Nothing's no good
2018-10-11 06:12In one respect character actors resemble supernatural creatures or ants: once you notice them, they're everywhere. I have observed this phenomenon with Denholm Elliott, Ralph Richardson, and Roscoe Karns among others, and now it's happening with Whit Bissell. I watched Raw Deal (1948) and He Walked by Night (1948) on the common factor of Anthony Mann, who directed almost nothing but noir in the '40's before switching to Westerns in the '50's and epics the decade after that, and discovered I had also booked myself a double feature of skinny stock player about one rung up the noir food chain from Elisha Cook Jr. I am not actually complaining.
I side-eye the generic pulpiness of film noir titles often enough that I should give Raw Deal's credit for crystalline relevance: the action starts in medias double-cross, as neither the protagonist nor her time-serving boyfriend know that the one-time partner who let him take the fall for the "Spokane Mills job" is now setting him up for a jailbreak, not so that he can make the long-delayed rendezvous in Crescent City and collect his rightful $50,000, but so that he can get himself shot, in an elegantly prescient form of swatting, in either the escape attempt itself or the ensuing manhunt. "Why not?" Raymond Burr's Rick Coyle shrugs, a sleek hulk in a silk dressing gown who plays with fire the way other villains stroke the fur of cats. "It's legal." It's just not foolproof, which is how Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe) ends up alive and pissed-off and working his way down the Pacific coast in a stolen Plymouth de Luxe and an increasingly volatile triangle with longtime girl Pat Cameron (Claire Trevor) and paralegal turned hostage turned new flame Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt). The viewer may be forgiven for expecting a familiar dichotomy: the women as devil and angel on the shoulders of our hard-driving, once-sensitive hero, moll and crusader, criminal past and fresh start, and the denouement of Joe's vengeance dependent on which romance is uppermost in his thoughts at the time. The viewer should be reassured that when I called Pat the protagonist of this picture, I meant it. She's the film's narrator, her hushed voiceover more poetic and more fatalistic than her tough dame's dialogue, as if she's honest only where nobody else can hear; she's the antihero at its heart, afraid of losing the man she loves to a younger, cleaner rival and hardening herself to the prospect of doing whatever it takes to clear the field, even if that means being complicit, like the cruel but craven Rick, in murder at second hand. She has a warily brazen, easily sneering face; we could believe it of her. She's not any more ahead of the eight-ball than the rest of the cast. There are passports in Pat's bag and two tickets to Panama if they can make the boat from San Francisco in three days, but every stage of the journey seems to bend back toward Corkscrew Alley, the fog-shrouded slum street where Pat and Joe grew up and where Rick still holds court, a second triangle of betrayal overlapping the first. Every sign of regeneration on Joe's part seems inspired not by Pat's devotion ("I'd always been more than ready to take him at any terms") but Ann's disillusionment ("I may have romanticized you before, but now I know you—you're something from under a rock!"). By the time he's brutally slugging it out with a contract killer in the back room of a taxidermist's while Pat with her bad ankle waits nervously at a neon-lit motel and Ann with shaking hands scrambles for a gun that went spinning across the antler-shadowed floor, it's beginning to look as though no one in this story is going to get what they wanted. We can't claim the title card didn't warn us.
Bissell's part in this one-way ride is fleeting—he's onscreen for three minutes if he's lucky—but memorable. Hunted up into the mountains where our main characters are hiding out for the night, his nameless wife-murderer comes scrambling to the door of their safe house begging for sanctuary and gets it thanks to the pity in Ann's eyes, but once inside the knowledge of what he's done drives him out again to commit suicide by cop, crying to his dead wife, "It's no good without you, May, it's no good!" He's a thin, panting little scarecrow in a torn denim jacket, covered in broken pine needles and sweat, and the bullets knock him down like a rag doll. He's like the ending of some other noir that the characters have stumbled through on the way to their own. Ann interprets him as a cautionary foreshadowing of Joe, a similarly lethal pack of police on his trail: "That could be you." Really he points forward to Pat and her crisis of second thoughts as the luminous hands of a clock tick round her darkened reflection and Joe talks haltingly, hopefully, of the "fresh, decent" life the two of them could build in South America: at what cost? What value to her, knowing how she got it? The murderer can't take back his crime; all he can do is die for it. Pat has the chance to undo hers, but the forfeit will be the life she's always dreamed of. If a good girl can feel rage, a bad girl can feel regret, but only in melodramas are nick-of-time rescues guaranteed. Speaking of women and noir, having recently seen The Big Heat (1953) I could not ignore the scene in which Rick heaves a dish of flaming brandy onto a woman who displeases him. It's a cruder take than Lang's overall, though more immediately shocking in the sense that the point-of-view camera makes the audience appear to get the fire in the face; the woman is not a character, merely a one-scene demonstration of the badness of this particular bad man. It's not the dominant note in the movie's attitude toward women, which means it leaves less of a bad taste with me, but I can't not wonder if Lang saw in it something he could work with—if so, The Big Heat really should have been Gloria Grahame's movie. Raw Deal is Trevor's and the better for it.
