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The harder you're hit, the harder you have to hit back
I left myself a placeholder last week to talk about Phil Karlson's 99 River Street (1953), which I described as "a small, great example of low-budget, street-level '50's noir with a backdrop of boxing and night-shift taxi service." I am not convinced that my brain has come back online sufficiently for a review, but I have also become heartily sick of saying nothing about the movies I watch, so here we go.
I have not gone so far as to taxonomize them, but I have noticed over the last few years that film noir comes in several different flavors, one of which is mainly governed by the distance of the mise-en-scène from reality. The Big Sleep (1946) is a gorgeous showcase of mingled screwball and noir, but it might as well be taking place in its own pocket dimension for all the likelihood of walking into the Acme Book Shop if you ever visit L.A. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) filters New York City through a twitchy scrim of guilt and fantasy, doing its best expressionist work literally inside its protagonist's head. Noirs that stake their claim on more domestic, suburban territory, like The Reckless Moment (1949) or Tension (1949), play with the scarily swift slippage between dark and daylight worlds; noirs like Caught (1949) and The Prowler (1951) demonstrate how hungrily that darkness has always coiled inside the American dream. 99 River Street, as if in sympathy with its blandly municipal title, is the kind of noir so intimately anchored to the real world with bills and paychecks and television programs that the diamond-fencing double-cross our protagonist stumbles into is a secondary nightmare, underworld garnish on the domestic crime his unquiet past and present misery have already stitched him up for. We don't even question the Aristotelian convenience of the dusk-to-dawn timing, because why not? Nothing has gone right for Ernie Driscoll for years, why shouldn't everything go asymptotically wrong on this one grimy, harrowing graveyard shift? We have no right to be skeptical if he's not, and when his wife's body falls out of the back seat of his taxicab, strangled with her own scarf at the address where her lover with the smile of Reynardine sent for her chump of a husband to pick her up, he looks like a man who's only standing because he hasn't the sense to fall down.
But that's Ernie Driscoll for you, a fortyish ex-pug who still thinks of himself as a prizefighter down on his luck, not a radio cab driver saving up tips to open a gas station of his own. "You were a showgirl," he growls at his wife, who has coldly snapped off a late-night rerun of Ernie's last, career-ending fight that we thought we were watching live—telescoping the years from ringside glory to working stiff with one clever zoom out. Proto-Budd Schulberg: "I could have been the champion." He's played by John Payne, who I can't place at all from Miracle on 34th Street (1947); he may have been suave in previous incarnations, but here his brush-cropped hair and the blunt, plaintive bones of his face can encourage the audience to dismiss him as a stupid, beaten bruiser, especially when his unguarded response to almost any strong emotion is to try to punch it. His intentions are better than his impulse control, though, and he is wincingly sensitive to his own shortcomings and his wife's discontent, which he's dubious can be repaired with a box of chocolates and a couple of kids. He has maybe a little brain damage, but mostly a lot of unfinished business, like anything except the anger stage of grieving. One eyebrow is nicked with the scar of the blow that nearly blinded him and put an abrupt, undignified end to his life in the ring; that eye still flickers sometimes with the permanent damage to the nerve. After a few seconds in any social situation, his forehead shines with flop sweat; his most characteristic expression is a kind of baffled defiance, never quite able to see where the next blow is coming from but already braced for it to land. I appreciate that he is not actually inarticulate once he starts talking: his unaffected plain speaking is the only thing that puts over technically outrageous lines like "There are worse things than murder. You can kill someone an inch at a time." Nothing about him figures him as the natural protagonist of a noir except that that's one of the most important features of the genre, that it can happen to anyone. And once it's happening to Ernie, he handles it about as well as most non-cinematic people, which is to say pretty badly at first. He's just lucky that he gets the worst of it out of his system with the fake murder before the real thing comes along.
