A few nights ago I dreamed of watching a film noir I still have trouble believing doesn't exist, about a refugee who moves to a small American town post-war only for his new neighbors to take him for a war criminal in hiding. When I saw that the latest offering from TCM's Noir Alley was called Talk About a Stranger (1952) and co-starred Kurt Kasznar, I knew I had a duty to my subconscious. It was not the movie I dreamed, of course. But it was something just as neat and maybe even rarer: a kid-sized noir that grants its pre-teen protagonist the same vertiginous shadows and unreliable light as his adult counterparts, the same cinematographic power to make the world over in the expressionist image of his fears and convictions, always remembering that his world is not exactly the adult world; it merely overlaps in unpredictable places. Noir has always thrived in the liminal spaces. Why shouldn't adolescence be among them?
The story itself can be sketched simply; like much children's fiction and much noir, it has the vocabulary of a fairy tale. There's a child, there's a beast in the wood, there's a death, there's a lie: there is nearly a disaster, because it's dangerous to be the hero of a story when you might be wrong about the kind of story you're in. The child is Bud Fontaine (Billy Gray), a cocky daydreamer with the all-American sheaf of fair hair that goes along with his paper route, his toy rifle, and the dog he wants more than anything in the world. The wood is his father's orange groves in southern California, homely and Hesperidal when sunlit, a wilderness of fog and whirling leaves after dark. The death belongs to Boy, the tail-wagging stray who came trotting down the sidewalks of Citrus City like the answer to Bud's fervent, nightly prayers. And the beast is the man he believes did it (Kasznar), the mysterious and unsociable stranger recently moved into the long-deserted property next door. He gave his name curtly as "Matlock," the night Bud's father (George Murphy) cheerily took him for "Dr. Mahler," the equally long-absentee owner of the rather Addams-looking house and its surrounding, neglected groves. Then he all but slammed the door in his good neighbors' face. From such abrasive details Bud gathers a dislike of the newcomer, who hardly ever comes into town and makes no friends when he does, until he becomes convinced that the man is not just capable but culpable of murder, human as well as canine. Really he wants vengeance for Boy and he will stop at little to achieve it, hellbent as any refrigerator widower or double-crossed hood. It is frightening to watch his face harden in adult invention and ruthlessness and also because we don't know for sure that he's wrong—in so many stories, only the child recognizes the monster the adults miss. And in so many others, the child fatally misconstrues what an adult would have understood at a glance. And all the while the mise-en-scène is making itself strange, shadowy, and unstable to match Bud's thoughts, carefree afternoons of autumn sun contracting into bitter winter nights, so that we can't tell whether the darkness is inside or out or whether it matters at all.
The film plays fair with its point-of-view. It doesn't condescend to its audience and it doesn't undercut its young hero by making his nemesis too conspicuously a scapegoat or a villain: Matlock is more surly than sinister to an adult eye, but that doesn't mean he didn't kill Dr. Paul Mahler of San Sala and steal his house and his orange groves and his 1947 DeSoto Custom with the original owner's registration still wrapped around the steering column. "Kid's the best judge of character there are," the butcher in town sagely opines, "kids and dogs—it's an instinct." On the other hand, an astute viewer may notice that the very first time Bud mentions the stranger to his parents, he's already lying: "We were kind of fooling around, you know? And this guy comes out and starts—well, I kind of thought you'd like to know!" A twelve-year-old can leave a lot of nasty implications in the lacuna of things a parent should know about their new neighbor, especially a twelve-year-old trying not to feel guilty about breaking windows in a house that turned out to be occupied after all. You watch the action under the credits of this movie with puzzlement, trying to figure out what on earth you're seeing humping through overgrown gardens toward a house-front with the Gothic decrepitude of the Bates Motel—it's a gang of trick-or-treaters masked and bed-sheeted in mid-century nightmare fuel, ready to storm the local spook house when the lights inside flick on. The kids freak and scatter, but it fascinates me how neutral the first appearance of Matlock actually is. He's not Boo Radley or even Miss Havisham. He's youngish, dark and heavyset—Kasznar played the first Pozzo on Broadway and the first Nero Wolfe on TV—his round face defined by his peaked emphatic eyebrows, as solid as greasepaint. The wildness with which he flings open the door and stares around at the retreating trick-or-treaters, the intensity of his gaze caught by a petrified, unmasked Bud suggest startlement, even fear, more than meanness or rage; Bud's father may not be far from the truth when he jokes to his agitated offspring, "What'd you do, scare somebody to death or something?" No words are exchanged, so the slight, distinct not one of us of Kasznar's Austrian accent is not even in play. But the man is fixed in Bud's mind as a monster from that moment forthwith, so that even when he thinks the stranger might be Dr. Mahler, his automatic response is, "Gee, I sure wouldn't want a doctor around that looked like that, would you?" and at night he sits up watching the one lighted window in the Matlock house, aiming his toy rifle and chattering Tommy-gun sounds until the light goes out.