He Walked by Night is a curate's egg so neatly swirled between the two sides of its nature that I would call it a curate's yin-yang if that didn't sound incredibly rude. The premise is a compact lesson in the shadowing of crime drama into film noir: when the seemingly random, fatal shooting of an off-duty policeman produces a lot of witnesses but no leads, the LAPD throws out its standard dragnet with description, and almost at once what started as a simple if personal murder case escalates into something like a lethal snipe hunt, a will-o'-the-wisp of break-ins and hold-ups and black-market electronics resale that never leaves fingerprints, never shows itself to anyone but its targets, never leaves them identifying the same face twice. A promising lead blows up into a firefight; a stakeout only lets slip to their quarry what's up. The killer isn't the kind to play games with his pursuers, but he is extremely serious about not being caught. It's edge-of-the-seat stuff, in summary. In real time, I don't know if it's the dryness of the script or the terseness of the characterizations, but even knowing this film was the direct precursor of the Dragnet franchise and I owe it a debt of gratitude for transitively inspiring the straight-faced mathematical crime-fighting of Square One TV's Mathnet (1987–92), I have trouble working up much investment in the procedural portions of its plot. The cops are simply not very interesting people to spend time with. Jack Webb in his first credited screen role makes some impression as a laconic forensic scientist who already foreshadows the more eccentric specialists of later shows (presented with a mysterious liquid found in the glove compartment of the suspect's car, he gives it a judicious tap and then, inspecting the headless stick that used to be a ball-peen hammer, pronounces it "Yep—nitroglycerin"), but otherwise the law in this movie is so vaguely embodied that I failed to memorize any of the individual officers' names and even now find myself thinking of them as "the captain" (Roy Roberts), "the partner" (James Cardwell), and "literally Lawrence Tierney's younger brother" (Scott Brady). Any suspense on their side depends strictly on the craft of the chase, which the screenplay does no favors with the inescapably stentorian narration of Reed Hadley. It's like watching someone diagram a sentence instead of letting you do it yourself. Every now and then an unclaimed modifier or prepositional phrase sneaks through: the compositing of an unknown face from a roomful of witnesses and a screenful of slides; one detective managing to "boot some sense" into another without leaving his wheelchair. Any scene with Bissell earning fourth billing with a miniature masterclass in collapsing assurance as the killer's unwitting fence, a much more sheltered and much more credulous man than he thought before the police started grilling him about that television projector he resold to its original owner and the fine-faced fellow who sold it to him showed up with a few demands of his own; he can't tell who to be more afraid of, now that his tidy world of ledgers and transistors is yawning with moral shadows and glasses-snapping slaps. But on the whole, if you want to watch this movie, I must recommend you do it for Richard Basehart.