I watched this movie partly for Evelyn Keyes—I ran into her autobiography Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister (1977) at the Brattle Book Shop the week before Christmas—and she is terrific as a hanger-out at the all-night drugstore where Ernie gets coffee in between fares, one of Edward Hopper's nighthawks to the life. A Broadway wannabe in a tight white sweater and a long fluffy coat, Linda James pirouettes around the bar stools before slapping a luridly titled script down in front of Ernie, her voice lifting like her dark-penciled eyebrows in excited skips. What she does for a shot at the footlights nearly breaks her friendship with Ernie; what she does to make it up to him gleefully twists around the tradition of the femme fatale as her ability to dissemble, decoy, and just plain lie is instrumental to the success of their frantic amateur detecting. She's nothing like a tough dame, but that only makes her tenacity more admirable and endearing: "I don't enlist very often, but when I do, it's for the duration." When the ex-boxer unburdens himself of a bitter speech about the two-faced nature of women "like the dames that hung around my dressing room after I'd won a fight . . . but where were the same dames the night I got my head kicked in? In the other guy's dressing room!" Linda is almost laughing as she answers, "Ernie, all women aren't like that!" and her matter-of-factness defuses his anger at once: no wounded pride, no special pleading, just knowing better. Her ideas of her career are about as realistic as Ernie's dreams of stepping back into the ring, but her talent comes through in one moment of real-life theater that's played as electrifyingly as the cabbie's climactic fistfight.
Of course there's a climactic fistfight, what do you expect in a movie haunted by a last, never-finished match? 99 River Street is bracketed by two different fights which are metaphysically the same fight, the chains and catwalks of a tramp steamer for the ropes of the squared circle, the same foggy glare of lights and pure black air against which the combatants' faces are snapped and sweat-soaked and contorted, nothing elegant but a great deal of visceral, kinetic sympathy in the spectacle of men trying to beat one another senseless for sport or survival. We always know where the bodies are, how bruisingly they connect with one another. (This is not a bloodless movie. You get socked in the face, you look fucked up for the rest of the night. Mouths bleed, noses bleed, bruised eyes and jaws puff. I haven't seen enough boxing movies of the '40's and '50's to know whether this is an unusual or a typical verisimilitude, but it got my attention. I can only hope the production designer got a good deal on stage blood in bulk.) The TV commentator's play-by-play rises over the soundtrack as Ernie hauls himself stubbornly to his feet, his momentarily downed opponent blurring in his battered eye: "There's something the matter with Driscoll's eye!" The noise of the long-ago crowd swells against Ernie's own voice, saying something just that night to Linda, his own fighter's advice that until now he hasn't been able to take. It's an exorcism and a violent one—he was pulled out of a prizefight once to save his life, now that he's in the ring for real he'll finish the job if it kills him—but it's not and can't be mindless. This turned out to be important to me. There are enough narratives right now where the uncritical application of violence saves the day, I don't need reinforcement from other decades. Also important: no matter how spitefully Ernie's straying wife treats him, no matter how combustible his temper, he never hits her—or Linda. I can't say the same of some supposedly meeker heroes in this genre.
The best tribute I can give this story's realism that it took me several days to realize that there is almost no location shooting anywhere in the picture that I can remember. Maybe the finale on the docks of Jersey City, where the harbor lights ripple in the black water and the bare-lit shadows of cranes and sheds and front loaders make as dizzying a labyrinth as any Chandler plot, but there's one long shot of a freighter at anchor that was pretty obviously done with mattes and I don't think I'm risking my reputation to guess that Karlson's Big Apple was constructed entirely out of studio interiors and backlots, cyclorama skylines and rear projection as the neon streets slide past the windows of Ernie's cab. And yet it feels like real New York City, not some generic noir metropolis; its night world is inhabited by people with real faces even more than Hollywood character faces, bartenders and fight promoters and middle-aged husbands with roving eyes. Frank Faylen's weathered, puckish taxi dispatcher offers marriage advice with the same hustling rhythms of his years as Ernie's trainer, a canny man to have in your corner when the police come calling. Jay Adler doesn't drop his air of weary avuncularity just because he's setting out to murder a two-timing jewel thief instead of feeding puppies at his pet shop. I am incredibly fond of the scene where Ernie whales the stuffing out of the lantern-jawed gun-punk played by Jack Lambert because it's not an act of superhuman toughness: Lambert's Mickey is used to getting his way with pistol-whips and rabbit punches, but it was Ernie's profession to take a beating and not stop thinking because of it and as soon as he sees an opening, Mickey has—and gets—all the chances of a damp rag in a Cuisinart. No noir guarantees its protagonist a happy ending, but you want one for Ernie and Linda, flawed and relatively insignificant as they are. You hope it's within reach because they live in the real world, not a shell game of stylized signifiers. Of course, that's what Ernie's wife thought, too.
