feet up into Cal's lap for a massage any more than she minds Cal giving her an affectionate squeeze and a peck on the cheek on his way out the door. It's a clever alignment. Another film might make it reductive, così fan tutte proof that a wife's just a tramp with a ring on, Francey's house-pride as interchangeable and materialistic as Lili's big-spending dreams. If anything, it points us to look more closely at Lili—what she actually does, not what she says with that dry, weary flippancy, her wisecrack armor that she's polished and sharpened since she was eighteen and unhappily married for the first and only time. "Sure I was broke," she retorts to Cal the one time they really fight, "I still am! But I didn't have to answer to anybody and that's the way I like it!" She lights up despite herself when he proposes a trip to Acapulco, but the minute she senses there's something shady behind the sudden cash flow, she drops all pretenses of gold-digging: "I think maybe I don't need that diamond bracelet. I'm kind of used to having you around. I don't want anything to spoil that." Don't even bother wondering if she's a femme fatale. If you won't have a film noir without one, the best bet in view is Cal.
Seriously, it's not Johnny Eager (1942) or anything, but the film returns again and again to the idea of Cal and Jack as not just partners but lovers, specifically the poisoned lovers of the stereotypical noir romance, the one amoral and the other weak. This grinds my gears with a female/male couple, but gets my attention with two men, and Lupino and Young's dialogue really holds the capslock down on the subtext. In their first scene together, Jack responds to a particularly callous remark of Cal's with a deadpanned "Sometimes I wonder why we go steady" and Cal's blameless, teasing comeback—"Because I'm irresistible!"—will prove to be entirely true. Once the stolen eighty grand has started to eat at Jack's self-respect, Lili notes the friction between the partners by asking, "You two had a lovers' spat?" and later sighs, after Cal alleges a phone call from Jack as his reason for ditching her mid-date, "First time I ever lost a man to a man." This is neither feminine intuition nor feminine jealousy; the partner of a colleague Jack punched into a locker for ribbing him about his finances snarls at Cal as they break up the fight, "Your boyfriend's a little overtrained!" Even the language Cal uses to justify involving Jack in the theft is not without its sexual overtones: "You wanted it as much as I did—it was written all over your face." I wish I could say this dynamic paid off in the finale, but it doesn't, any more than the film ever returns to Francey left alone in her modern living room or Lili by the door of her clutter-furnished SRO. The ending of Private Hell 36 comes up faster and messier than I thought it would and leaves an awkward smear of sermonizing on the windshield. I guess it's some kind of milestone that I have finally seen a film noir where I object to a character surviving, but I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't feel that the PCA had swooped in and saved him from the deserved consequences of his own vacuity. There's tragedy in the shootout and perhaps even in the poverty-line, pre-fab metaphor of the trailer park, photographed with appropriate bleak shadows by Burnett Guffey, but all of my sympathy was running the wrong way to the wrap-up. There is also an especially sententious voiceover. Please stop with the sententious voiceovers. I've hit my quota.
But there is Ida Lupino, who is really who I watched this movie for, with her wide-set eyes and her vermouth voice, batting back pity and flattery with equal effortless contempt, but not quite done with dreaming of someday, somehow, having something real. I was going to say I'd have given it to her if it were my movie, but it was hers and she didn't. Never the easy way out. This number brought to you by my private backers at Patreon.
In characteristic fashion, I am beginning my survey of Ida Lupino's noirs at the wrong end: Private Hell 36 (1954) is the last of the movies she made under the auspices of the Filmakers, the production company she had formed in 1949 with her then-husband Collier Young. By the end of the eight-film run, she and Young had divorced—he was remarried to Joan Fontaine, with whom Lupino co-starred in The Bigamist (1953), while she had paired up with Howard Duff, with whom she co-stars here—and while she remained active in TV, Lupino would not direct another feature film until 1965's The Trouble with Angels and then no more after that. Earlier in her career she had joked that as a director she was the "poor man's Don Siegel," as she had once been labeled the "poor man's Bette Davis" in her B-years at Warners, so it feels wryly apropos that Siegel himself should direct her in Private Hell 36. She co-wrote the screenplay with Young. The resulting film is rough around the edges and it doesn't have a lot of money, but you could say the same for several of its characters. Where it counts, it delivers. You can't say that of all of them, and they know it.