Because he got my attention for the first time in La strada (1954), some part of me always thinks of Basehart as an Ariel of the high wire, a daredevil with the face of an angel and a trickster's equal capacity for destruction and grace; it does not fundamentally change my feelings about him to see him as a criminal who haunts the storm drains of Los Angeles and dies without giving up anything of himself, not even last words. Even without the narrator building him up as "no more than a description, a shadow of a man—mysterious, elusive, deadly," Officer Rawlins' shooter assumes a semi-supernatural dimension simply because of everything that is not known about him, everything that seems unknowable. He's medium-height, indeterminately young, very beautiful. He doesn't look tough, but he handles guns with the same casual competence with which he rebuilds a radio and tunes up a car. We get a hint of sexual kink in the possessive way he caresses an oscilloscope, but otherwise he lives quite ordinarily in an anonymous little bungalow shared only by a well-cluttered workbench and a well-loved dog. He's utterly silent when he's on his own. He's mesmerizing. He's such a cipher that all the conventions of crime fiction lead us to believe, along with the LAPD, that uncovering his true identity will crack the mystery of his life against the law, but when he's finally linked to his past, it's as empty of motive or pattern as his real name: "He was a radio technician right here in our dispatch office . . . Sort of strange. Never bothered with anyone in the department, just kept to himself. He was in line for a promotion when he got drafted . . . He never asked for his job back after the war." That's our only clue, if you even want to call it that. If anything explains the man who goes by the name of Roy Martin, it happened in that lacuna of the war, when a kid who "had no interest in anything but electronics" went off and was taught to shoot by the Signal Corps. Now he lives in his native city as if in enemy country, as much off the grid as a man on a milk run can be; he always has escape routes, weapons cached in and outside of the home; his few conversations are as carefully worded as challenge and response. He can change the papers in his wallet as easily as the license plates on his car. He performs field surgery on himself as if he's done it before. But we never know why—what teachers, what demons. Where other damaged GIs in this genre have origin stories, this one deliberately refuses reduction to any nameable trauma. Maybe there was none. It's exhilaratingly existential. He takes his secrets with him when he goes. Alas that he could not take the lawful half of his movie.
Both of these movies are beautifully shot. John Alton was one of the acknowledged masters of making chiaroscuro stand in for budget and it is wall-to-wall in Raw Deal and He Walked by Night, from obvious expressionist opportunities like shootouts in mist-swirling alleys or wet-lit sewer tunnels to the fragmenting of human bodies in low-key light that turns even the front seat of a car into a liminal space. I feel more ambivalently about the contributions of John C. Higgins, who co-scripted both productions: I am beginning to think I feel about voiceovers the way I feel about shaky-cam. Nothing here is as bad as the interrupting narrator in T-Men (1947) who punctured the most emotionally devastating moment in the film for me, but Trevor has to narrate over a scene where her face is already doing all the acting and Hadley just sounds as though the screenwriters forgot they were writing for film and not radio. I can't knock Eagle-Lion Films too hard; they were the U.S. distributors of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). I am just not sure why Anthony Mann of all directors should have been prone to voiceovers I consistently want to remove with a X-acto knife. In other words, I did not love either of these movies as I love some of their co-religionists, but they both showed me things I hadn't seen in this genre before, which is basically all I ask from my B-noir, even B-noir that is very highly rated by other people, and I am now fully prepared for the next thing I watch to contain surprise Whit Bissell even if it was made last year. This character brought to you by my shadowy backers at Patreon.
I side-eye the generic pulpiness of film noir titles often enough that I should give Raw Deal's credit for crystalline relevance: the action starts in medias double-cross, as neither the protagonist nor her time-serving boyfriend know that the one-time partner who let him take the fall for the "Spokane Mills job" is now setting him up for a jailbreak, not so that he can make the long-delayed rendezvous in Crescent City and collect his rightful $50,000, but so that he can get himself shot, in an elegantly prescient form of swatting, in either the escape attempt itself or the ensuing manhunt. "Why not?" Raymond Burr's Rick Coyle shrugs, a sleek hulk in a silk dressing gown who plays with fire the way other villains stroke the fur of cats. "It's legal." It's just not foolproof, which is how Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe) ends up alive and pissed-off and working his way down the Pacific coast in a stolen Plymouth de Luxe and an increasingly volatile triangle with longtime girl Pat Cameron (Claire Trevor) and paralegal turned hostage turned new flame Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt). The viewer may be forgiven for expecting a familiar dichotomy: the women as devil and angel on the shoulders of our hard-driving, once-sensitive hero, moll and crusader, criminal past and fresh start, and the denouement of Joe's vengeance dependent on which romance is uppermost in his thoughts at the time. The viewer should be reassured that when I called Pat the protagonist of this picture, I meant it. She's the film's narrator, her hushed voiceover more poetic and more fatalistic than her tough dame's dialogue, as if she's honest only where nobody else can hear; she's the antihero at its heart, afraid of losing the man she loves to a younger, cleaner rival and hardening herself to the prospect of doing whatever it takes to clear the field, even if that means being complicit, like the cruel but craven Rick, in murder at second hand. She has a warily brazen, easily sneering face; we could believe it of her. She's not any more ahead of the eight-ball than the rest of the cast. There are passports in Pat's bag and two tickets to Panama if they can make the boat from San Francisco in three days, but every stage of the journey seems to bend back toward Corkscrew Alley, the fog-shrouded slum street where Pat and Joe grew up and where Rick still holds court, a second triangle of betrayal overlapping the first. Every sign of regeneration on Joe's part seems inspired not by Pat's devotion ("I'd always been more than ready to take him at any terms") but Ann's disillusionment ("I may have romanticized you before, but now I know you—you're something from under a rock!"). By the time he's brutally slugging it out with a contract killer in the back room of a taxidermist's while Pat with her bad ankle waits nervously at a neon-lit motel and Ann with shaking hands scrambles for a gun that went spinning across the antler-shadowed floor, it's beginning to look as though no one in this story is going to get what they wanted. We can't claim the title card didn't warn us.