I love details like the Tommy gun because they remind the viewer that for all his hard-boiled investigating, Bud really is twelve years old, with all the intensity of an age when the Q.E.D. line between I don't like this person and someone killed my dog and this person killed my dog feels as obvious as the cold-snap temperatures that have the farmers of Citrus City nursing their trees through the nights with smudge pots and thermometers. One minute he's formidably composed, the next doubled over sobbing. Frustrated in his efforts to obtain justice for Boy—for his father to beat a confession out of Matlock, the police arrest him, the editor of the Citrus City Independent print that he's a dog-poisoner—he turns detective in miniature to prove his case, gleaning information from gossip at the grocery and the sale records of the hardware store, breaking into Matlock's garage, eventually even hitching a ride to coastal San Sala, where the boarded-up house that belonged to the missing Dr. Mahler stands cavernously above the kelp-swirling surf and the desolate cries of seagulls. The mailbox is choked with bills and papers, the sunroom windows smashed. A boy his own age (Teddy Infuhr) is loitering on the stony beach, a barefoot gamin with salt-tousled hair and the sleeves of his white T-shirt rolled up tough; he offers a pint-size of the noir hero's underworld as he dares Bud into the derelict house with its empty birdcages and dust-webbed photographs and gives him both a fright and a real lead. "That was October and this is January. Nobody's seen him since. Cops came to all the houses around here, asking questions. They dragged all this piece of ocean with nets. Nobody was allowed to go in swimming in case his corpse was floating around out there. It wasn't, though." His parents' consternation tips in a note of domestic comedy, but he's really lying to them now, keeping secrets, including about the damage he's done in his fury at not being able to reach Matlock directly. His inquiries have left a corrosive wake of suspicion, the honest citizens of Citrus City suddenly comparing notes on the stranger in their midst and finding him exactly the sort of man who would poison a boy's dog, with his reclusive habits and his disheveled appearance and his meager purchases that don't match his solid gold watch and his murderer's thumbs. I am not sure it's an accident that the only person we hear defend him is the Italian grocer, the other visible immigrant in town. Even Bud's father won't say he believes in Matlock's innocence, just that "hitting him wouldn't settle anything . . . Grown-ups don't do things that way. They can't. And they shouldn't . . ." Bud's face is closed, hearing the loophole his father doesn't mean to leave: that doesn't dictate what a kid can do.
Talk About a Stranger was shot by past master of shadows John Alton and he marshals them brilliantly for the climax, which finds Bud facing off against the people he didn't mean to hurt: his father and the rest of the orange growers, the community he thought Matlock was so far outside that no action taken to wound him could ever affect them. There's smudge-smoke, the sky fanned with dull light through the trees, oranges torn and rolling, an irrigation canal rippling with water as silky and ghostly as the river of The Night of the Hunter (1955). It's a frost-fogged nightmare, the fairy-tale forest that will catch you if you stray from the path. It's the world that shifts its shape. ( Then it's all right, isn't it? ) I didn't even notice this film runs only 65 minutes, it packs so much emotion and atmosphere into its slight narrative. Margaret Fitts adapted the screenplay from the 1951 short story "The Enemy" by Charlotte Armstrong, meaning I can count it toward my unofficial catalogue of women in noir; I don't know what to tell you about the director, since David Bradley appears otherwise most famous for a 16 mm Julius Caesar (1950) starring Charlton Heston and for The Madmen of Mandoras (1963), better known under its TV title of They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968). A third-act mention of Santa Lisa made me wonder if all of MGM's noirs take place in the same semi-fictional California-verse. Oh, and the future Nancy Reagan plays Bud's mother, but she has almost nothing to do in the story beyond being discreetly pregnant, so I did not find that she interfered. This fooling around brought to you by my serious backers at Patreon.
