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Blood is red. It keeps you alive. It doesn't tell you what you have to do
Around this time last year, I streamed a pulpy little British noir called Five Days (U.S. Paid to Kill, 1954) off TCM and discovered Dane Clark. The film around him was fun but no classic; I wanted to know at once what else the actor had done. The internet indicated he was best remembered nowadays for a scene with Joan Crawford in Hollywood Canteen (1944) and the lead role in Frank Borzage's Moonrise (1948). The former was easy enough to find. I had to wait for the latter to come around at the HFA. It's a true cult object. I'm not surprised it was a formative influence on Guy Maddin. If you can find it, it's worth your time.
I understand why critics compare Moonrise to The Night of the Hunter (1955). Visually and atmospherically, it's certainly the closest thing I've seen to a film I thought had no immediate American relatives: an unusually and lyrically photographed cross between film noir and Southern Gothic with utterly artificial sets, highly stylized compositions, and a mix of psychological realism and deliberately folk-poetic dialogue that works almost despite itself to create a strong sense of place and a tense state of mind. After the fact, I realized that it reminded me strongly of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955). Actually, in some ways this movie makes the most sense as an opera and not any more realist form of drama at all. Since I don't know if Dane Clark could sing, however, I'll be just as happy that the story exists in its current medium.
The plot is simple to the point of parable. An infant when his father was hanged for murder, Danny Hawkins (Clark) has grown up bullied by his peers and ostracized by their parents, branded "bad blood" until he's afraid he believes it himself; when he kills his worst tormenter in a fistfight that gets out of control, it feels like a curse coming home. He hides the body. The secret shadows his tentative romance with the new-to-town schoolteacher, his friendship with the deaf-mute age-mate he's always protected, his familial closeness with the well-educated recluse who partly raised him. Insofar as there's any suspense in this story, it's not so much whether Danny will be found out for the killing as what he will decide about himself when it happens. He's been waiting fatalistically his entire life to prove the worst of himself and simultaneously kicking hard against the town's opinion of him: what the viewer can't tell is whether he believes there's redemption for him any way he turns or only different ways of going to hell. Everything that works in the film is in service of making this sins-of-the-father psychodrama textured and strange. All around Danny's tormented self-image, Borzage builds a present ghosted by the past. Modern-day Woodville is a whistle-stop of a town in the midst of blackwater swamps and Virginian hills. Its citizens differentiate themselves sharply by class and modernity from "the mountains," which is another outsider's strike against Danny who wasn't sent to town until he was old enough for school, whose grandmother still lives in the cabin her son built for his wedding; the dance hall down by Brothers Pond swings with big-band jazz at night and the soda jerk talks self-conscious jive ("Heck, I ain't no square, you know?") whether his customers want to hear it or not, but on the outskirts of town a crumbling antebellum mansion overhangs the swamp like a bad memory, its grounds occupied only by the film's sole black character, a retired brakeman who raises hounds, reads books, and provides Danny with a refuge from the town and himself, as he always did.1 It's not quite a hermetic world, with the Tidewater freight coming and going, but it is insular. It would protect Danny if it thought he were part of it. It protected his bullies for years.