The plot is as procedural as it gets: two L.A. cops on the trail of a hot New York $300,000 wind up stealing some of it, after which their friendship fractures and their personal lives show the strain and it all ends in perfidy in a trailer park, with only a dubiously restorative moral to paper over the latest cracks in the postwar dream. All the nuance comes out in the characters themselves, their pairing and patterning against one another, and the interlocking performances of the actors who play them. Detective Jack Farnham (Duff) is the kind of good cop who gets described as a boy scout, a serious straight arrow with a loving blonde wife (Dorothy Malone), a cute baby girl (Bridget Duff, Howard's real-life daughter with Lupino), and a tree-shaded house in the suburbs (I think it's a TV set). He has college football shoulders and a terse, tough voice, just saved from woodenness by a dry, surprising sense of humor. Smoother and less square, his partner Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) isn't crooked yet, but he's pliable—introduced over the credits with a bone-crunching fight in the drugstore he disturbed mid-robbery, he exchanges fire with one perp and collars another, but before we can fix on him as a hero, we watch him land three hard, unnecessary blows on the robber he just carried with him through the shattered glass of the storefront onto the sidewalk, Cal uppermost and pile-driving like the break-in was personal. Back at the station, he's not bothered by the fatal shooting he just committed any more than he's bothered by the news that a fellow officer less quick on the draw just traded his shield for a harp: "Ah, stop taking it so hard. He wasn't your brother." His sharp look when his partner turns somber over his own chances in the line of duty reassures us he's not a sociopath, but he's really making up for it in shallowness, freshening up for a date in the station locker room while griping about the wear and tear of justice on his brand-new suit. Admittedly he's got some cause for vanity with Cochran's thickly combed black hair and soulful, forceful brows, but that offhand, establishing self-centeredness is the reason we're not even surprised to find Cal shoving $80,000 in his pockets after he and Jack accidentally run their prime suspect off a closed road during a high-speed pursuit. A man's dead at the wheel, but who cares when the air's fluttering with hundred-dollar bills like ticker tape and confetti? Jack protests, but misses his moment to correct course before the rest of the team shows up, and the next thing he knows Cal's got their illicit finder's fee stashed in the private hell of the title, Trailer #36 of the Birmingham Trailer Park.
As with all good tales of the underworld, chiasmus ensues. Duff has one of those kite-boned, freckly all-American faces that the viewer might be tempted to take as a moral compass, but he has worried eyebrows and his mouth twists easily in on itself; it doesn't take much to make him look bewildered, indecisive, behind the eight-ball. In fact, Jack's guilt crashes him almost immediately into distance and drunkenness, blundering around his nice middle-class, magazine-glossy house like a dangerous stranger, downing whisky like soda over dinner while his wife covers with bright strained nerves for his jagged sneers and silence. Trawling for their suspect at the Hollywood Park Racetrack, he gazed at all the cash changing hands around him with a kind of disapproving awe and then lost two bucks betting on glue on the hoof: Cal's claim that he got just as greedy after the road accident is hard to refute. We heard him in his first scene with Malone's Francey, half-joking about liking his job "except on payday." But he doesn't touch the money once he has it, and he doesn't make a move to return it, either. He just hangs between inactions, compromised enough to feel bad about it, not bent enough to do him any good, and sinking in his own estimation and the audience's all the while. On the rising side of the figure, however much we might expect Cal's chemistry with the caustic lounge singer played by Lupino—Lili Marlowe of the obviously phony name, all conversational sharp elbows and mockingly unsubtle mentions of diamonds—to be the hook that pulls him deeper into crime, their relationship comes to look like the one true thing about him, the exception to his rule of reliable self-interest. The scene in which he unlaces Lili's halter top and gives her shoulders a massage is sexy to the limits of the Production Code, but it's also kind: it's late, she's tired and achy, and the warmth of his big, capable hands on her naked skin doesn't lead to lovemaking, but to an important piece of conversation. She brushes off sweet talk with her usual vinegar: "You know, somewhere in my dim past I seem to have heard this before." Cal shrugs, uninsulted: "I've said it before—to all sizes and all shapes. Only with you I mean it. Don't ask me why." He made her coffee and tucked his jacket over her for a blanket. He ties the strings of her top back up again before they kiss. They are comfortably intimate; they share the same wavelength of tough, dirty, careless wit, as if constantly vying for the most hardboiled line. We can tell she's falling for him because she talks so lightly about taking her act to Las Vegas and we can tell he's fallen for her because when she inquires what's to keep her in L.A., he all but shouts, not at all coolly or casually, "Me!" Their relationship is characteristically, sour-sweetly summarized by the one number we hear Lili perform at the Emerald Club, a Dietrich-ish warning called "Didn't You Know?"
I want you to know
That I could never feel as others do
And even though I may kiss you
I could always let you go
I've told my heart that I'll never fall in love
Didn't you know?
She addresses this sally of anti-romance directly to Cal, with affection and challenge; he looks back with the closest thing we've seen to sincerity on that normally cocky face, curiously open and content. Whatever they have between them is adult and leveling, sometime as cracklingly coded as screwball and sometimes blissfully crude. And doomed, of course, but that isn't Lili's fault.