The story itself can be sketched simply; like much children's fiction and much noir, it has the vocabulary of a fairy tale. There's a child, there's a beast in the wood, there's a death, there's a lie: there is nearly a disaster, because it's dangerous to be the hero of a story when you might be wrong about the kind of story you're in. The child is Bud Fontaine (Billy Gray), a cocky daydreamer with the all-American sheaf of fair hair that goes along with his paper route, his toy rifle, and the dog he wants more than anything in the world. The wood is his father's orange groves in southern California, homely and Hesperidal when sunlit, a wilderness of fog and whirling leaves after dark. The death belongs to Boy, the tail-wagging stray who came trotting down the sidewalks of Citrus City like the answer to Bud's fervent, nightly prayers. And the beast is the man he believes did it (Kasznar), the mysterious and unsociable stranger recently moved into the long-deserted property next door. He gave his name curtly as "Matlock," the night Bud's father (George Murphy) cheerily took him for "Dr. Mahler," the equally long-absentee owner of the rather Addams-looking house and its surrounding, neglected groves. Then he all but slammed the door in his good neighbors' face. From such abrasive details Bud gathers a dislike of the newcomer, who hardly ever comes into town and makes no friends when he does, until he becomes convinced that the man is not just capable but culpable of murder, human as well as canine. Really he wants vengeance for Boy and he will stop at little to achieve it, hellbent as any refrigerator widower or double-crossed hood. It is frightening to watch his face harden in adult invention and ruthlessness and also because we don't know for sure that he's wrong—in so many stories, only the child recognizes the monster the adults miss. And in so many others, the child fatally misconstrues what an adult would have understood at a glance. And all the while the mise-en-scène is making itself strange, shadowy, and unstable to match Bud's thoughts, carefree afternoons of autumn sun contracting into bitter winter nights, so that we can't tell whether the darkness is inside or out or whether it matters at all.
The film plays fair with its point-of-view. It doesn't condescend to its audience and it doesn't undercut its young hero by making his nemesis too conspicuously a scapegoat or a villain: Matlock is more surly than sinister to an adult eye, but that doesn't mean he didn't kill Dr. Paul Mahler of San Sala and steal his house and his orange groves and his 1947 DeSoto Custom with the original owner's registration still wrapped around the steering column. "Kid's the best judge of character there are," the butcher in town sagely opines, "kids and dogs—it's an instinct." On the other hand, an astute viewer may notice that the very first time Bud mentions the stranger to his parents, he's already lying: "We were kind of fooling around, you know? And this guy comes out and starts—well, I kind of thought you'd like to know!" A twelve-year-old can leave a lot of nasty implications in the lacuna of things a parent should know about their new neighbor, especially a twelve-year-old trying not to feel guilty about breaking windows in a house that turned out to be occupied after all. You watch the action under the credits of this movie with puzzlement, trying to figure out what on earth you're seeing humping through overgrown gardens toward a house-front with the Gothic decrepitude of the Bates Motel—it's a gang of trick-or-treaters masked and bed-sheeted in mid-century nightmare fuel, ready to storm the local spook house when the lights inside flick on. The kids freak and scatter, but it fascinates me how neutral the first appearance of Matlock actually is. He's not Boo Radley or even Miss Havisham. He's youngish, dark and heavyset—Kasznar played the first Pozzo on Broadway and the first Nero Wolfe on TV—his round face defined by his peaked emphatic eyebrows, as solid as greasepaint. The wildness with which he flings open the door and stares around at the retreating trick-or-treaters, the intensity of his gaze caught by a petrified, unmasked Bud suggest startlement, even fear, more than meanness or rage; Bud's father may not be far from the truth when he jokes to his agitated offspring, "What'd you do, scare somebody to death or something?" No words are exchanged, so the slight, distinct not one of us of Kasznar's Austrian accent is not even in play. But the man is fixed in Bud's mind as a monster from that moment forthwith, so that even when he thinks the stranger might be Dr. Mahler, his automatic response is, "Gee, I sure wouldn't want a doctor around that looked like that, would you?" and at night he sits up watching the one lighted window in the Matlock house, aiming his toy rifle and chattering Tommy-gun sounds until the light goes out.