So that's a movie I watched with no expectations whatsoever and was rewardingly pleased by. I may have to track down the other two noirs Karlson directed with Payne, Kansas City Confidential (1952) and Hell's Island (1955); if you don't want to take my word for this one, Kino Lorber's got it on Blu-Ray. I am still thinking about taxonomies, about the way the film's handling of Ernie's damage reminds me of an earlier, British noir, Roy Ward Baker's The October Man (1947), which takes a similarly civilian approach to material more directly associated with the problems of returning veterans. 1953 feels a little late for this kind of oblique exploration, but maybe not: I was wrong when I thought that about TB in 1955. I just realized that the Franz Planer who gave 99 River Street its deep, Gregg Toland-like shadows is the same "Frank Planer" who lensed the Technicolor delirium of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). I think I want to watch more boxing movies. This round brought to you by my go-the-distance backers at Patreon.
I have not gone so far as to taxonomize them, but I have noticed over the last few years that film noir comes in several different flavors, one of which is mainly governed by the distance of the mise-en-scène from reality. The Big Sleep (1946) is a gorgeous showcase of mingled screwball and noir, but it might as well be taking place in its own pocket dimension for all the likelihood of walking into the Acme Book Shop if you ever visit L.A. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) filters New York City through a twitchy scrim of guilt and fantasy, doing its best expressionist work literally inside its protagonist's head. Noirs that stake their claim on more domestic, suburban territory, like The Reckless Moment (1949) or Tension (1949), play with the scarily swift slippage between dark and daylight worlds; noirs like Caught (1949) and The Prowler (1951) demonstrate how hungrily that darkness has always coiled inside the American dream. 99 River Street, as if in sympathy with its blandly municipal title, is the kind of noir so intimately anchored to the real world with bills and paychecks and television programs that the diamond-fencing double-cross our protagonist stumbles into is a secondary nightmare, underworld garnish on the domestic crime his unquiet past and present misery have already stitched him up for. We don't even question the Aristotelian convenience of the dusk-to-dawn timing, because why not? Nothing has gone right for Ernie Driscoll for years, why shouldn't everything go asymptotically wrong on this one grimy, harrowing graveyard shift? We have no right to be skeptical if he's not, and when his wife's body falls out of the back seat of his taxicab, strangled with her own scarf at the address where her lover with the smile of Reynardine sent for her chump of a husband to pick her up, he looks like a man who's only standing because he hasn't the sense to fall down.