Bissell's part in this one-way ride is fleeting—he's onscreen for three minutes if he's lucky—but memorable. Hunted up into the mountains where our main characters are hiding out for the night, his nameless wife-murderer comes scrambling to the door of their safe house begging for sanctuary and gets it thanks to the pity in Ann's eyes, but once inside the knowledge of what he's done drives him out again to commit suicide by cop, crying to his dead wife, "It's no good without you, May, it's no good!" He's a thin, panting little scarecrow in a torn denim jacket, covered in broken pine needles and sweat, and the bullets knock him down like a rag doll. He's like the ending of some other noir that the characters have stumbled through on the way to their own. Ann interprets him as a cautionary foreshadowing of Joe, a similarly lethal pack of police on his trail: "That could be you." Really he points forward to Pat and her crisis of second thoughts as the luminous hands of a clock tick round her darkened reflection and Joe talks haltingly, hopefully, of the "fresh, decent" life the two of them could build in South America: at what cost? What value to her, knowing how she got it? The murderer can't take back his crime; all he can do is die for it. Pat has the chance to undo hers, but the forfeit will be the life she's always dreamed of. If a good girl can feel rage, a bad girl can feel regret, but only in melodramas are nick-of-time rescues guaranteed. Speaking of women and noir, having recently seen The Big Heat (1953) I could not ignore the scene in which Rick heaves a dish of flaming brandy onto a woman who displeases him. It's a cruder take than Lang's overall, though more immediately shocking in the sense that the point-of-view camera makes the audience appear to get the fire in the face; the woman is not a character, merely a one-scene demonstration of the badness of this particular bad man. It's not the dominant note in the movie's attitude toward women, which means it leaves less of a bad taste with me, but I can't not wonder if Lang saw in it something he could work with—if so, The Big Heat really should have been Gloria Grahame's movie. Raw Deal is Trevor's and the better for it.
He Walked by Night is a curate's egg so neatly swirled between the two sides of its nature that I would call it a curate's yin-yang if that didn't sound incredibly rude. The premise is a compact lesson in the shadowing of crime drama into film noir: when the seemingly random, fatal shooting of an off-duty policeman produces a lot of witnesses but no leads, the LAPD throws out its standard dragnet with description, and almost at once what started as a simple if personal murder case escalates into something like a lethal snipe hunt, a will-o'-the-wisp of break-ins and hold-ups and black-market electronics resale that never leaves fingerprints, never shows itself to anyone but its targets, never leaves them identifying the same face twice. A promising lead blows up into a firefight; a stakeout only lets slip to their quarry what's up. The killer isn't the kind to play games with his pursuers, but he is extremely serious about not being caught. It's edge-of-the-seat stuff, in summary. In real time, I don't know if it's the dryness of the script or the terseness of the characterizations, but even knowing this film was the direct precursor of the Dragnet franchise and I owe it a debt of gratitude for transitively inspiring the straight-faced mathematical crime-fighting of Square One TV's Mathnet (1987–92), I have trouble working up much investment in the procedural portions of its plot. The cops are simply not very interesting people to spend time with. Jack Webb in his first credited screen role makes some impression as a laconic forensic scientist who already foreshadows the more eccentric specialists of later shows (presented with a mysterious liquid found in the glove compartment of the suspect's car, he gives it a judicious tap and then, inspecting the headless stick that used to be a ball-peen hammer, pronounces it "Yep—nitroglycerin"), but otherwise the law in this movie is so vaguely embodied that I failed to memorize any of the individual officers' names and even now find myself thinking of them as "the captain" (Roy Roberts), "the partner" (James Cardwell), and "literally Lawrence Tierney's younger brother" (Scott Brady). Any suspense on their side depends strictly on the craft of the chase, which the screenplay does no favors with the inescapably stentorian narration of Reed Hadley. It's like watching someone diagram a sentence instead of letting you do it yourself. Every now and then an unclaimed modifier or prepositional phrase sneaks through: the compositing of an unknown face from a roomful of witnesses and a screenful of slides; one detective managing to "boot some sense" into another without leaving his wheelchair. Any scene with Bissell earning fourth billing with a miniature masterclass in collapsing assurance as the killer's unwitting fence, a much more sheltered and much more credulous man than he thought before the police started grilling him about that television projector he resold to its original owner and the fine-faced fellow who sold it to him showed up with a few demands of his own; he can't tell who to be more afraid of, now that his tidy world of ledgers and transistors is yawning with moral shadows and glasses-snapping slaps. But on the whole, if you want to watch this movie, I must recommend you do it for Richard Basehart.