But we don't learn any of this information in a conventional dramatic manner, backfilling time in conversation. Instead the film hits us with a montage straight out of the gate, compressing Danny's childhood into a stunning overlay of expressionist, nightmarish images: a man marched to the gallows, his hanged shadow on the prison wall match-cut to a doll string-dangled over a crying child's crib. Again he marches to the gallows: shot from a vertiginous angle, children chant in the wet-lit schoolyard—"Danny Hawkins' dad was hanged, Danny Hawkins' dad was hanged!"—as a thin, dark child walks stoically through their games. Their fair-haired leader mimes a gruesome strangulation until Danny goes for him, is knocked down and beaten at the center of a jeering circle. The footsteps on the gallows once more: a few years older, the same children hunt Danny down a darkened street, mob him, laughing, hold his arms—"No better than his old man!"—while the same blond ringleader brands him a coward with a faceful of mud. The rope around the shadow-figure's neck: a man walks through bracken at the same drum-doomed pace and it's not until the scene keeps going that we realize the argument behind the dance hall is not just the latest episode but the present day. Lloyd Bridges more or less cameos as the grown Jerry Sykes, a rich man's blue-eyed boy in his snappy white jacket and smug air of entitlement, threatening Danny with another beating if he doesn't back off the girl Jerry thinks is too good for him and then taunting him when he rises to the bait: "The killer blood, eh? Your old man have time to tell you how it feels to drop six feet at the end of a rope?" Danny throws the first punch. It's a surprisingly brutal fight. They are adults now; they can really hurt each other. And once again, we're into it before there's any time to gather the usual orientation of narrative and character. But there's still the sense of being mired in the repeating images of the montage, in the nightmare that's the past—frames of Danny's childhood torment go off like flashbulbs over the contemporary action as each blow hits home. When the scene ends, he's killed a man. Everything we learn about him from here on will have to be added to that fact. It's a clever way of locating the audience in Danny's perspective, where the most important thing about him is his capacity for murder. The cinematography isn't going to let up, either. There's a virtuoso sequence on the Ferris wheel of a county fair where the camera swings and lurches as the cars go round and Danny's anxiety spikes, seeing the sheriff and his wife across the rotating frame of the wheel, his pursuer's face rising and falling against the black evening sky until recklessly, sickeningly, Danny jumps. But even ordinary interactions are framed and cropped at arresting, sometimes abstract angles, profiling two characters against one another in a severe combination of close-up and deep-focus, highlighting body language instead of facial expression or faces at the expense of the rest of the frame.2
Dane Clark's face is worth paying attention to. He has brushy dark hair, quick-drawn brows at a troubled tilt, a mouth that folds tightly over its own pain; the actor was about ten years older than his character at the time of filming, but the effect is poignant rather than artificial—at twenty-five, Danny Hawkins already looks bitter to the bone. Sympathetic though he may be, he's not just a sensitive, suffering soul. Everyone who looks at Danny sees his father's son: "All the beatings I took since I was a kid on account of him. Never could get a job unless there was nobody else left to hire. Girls walking away from me like I was poison. 'Hello, Hawkins,' they'd say—simple, ain't it? But every time they said it, I wanted to change my name." Sullen, hot-headed, and standoffish, he treats social encounters with a kind of fatalistic belligerence: if nothing good can be expected of him, why should he even try? On the bright side, it means he has nothing to lose, in a gossip-knit small Southern town, spending the majority of his time with a black man and sticking up for a character who gets treated otherwise as the village idiot. Less progressively, his initial moves with Gail Russell's Gilly Johnson are brusque to the point of coercion and nearly ruin both her reputation and her trust after he involves her in a car accident caused by his deliberately reckless speeding; they share an immediate combination of irresistible physical chemistry and fragile emotional rapport, but his mixed attempts at confession and concealment push her away as fast as the intensity of his attentions and his gauche, furtive tenderness can pull her in. It doesn't help that her previous romantic attachment was Jerry, whom she knew only as the charming banker's son who courted her for three months before disappearing suddenly. Danny can't ease her mind that dead men don't get jealous. Alone in the ruins of the mansion, under the chaperoning eye of a fireplace portrait, they consummate their relationship in silhouette, playing at elegant ghosts until the masks fall, at least from her side: "I've never seen you like this before, Gilly."–"I've never been like this before." She has a cat-eyed expressiveness that makes up for the shortcomings in her dialogue, wordless reactions shading in complexity that I'm not sure the script got around to. The beautiful modeling of his bones comes out at odd, painful moments: a look of mute unhappiness tightening his jaw, showing the beaten child through the angry adult. You can root for them only if Danny gets his head together. As he is, they're both right that he's not a good idea.