But that's Ernie Driscoll for you, a fortyish ex-pug who still thinks of himself as a prizefighter down on his luck, not a radio cab driver saving up tips to open a gas station of his own. "You were a showgirl," he growls at his wife, who has coldly snapped off a late-night rerun of Ernie's last, career-ending fight that we thought we were watching live—telescoping the years from ringside glory to working stiff with one clever zoom out. Proto-Budd Schulberg: "I could have been the champion." He's played by John Payne, who I can't place at all from Miracle on 34th Street (1947); he may have been suave in previous incarnations, but here his brush-cropped hair and the blunt, plaintive bones of his face can encourage the audience to dismiss him as a stupid, beaten bruiser, especially when his unguarded response to almost any strong emotion is to try to punch it. His intentions are better than his impulse control, though, and he is wincingly sensitive to his own shortcomings and his wife's discontent, which he's dubious can be repaired with a box of chocolates and a couple of kids. He has maybe a little brain damage, but mostly a lot of unfinished business, like anything except the anger stage of grieving. One eyebrow is nicked with the scar of the blow that nearly blinded him and put an abrupt, undignified end to his life in the ring; that eye still flickers sometimes with the permanent damage to the nerve. After a few seconds in any social situation, his forehead shines with flop sweat; his most characteristic expression is a kind of baffled defiance, never quite able to see where the next blow is coming from but already braced for it to land. I appreciate that he is not actually inarticulate once he starts talking: his unaffected plain speaking is the only thing that puts over technically outrageous lines like "There are worse things than murder. You can kill someone an inch at a time." Nothing about him figures him as the natural protagonist of a noir except that that's one of the most important features of the genre, that it can happen to anyone. And once it's happening to Ernie, he handles it about as well as most non-cinematic people, which is to say pretty badly at first. He's just lucky that he gets the worst of it out of his system with the fake murder before the real thing comes along.
I watched this movie partly for Evelyn Keyes—I ran into her autobiography Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister (1977) at the Brattle Book Shop the week before Christmas—and she is terrific as a hanger-out at the all-night drugstore where Ernie gets coffee in between fares, one of Edward Hopper's nighthawks to the life. A Broadway wannabe in a tight white sweater and a long fluffy coat, Linda James pirouettes around the bar stools before slapping a luridly titled script down in front of Ernie, her voice lifting like her dark-penciled eyebrows in excited skips. What she does for a shot at the footlights nearly breaks her friendship with Ernie; what she does to make it up to him gleefully twists around the tradition of the femme fatale as her ability to dissemble, decoy, and just plain lie is instrumental to the success of their frantic amateur detecting. She's nothing like a tough dame, but that only makes her tenacity more admirable and endearing: "I don't enlist very often, but when I do, it's for the duration." When the ex-boxer unburdens himself of a bitter speech about the two-faced nature of women "like the dames that hung around my dressing room after I'd won a fight . . . but where were the same dames the night I got my head kicked in? In the other guy's dressing room!" Linda is almost laughing as she answers, "Ernie, all women aren't like that!" and her matter-of-factness defuses his anger at once: no wounded pride, no special pleading, just knowing better. Her ideas of her career are about as realistic as Ernie's dreams of stepping back into the ring, but her talent comes through in one moment of real-life theater that's played as electrifyingly as the cabbie's climactic fistfight.
Of course there's a climactic fistfight, what do you expect in a movie haunted by a last, never-finished match? 99 River Street is bracketed by two different fights which are metaphysically the same fight, the chains and catwalks of a tramp steamer for the ropes of the squared circle, the same foggy glare of lights and pure black air against which the combatants' faces are snapped and sweat-soaked and contorted, nothing elegant but a great deal of visceral, kinetic sympathy in the spectacle of men trying to beat one another senseless for sport or survival. We always know where the bodies are, how bruisingly they connect with one another. (This is not a bloodless movie. You get socked in the face, you look fucked up for the rest of the night. Mouths bleed, noses bleed, bruised eyes and jaws puff. I haven't seen enough boxing movies of the '40's and '50's to know whether this is an unusual or a typical verisimilitude, but it got my attention. I can only hope the production designer got a good deal on stage blood in bulk.) The TV commentator's play-by-play rises over the soundtrack as Ernie hauls himself stubbornly to his feet, his momentarily downed opponent blurring in his battered eye: "There's something the matter with Driscoll's eye!" The noise of the long-ago crowd swells against Ernie's own voice, saying something just that night to Linda, his own fighter's advice that until now he hasn't been able to take. It's an exorcism and a violent one—he was pulled out of a prizefight once to save his life, now that he's in the ring for real he'll finish the job if it kills him—but it's not and can't be mindless. This turned out to be important to me. There are enough narratives right now where the uncritical application of violence saves the day, I don't need reinforcement from other decades. Also important: no matter how spitefully Ernie's straying wife treats him, no matter how combustible his temper, he never hits her—or Linda. I can't say the same of some supposedly meeker heroes in this genre.