Because he got my attention for the first time in La strada (1954), some part of me always thinks of Basehart as an Ariel of the high wire, a daredevil with the face of an angel and a trickster's equal capacity for destruction and grace; it does not fundamentally change my feelings about him to see him as a criminal who haunts the storm drains of Los Angeles and dies without giving up anything of himself, not even last words. Even without the narrator building him up as "no more than a description, a shadow of a man—mysterious, elusive, deadly," Officer Rawlins' shooter assumes a semi-supernatural dimension simply because of everything that is not known about him, everything that seems unknowable. He's medium-height, indeterminately young, very beautiful. He doesn't look tough, but he handles guns with the same casual competence with which he rebuilds a radio and tunes up a car. We get a hint of sexual kink in the possessive way he caresses an oscilloscope, but otherwise he lives quite ordinarily in an anonymous little bungalow shared only by a well-cluttered workbench and a well-loved dog. He's utterly silent when he's on his own. He's mesmerizing. He's such a cipher that all the conventions of crime fiction lead us to believe, along with the LAPD, that uncovering his true identity will crack the mystery of his life against the law, but when he's finally linked to his past, it's as empty of motive or pattern as his real name: "He was a radio technician right here in our dispatch office . . . Sort of strange. Never bothered with anyone in the department, just kept to himself. He was in line for a promotion when he got drafted . . . He never asked for his job back after the war." That's our only clue, if you even want to call it that. If anything explains the man who goes by the name of Roy Martin, it happened in that lacuna of the war, when a kid who "had no interest in anything but electronics" went off and was taught to shoot by the Signal Corps. Now he lives in his native city as if in enemy country, as much off the grid as a man on a milk run can be; he always has escape routes, weapons cached in and outside of the home; his few conversations are as carefully worded as challenge and response. He can change the papers in his wallet as easily as the license plates on his car. He performs field surgery on himself as if he's done it before. But we never know why—what teachers, what demons. Where other damaged GIs in this genre have origin stories, this one deliberately refuses reduction to any nameable trauma. Maybe there was none. It's exhilaratingly existential. He takes his secrets with him when he goes. Alas that he could not take the lawful half of his movie.
Both of these movies are beautifully shot. John Alton was one of the acknowledged masters of making chiaroscuro stand in for budget and it is wall-to-wall in Raw Deal and He Walked by Night, from obvious expressionist opportunities like shootouts in mist-swirling alleys or wet-lit sewer tunnels to the fragmenting of human bodies in low-key light that turns even the front seat of a car into a liminal space. I feel more ambivalently about the contributions of John C. Higgins, who co-scripted both productions: I am beginning to think I feel about voiceovers the way I feel about shaky-cam. Nothing here is as bad as the interrupting narrator in T-Men (1947) who punctured the most emotionally devastating moment in the film for me, but Trevor has to narrate over a scene where her face is already doing all the acting and Hadley just sounds as though the screenwriters forgot they were writing for film and not radio. I can't knock Eagle-Lion Films too hard; they were the U.S. distributors of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). I am just not sure why Anthony Mann of all directors should have been prone to voiceovers I consistently want to remove with a X-acto knife. In other words, I did not love either of these movies as I love some of their co-religionists, but they both showed me things I hadn't seen in this genre before, which is basically all I ask from my B-noir, even B-noir that is very highly rated by other people, and I am now fully prepared for the next thing I watch to contain surprise Whit Bissell even if it was made last year. This character brought to you by my shadowy backers at Patreon.
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