Several factors contribute to the optimistic ending, but I wouldn't believe it except for the scenes with Ethel Barrymore. The sympathetic law is necessary to the plot: despite his indolent introduction and penchant for digressive philosophizing ("If you went into all the reasons why that rock struck Jerry's head, you might end up writing the history of the world"), the local sheriff played by Allyn Joslyn turns out to be a not insensitive man who doesn't want to see even a difficult case like Danny Hawkins escalate a defensible accident into a capital crime; he's willing to do everything he can for the young man if Danny turns himself in, but can't make any promises if he needs to use hounds and handcuffs to make the arrest. As he tells Gilly, "I don't want him punished beyond what's right." That reassures the audience that our protagonist has a future if he doesn't bolt across state lines or kill anyone else in his hopeless panic to cover his tracks, but he has no plausible reason to try for it until the conversation with his grandmother. He's run into the mountains with the dogs behind him, yelping and baying as if they were hunting a raccoon. His grandmother gives him a bath, fresh clothes, a picture of his father that he's never seen before. She does not—film noir or no, it's a Hollywood movie, I cannot express how glad I am she does not—tell him that his father wasn't a murderer. There's no miscarriage of justice exonerating Danny from the haunting of his "bad blood." The story that he confessed bitterly to Gilly is still true, stark and spare as a murder ballad: "After I was born, Ma . . . Ma took sick at night. Doctor said it was too far to come. Wasn't serious. Gave Pa a bottle of pills. She died the next day. Pa carried me to Grandma's cabin and came into town. Shot the doctor. Shot him dead. Took three bullets to kill him. Took them three weeks to hang Pa." That's all he's ever known of his father, heavy as a noose around his own neck, and his grandmother doesn't contradict it. What she tells him instead is everything else about his father that he's never known, his soft-spoken ways, his startling mountain-ringing laugh, how he danced all night at his wedding and came home in the morning "as if he never needed sleep again in his life . . . like sparks out of a pine log." His wife died and he shot the doctor in cold blood and his mother refuses to say whether her son was wrong or right: "He acted like the man he was." None of what she tells Danny erases the pain or the shame of his father's decision, but it gives him a person to imagine instead of a swaying gallows shadow, a newspaper clipping of a young man's face instead of a death-cycle he's doomed to repeat. He can begin to think of making his own decisions. He can stop being haunted, a little. When he steps out into a cleared field at daybreak, it's the first time we've seen the horizon untangled by trees or blocked by the lines of the town. The hound that barks at him over the rise is Daisy Belle, Mose's prize bitch whose newborn pups he crooned over earlier in the film. She doesn't bring him down like Actaeon, she trots to him to have her ears fondled and her belly rubbed. He waits with her until the sheriff, with Gilly and Mose, comes to find them. He can take his chances with the law now that he can imagine some other ending than a six-foot drop of his own. Whatever his future, he might not have to be cursed.
I suspect there are audiences this film will just not work for. It has zero irony, almost as little budget, the hyper-expressive style of a silent film, and a romantic, redemptive ending after ninety minutes of increasingly downbeat paranoia. Especially the first act has some awkward transitions and disjoints which are either an attempt to convey the shocky zigzags of a nightmare or the fossil record of an argument in the cutting room; the script gestures toward a couple of subplots that never pan out and I cannot tell if they were equally vestigial in Theodore Strauss' 1946 source novel or casualties of transference to the screen. If the dialogue registers as stagy or condescending, the regional mise-en-scène is sunk. It worked for me and I wish I could point to a legitimate DVD, but all I can find is a slightly fast runtime on YouTube. Dane Clark is terrific and anybody who called him the poor man's John Garfield was a dope. The calendar tells me I wrote this post through the equinox. This move into light brought to you by my insightful backers at Patreon.
1. Mose Jackson is played by the legendary Rex Ingram and I find it really interesting that nothing in the script directly indicates the character's race. Everything is implied, like the understood surprise in the town sheriff's remark that Mose "can read as good as anybody." ("Better," Danny counters. "Read about every book there is, I guess.") Teased by Danny about his habit of adding honorifics to ordinary nouns—"Mr. Dog"—Mose responds curtly, "Isn't enough dignity in the world." The closest we get to any comment on racism comes when Mose considers his own hermitage: "A man ought to live in a world with other folks. When I came here, I thought I would be out of the way, I thought there'd be no one shoving me around. What I did was resign from the human race." So he could be an early instance of non-traditional casting, except that I can't believe it's an accident that Danny's only allies in Woodville at the start of the film are an educated black man and the only white character more marginalized than he is, the deaf and apparently simple Billy Scripture, who I did not realize was TV-M*A*S*H's Harry Morgan until I got home.
2. If you want a prose equivalent to John L. Russell's photography, it's Ray Bradbury in black and white—Dandelion Wine (1957), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). The county fair is small and tinny to the cinema-going eye, but to Danny and Gilly it's a pocket of magic with its netted electric lights and spun sugar, twenty-five-cent bottle stands and gum-chewing dancers undulating under the painted advertisement "GIRLS WITHOUT—?" Until the Ferris wheel becomes a site of danger, it lifts them out of the everyday.