The best tribute I can give this story's realism that it took me several days to realize that there is almost no location shooting anywhere in the picture that I can remember. Maybe the finale on the docks of Jersey City, where the harbor lights ripple in the black water and the bare-lit shadows of cranes and sheds and front loaders make as dizzying a labyrinth as any Chandler plot, but there's one long shot of a freighter at anchor that was pretty obviously done with mattes and I don't think I'm risking my reputation to guess that Karlson's Big Apple was constructed entirely out of studio interiors and backlots, cyclorama skylines and rear projection as the neon streets slide past the windows of Ernie's cab. And yet it feels like real New York City, not some generic noir metropolis; its night world is inhabited by people with real faces even more than Hollywood character faces, bartenders and fight promoters and middle-aged husbands with roving eyes. Frank Faylen's weathered, puckish taxi dispatcher offers marriage advice with the same hustling rhythms of his years as Ernie's trainer, a canny man to have in your corner when the police come calling. Jay Adler doesn't drop his air of weary avuncularity just because he's setting out to murder a two-timing jewel thief instead of feeding puppies at his pet shop. I am incredibly fond of the scene where Ernie whales the stuffing out of the lantern-jawed gun-punk played by Jack Lambert because it's not an act of superhuman toughness: Lambert's Mickey is used to getting his way with pistol-whips and rabbit punches, but it was Ernie's profession to take a beating and not stop thinking because of it and as soon as he sees an opening, Mickey has—and gets—all the chances of a damp rag in a Cuisinart. No noir guarantees its protagonist a happy ending, but you want one for Ernie and Linda, flawed and relatively insignificant as they are. You hope it's within reach because they live in the real world, not a shell game of stylized signifiers. Of course, that's what Ernie's wife thought, too.
So that's a movie I watched with no expectations whatsoever and was rewardingly pleased by. I may have to track down the other two noirs Karlson directed with Payne, Kansas City Confidential (1952) and Hell's Island (1955); if you don't want to take my word for this one, Kino Lorber's got it on Blu-Ray. I am still thinking about taxonomies, about the way the film's handling of Ernie's damage reminds me of an earlier, British noir, Roy Ward Baker's The October Man (1947), which takes a similarly civilian approach to material more directly associated with the problems of returning veterans. 1953 feels a little late for this kind of oblique exploration, but maybe not: I was wrong when I thought that about TB in 1955. I just realized that the Franz Planer who gave 99 River Street its deep, Gregg Toland-like shadows is the same "Frank Planer" who lensed the Technicolor delirium of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953). I think I want to watch more boxing movies. This round brought to you by my go-the-distance backers at Patreon.
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I was happy, especially since the last completely random noir I tried was the inconsistent Pushover (1954).
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I feel like I need to rewatch Miracle on 34th Street now, because I didn't recognize Payne at all! And I just saw that I had equally forgotten Keyes as the female lead in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a film I recall otherwise with great affection. It's almost as though I remember romances less vividly than the rest of the movies around them.
Have you seen any of Karlson/Payne's other noirs?
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I don't think so, but I'd like to.
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That description reminds me in a way of the one fight scene in Unbreakanle, where of course the protagonist *is* superhumanly tough, but has little or no fight training, and his opponent is a murderous psychopath. He mostly just outlasts him; and it’s shot from a high-ish, unmoving vantage point in a corner of the room, as though through a security camera.
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I've seen Unbreakable, but I have no memory of this scene, and now I want to rewatch it.
(Most of my memory of Unbreakable, unfortunately, is of being annoyed at the final twist which should have been the third-act twist, damn it.)
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Thank you! I'm really flattered that you enjoy film noir in this form.
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Have you seen After Hours? It's one of my favorites, and those lines reminded me of it.
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I am not sure I've even heard of it. Tell me about it?
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I guess I would categorize it as a dark comedy. It's the sort of film that can make an ice cream truck scary.
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I will keep an eye out for it. I have not seen that many scary ice cream trucks.