I was familiar with Collier Young as the story author for my beloved Act of Violence (1948); learning that Lupino was involved in the early stages of the production made even more sense of the way that movie sees women, especially Mary Astor's unsentimental streetwalker and the unexpected alliance between the girlfriend and the wife of two men devastatingly locked in the trauma of their past. Private Hell 36 sets up a similar trick with its female leads. From everything the film shows us of Francey Farnham, she's a model housewife of her class and generation, with checked curtains in the kitchen and ornamental china in the dining room and a sleeveless nightie and a cigarette while she waits up for her husband at night; she looks good in an apron and a pageboy flip, cooking spaghetti for her husband's friends and showing off the kid. Given Lili's general allergy to domesticity ("Rice is for eating, not throwing"), the two women look slated to clash, but they genuinely seem to like each other. Lili helps with the dishes after dinner, duly admires the curly-headed moppet, makes plans for a girls' day out and remarks to Cal on the drive home that it's "too bad, people like that not getting along," meaning it even as she's sussing out the reasons Jack was loaded and uncommunicative and Francey stressed. For her part, when her husband rather hypocritically prevents her from bringing their daughter out at dinner, as though Cal's presence is some kind of moral contaminant, Francey leads Lili firmly into Bridget's bedroom; she doesn't bat an eye seeing Lili swing her bare feet up into Cal's lap for a massage any more than she minds Cal giving her an affectionate squeeze and a peck on the cheek on his way out the door. It's a clever alignment. Another film might make it reductive, così fan tutte proof that a wife's just a tramp with a ring on, Francey's house-pride as interchangeable and materialistic as Lili's big-spending dreams. If anything, it points us to look more closely at Lili—what she actually does, not what she says with that dry, weary flippancy, her wisecrack armor that she's polished and sharpened since she was eighteen and unhappily married for the first and only time. "Sure I was broke," she retorts to Cal the one time they really fight, "I still am! But I didn't have to answer to anybody and that's the way I like it!" She lights up despite herself when he proposes a trip to Acapulco, but the minute she senses there's something shady behind the sudden cash flow, she drops all pretenses of gold-digging: "I think maybe I don't need that diamond bracelet. I'm kind of used to having you around. I don't want anything to spoil that." Don't even bother wondering if she's a femme fatale. If you won't have a film noir without one, the best bet in view is Cal.
Seriously, it's not Johnny Eager (1942) or anything, but the film returns again and again to the idea of Cal and Jack as not just partners but lovers, specifically the poisoned lovers of the stereotypical noir romance, the one amoral and the other weak. This grinds my gears with a female/male couple, but gets my attention with two men, and Lupino and Young's dialogue really holds the capslock down on the subtext. In their first scene together, Jack responds to a particularly callous remark of Cal's with a deadpanned "Sometimes I wonder why we go steady" and Cal's blameless, teasing comeback—"Because I'm irresistible!"—will prove to be entirely true. Once the stolen eighty grand has started to eat at Jack's self-respect, Lili notes the friction between the partners by asking, "You two had a lovers' spat?" and later sighs, after Cal alleges a phone call from Jack as his reason for ditching her mid-date, "First time I ever lost a man to a man." This is neither feminine intuition nor feminine jealousy; the partner of a colleague Jack punched into a locker for ribbing him about his finances snarls at Cal as they break up the fight, "Your boyfriend's a little overtrained!" Even the language Cal uses to justify involving Jack in the theft is not without its sexual overtones: "You wanted it as much as I did—it was written all over your face." I wish I could say this dynamic paid off in the finale, but it doesn't, any more than the film ever returns to Francey left alone in her modern living room or Lili by the door of her clutter-furnished SRO. The ending of Private Hell 36 comes up faster and messier than I thought it would and leaves an awkward smear of sermonizing on the windshield. I guess it's some kind of milestone that I have finally seen a film noir where I object to a character surviving, but I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't feel that the PCA had swooped in and saved him from the deserved consequences of his own vacuity. There's tragedy in the shootout and perhaps even in the poverty-line, pre-fab metaphor of the trailer park, photographed with appropriate bleak shadows by Burnett Guffey, but all of my sympathy was running the wrong way to the wrap-up. There is also an especially sententious voiceover. Please stop with the sententious voiceovers. I've hit my quota.
But there is Ida Lupino, who is really who I watched this movie for, with her wide-set eyes and her vermouth voice, batting back pity and flattery with equal effortless contempt, but not quite done with dreaming of someday, somehow, having something real. I was going to say I'd have given it to her if it were my movie, but it was hers and she didn't. Never the easy way out. This number brought to you by my private backers at Patreon.
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