I understand why critics compare Moonrise to The Night of the Hunter (1955). Visually and atmospherically, it's certainly the closest thing I've seen to a film I thought had no immediate American relatives: an unusually and lyrically photographed cross between film noir and Southern Gothic with utterly artificial sets, highly stylized compositions, and a mix of psychological realism and deliberately folk-poetic dialogue that works almost despite itself to create a strong sense of place and a tense state of mind. After the fact, I realized that it reminded me strongly of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (1955). Actually, in some ways this movie makes the most sense as an opera and not any more realist form of drama at all. Since I don't know if Dane Clark could sing, however, I'll be just as happy that the story exists in its current medium.
The plot is simple to the point of parable. An infant when his father was hanged for murder, Danny Hawkins (Clark) has grown up bullied by his peers and ostracized by their parents, branded "bad blood" until he's afraid he believes it himself; when he kills his worst tormenter in a fistfight that gets out of control, it feels like a curse coming home. He hides the body. The secret shadows his tentative romance with the new-to-town schoolteacher, his friendship with the deaf-mute age-mate he's always protected, his familial closeness with the well-educated recluse who partly raised him. Insofar as there's any suspense in this story, it's not so much whether Danny will be found out for the killing as what he will decide about himself when it happens. He's been waiting fatalistically his entire life to prove the worst of himself and simultaneously kicking hard against the town's opinion of him: what the viewer can't tell is whether he believes there's redemption for him any way he turns or only different ways of going to hell. Everything that works in the film is in service of making this sins-of-the-father psychodrama textured and strange. All around Danny's tormented self-image, Borzage builds a present ghosted by the past. Modern-day Woodville is a whistle-stop of a town in the midst of blackwater swamps and Virginian hills. Its citizens differentiate themselves sharply by class and modernity from "the mountains," which is another outsider's strike against Danny who wasn't sent to town until he was old enough for school, whose grandmother still lives in the cabin her son built for his wedding; the dance hall down by Brothers Pond swings with big-band jazz at night and the soda jerk talks self-conscious jive ("Heck, I ain't no square, you know?") whether his customers want to hear it or not, but on the outskirts of town a crumbling antebellum mansion overhangs the swamp like a bad memory, its grounds occupied only by the film's sole black character, a retired brakeman who raises hounds, reads books, and provides Danny with a refuge from the town and himself, as he always did.1 It's not quite a hermetic world, with the Tidewater freight coming and going, but it is insular. It would protect Danny if it thought he were part of it. It protected his bullies for years.
But we don't learn any of this information in a conventional dramatic manner, backfilling time in conversation. Instead the film hits us with a montage straight out of the gate, compressing Danny's childhood into a stunning overlay of expressionist, nightmarish images: a man marched to the gallows, his hanged shadow on the prison wall match-cut to a doll string-dangled over a crying child's crib. Again he marches to the gallows: shot from a vertiginous angle, children chant in the wet-lit schoolyard—"Danny Hawkins' dad was hanged, Danny Hawkins' dad was hanged!"—as a thin, dark child walks stoically through their games. Their fair-haired leader mimes a gruesome strangulation until Danny goes for him, is knocked down and beaten at the center of a jeering circle. The footsteps on the gallows once more: a few years older, the same children hunt Danny down a darkened street, mob him, laughing, hold his arms—"No better than his old man!"—while the same blond ringleader brands him a coward with a faceful of mud. The rope around the shadow-figure's neck: a man walks through bracken at the same drum-doomed pace and it's not until the scene keeps going that we realize the argument behind the dance hall is not just the latest episode but the present day. Lloyd Bridges more or less cameos as the grown Jerry Sykes, a rich man's blue-eyed boy in his snappy white jacket and smug air of entitlement, threatening Danny with another beating if he doesn't back off the girl Jerry thinks is too good for him and then taunting him when he rises to the bait: "The killer blood, eh? Your old man have time to tell you how it feels to drop six feet at the end of a rope?" Danny throws the first punch. It's a surprisingly brutal fight. They are adults now; they can really hurt each other. And once again, we're into it before there's any time to gather the usual orientation of narrative and character. But there's still the sense of being mired in the repeating images of the montage, in the nightmare that's the past—frames of Danny's childhood torment go off like flashbulbs over the contemporary action as each blow hits home. When the scene ends, he's killed a man. Everything we learn about him from here on will have to be added to that fact. It's a clever way of locating the audience in Danny's perspective, where the most important thing about him is his capacity for murder. The cinematography isn't going to let up, either. There's a virtuoso sequence on the Ferris wheel of a county fair where the camera swings and lurches as the cars go round and Danny's anxiety spikes, seeing the sheriff and his wife across the rotating frame of the wheel, his pursuer's face rising and falling against the black evening sky until recklessly, sickeningly, Danny jumps. But even ordinary interactions are framed and cropped at arresting, sometimes abstract angles, profiling two characters against one another in a severe combination of close-up and deep-focus, highlighting body language instead of facial expression or faces at the expense of the rest of the frame.2