I love details like the Tommy gun because they remind the viewer that for all his hard-boiled investigating, Bud really is twelve years old, with all the intensity of an age when the Q.E.D. line between I don't like this person and someone killed my dog and this person killed my dog feels as obvious as the cold-snap temperatures that have the farmers of Citrus City nursing their trees through the nights with smudge pots and thermometers. One minute he's formidably composed, the next doubled over sobbing. Frustrated in his efforts to obtain justice for Boy—for his father to beat a confession out of Matlock, the police arrest him, the editor of the Citrus City Independent print that he's a dog-poisoner—he turns detective in miniature to prove his case, gleaning information from gossip at the grocery and the sale records of the hardware store, breaking into Matlock's garage, eventually even hitching a ride to coastal San Sala, where the boarded-up house that belonged to the missing Dr. Mahler stands cavernously above the kelp-swirling surf and the desolate cries of seagulls. The mailbox is choked with bills and papers, the sunroom windows smashed. A boy his own age (Teddy Infuhr) is loitering on the stony beach, a barefoot gamin with salt-tousled hair and the sleeves of his white T-shirt rolled up tough; he offers a pint-size of the noir hero's underworld as he dares Bud into the derelict house with its empty birdcages and dust-webbed photographs and gives him both a fright and a real lead. "That was October and this is January. Nobody's seen him since. Cops came to all the houses around here, asking questions. They dragged all this piece of ocean with nets. Nobody was allowed to go in swimming in case his corpse was floating around out there. It wasn't, though." His parents' consternation tips in a note of domestic comedy, but he's really lying to them now, keeping secrets, including about the damage he's done in his fury at not being able to reach Matlock directly. His inquiries have left a corrosive wake of suspicion, the honest citizens of Citrus City suddenly comparing notes on the stranger in their midst and finding him exactly the sort of man who would poison a boy's dog, with his reclusive habits and his disheveled appearance and his meager purchases that don't match his solid gold watch and his murderer's thumbs. I am not sure it's an accident that the only person we hear defend him is the Italian grocer, the other visible immigrant in town. Even Bud's father won't say he believes in Matlock's innocence, just that "hitting him wouldn't settle anything . . . Grown-ups don't do things that way. They can't. And they shouldn't . . ." Bud's face is closed, hearing the loophole his father doesn't mean to leave: that doesn't dictate what a kid can do.
Talk About a Stranger was shot by past master of shadows John Alton and he marshals them brilliantly for the climax, which finds Bud facing off against the people he didn't mean to hurt: his father and the rest of the orange growers, the community he thought Matlock was so far outside that no action taken to wound him could ever affect them. There's smudge-smoke, the sky fanned with dull light through the trees, oranges torn and rolling, an irrigation canal rippling with water as silky and ghostly as the river of The Night of the Hunter (1955). It's a frost-fogged nightmare, the fairy-tale forest that will catch you if you stray from the path. It's the world that shifts its shape. ( Then it's all right, isn't it? ) I didn't even notice this film runs only 65 minutes, it packs so much emotion and atmosphere into its slight narrative. Margaret Fitts adapted the screenplay from the 1951 short story "The Enemy" by Charlotte Armstrong, meaning I can count it toward my unofficial catalogue of women in noir; I don't know what to tell you about the director, since David Bradley appears otherwise most famous for a 16 mm Julius Caesar (1950) starring Charlton Heston and for The Madmen of Mandoras (1963), better known under its TV title of They Saved Hitler's Brain (1968). A third-act mention of Santa Lisa made me wonder if all of MGM's noirs take place in the same semi-fictional California-verse. Oh, and the future Nancy Reagan plays Bud's mother, but she has almost nothing to do in the story beyond being discreetly pregnant, so I did not find that she interfered. This fooling around brought to you by my serious backers at Patreon.
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