Dane Clark's face is worth paying attention to. He has brushy dark hair, quick-drawn brows at a troubled tilt, a mouth that folds tightly over its own pain; the actor was about ten years older than his character at the time of filming, but the effect is poignant rather than artificial—at twenty-five, Danny Hawkins already looks bitter to the bone. Sympathetic though he may be, he's not just a sensitive, suffering soul. Everyone who looks at Danny sees his father's son: "All the beatings I took since I was a kid on account of him. Never could get a job unless there was nobody else left to hire. Girls walking away from me like I was poison. 'Hello, Hawkins,' they'd say—simple, ain't it? But every time they said it, I wanted to change my name." Sullen, hot-headed, and standoffish, he treats social encounters with a kind of fatalistic belligerence: if nothing good can be expected of him, why should he even try? On the bright side, it means he has nothing to lose, in a gossip-knit small Southern town, spending the majority of his time with a black man and sticking up for a character who gets treated otherwise as the village idiot. Less progressively, his initial moves with Gail Russell's Gilly Johnson are brusque to the point of coercion and nearly ruin both her reputation and her trust after he involves her in a car accident caused by his deliberately reckless speeding; they share an immediate combination of irresistible physical chemistry and fragile emotional rapport, but his mixed attempts at confession and concealment push her away as fast as the intensity of his attentions and his gauche, furtive tenderness can pull her in. It doesn't help that her previous romantic attachment was Jerry, whom she knew only as the charming banker's son who courted her for three months before disappearing suddenly. Danny can't ease her mind that dead men don't get jealous. Alone in the ruins of the mansion, under the chaperoning eye of a fireplace portrait, they consummate their relationship in silhouette, playing at elegant ghosts until the masks fall, at least from her side: "I've never seen you like this before, Gilly."–"I've never been like this before." She has a cat-eyed expressiveness that makes up for the shortcomings in her dialogue, wordless reactions shading in complexity that I'm not sure the script got around to. The beautiful modeling of his bones comes out at odd, painful moments: a look of mute unhappiness tightening his jaw, showing the beaten child through the angry adult. You can root for them only if Danny gets his head together. As he is, they're both right that he's not a good idea.
Several factors contribute to the optimistic ending, but I wouldn't believe it except for the scenes with Ethel Barrymore. The sympathetic law is necessary to the plot: despite his indolent introduction and penchant for digressive philosophizing ("If you went into all the reasons why that rock struck Jerry's head, you might end up writing the history of the world"), the local sheriff played by Allyn Joslyn turns out to be a not insensitive man who doesn't want to see even a difficult case like Danny Hawkins escalate a defensible accident into a capital crime; he's willing to do everything he can for the young man if Danny turns himself in, but can't make any promises if he needs to use hounds and handcuffs to make the arrest. As he tells Gilly, "I don't want him punished beyond what's right." That reassures the audience that our protagonist has a future if he doesn't bolt across state lines or kill anyone else in his hopeless panic to cover his tracks, but he has no plausible reason to try for it until the conversation with his grandmother. He's run into the mountains with the dogs behind him, yelping and baying as if they were hunting a raccoon. His grandmother gives him a bath, fresh clothes, a picture of his father that he's never seen before. She does not—film noir or no, it's a Hollywood movie, I cannot express how glad I am she does not—tell him that his father wasn't a murderer. There's no miscarriage of justice exonerating Danny from the haunting of his "bad blood." The story that he confessed bitterly to Gilly is still true, stark and spare as a murder ballad: "After I was born, Ma . . . Ma took sick at night. Doctor said it was too far to come. Wasn't serious. Gave Pa a bottle of pills. She died the next day. Pa carried me to Grandma's cabin and came into town. Shot the doctor. Shot him dead. Took three bullets to kill him. Took them three weeks to hang Pa." That's all he's ever known of his father, heavy as a noose around his own neck, and his grandmother doesn't contradict it. What she tells him instead is everything else about his father that he's never known, his soft-spoken ways, his startling mountain-ringing laugh, how he danced all night at his wedding and came home in the morning "as if he never needed sleep again in his life . . . like sparks out of a pine log." His wife died and he shot the doctor in cold blood and his mother refuses to say whether her son was wrong or right: "He acted like the man he was." None of what she tells Danny erases the pain or the shame of his father's decision, but it gives him a person to imagine instead of a swaying gallows shadow, a newspaper clipping of a young man's face instead of a death-cycle he's doomed to repeat. He can begin to think of making his own decisions. He can stop being haunted, a little. When he steps out into a cleared field at daybreak, it's the first time we've seen the horizon untangled by trees or blocked by the lines of the town. The hound that barks at him over the rise is Daisy Belle, Mose's prize bitch whose newborn pups he crooned over earlier in the film. She doesn't bring him down like Actaeon, she trots to him to have her ears fondled and her belly rubbed. He waits with her until the sheriff, with Gilly and Mose, comes to find them. He can take his chances with the law now that he can imagine some other ending than a six-foot drop of his own. Whatever his future, he might not have to be cursed.
I suspect there are audiences this film will just not work for. It has zero irony, almost as little budget, the hyper-expressive style of a silent film, and a romantic, redemptive ending after ninety minutes of increasingly downbeat paranoia. Especially the first act has some awkward transitions and disjoints which are either an attempt to convey the shocky zigzags of a nightmare or the fossil record of an argument in the cutting room; the script gestures toward a couple of subplots that never pan out and I cannot tell if they were equally vestigial in Theodore Strauss' 1946 source novel or casualties of transference to the screen. If the dialogue registers as stagy or condescending, the regional mise-en-scène is sunk. It worked for me and I wish I could point to a legitimate DVD, but all I can find is a slightly fast runtime on YouTube. Dane Clark is terrific and anybody who called him the poor man's John Garfield was a dope. The calendar tells me I wrote this post through the equinox. This move into light brought to you by my insightful backers at Patreon.
1. Mose Jackson is played by the legendary Rex Ingram and I find it really interesting that nothing in the script directly indicates the character's race. Everything is implied, like the understood surprise in the town sheriff's remark that Mose "can read as good as anybody." ("Better," Danny counters. "Read about every book there is, I guess.") Teased by Danny about his habit of adding honorifics to ordinary nouns—"Mr. Dog"—Mose responds curtly, "Isn't enough dignity in the world." The closest we get to any comment on racism comes when Mose considers his own hermitage: "A man ought to live in a world with other folks. When I came here, I thought I would be out of the way, I thought there'd be no one shoving me around. What I did was resign from the human race." So he could be an early instance of non-traditional casting, except that I can't believe it's an accident that Danny's only allies in Woodville at the start of the film are an educated black man and the only white character more marginalized than he is, the deaf and apparently simple Billy Scripture, who I did not realize was TV-M*A*S*H's Harry Morgan until I got home.
2. If you want a prose equivalent to John L. Russell's photography, it's Ray Bradbury in black and white—Dandelion Wine (1957), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). The county fair is small and tinny to the cinema-going eye, but to Danny and Gilly it's a pocket of magic with its netted electric lights and spun sugar, twenty-five-cent bottle stands and gum-chewing dancers undulating under the painted advertisement "GIRLS WITHOUT—?" Until the Ferris wheel becomes a site of danger, it lifts them out of the everyday.
no subject
This sounds interesting; will check it out.
no subject
He does have a very expressive face. And looks, at least as Billy Scripture, slightly like another actor, I just haven't been able to figure out whom. I had this problem with Anton Walbrook minus his characteristic mustache in The Queen of Spades (1949).
This sounds interesting; will check it out.
It's streaming on Amazon! Does that do you any good?
no subject
I wonder what the slightly fast run time on Youtube cuts out. I don't usually like seeing things at my desk--I can count on one hand the films I've seen on my computer--but this sounds worth trying.
It has zero irony, almost as little budget, the hyper-expressive style of a silent film, and a romantic, redemptive ending after ninety minutes of increasingly downbeat paranoia.
--all of those are completely fine with me.
no subject
Thank you!
I wonder what the slightly fast run time on Youtube cuts out. I don't usually like seeing things at my desk--I can count on one hand the films I've seen on my computer--but this sounds worth trying.
It's also streaming on Amazon, if that helps. With the correct runtime.
--all of those are completely fine with me.
Me, too. But something must account for its mixed critical and commercial reception and its relative obscurity until UCLA restored a print a few years ago. I'd waited a fruitless year for it to appear on TCM—I was so happy to be able to catch it in a theater instead.