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I think that's misquoted, but it's a rousing sentiment
Whiplash (1948) is exactly the kind of movie I was trying to watch when I got burned by Out of the Fog (1941): a small, strong noir, neatly put together, tightly acted, nice to look at it and not insulting. If you don't want to have to choose between the misleading sunlight of California noir and the flashy neon streets of New York, the transcontinental plot has got you covered; the protagonist's hooked on a romance if you like that sort of thing and if sweaty action scenes are more your jam, there's the boxing. I liked everyone in the cast, including some people I hadn't heard of when it started. It was directed by Lew Seiler for Warner Bros. and I've felt much better about the studio since.
Everything starts in medias prizefight; the dark, wiry contender currently being pummeled into toothpaste is Dane Clark, his extraordinarily beautiful face starred with sweat, his thick-lashed eyes drifting shut as he tries muzzily to remember how he strayed from his native beaches around San Francisco onto the ropes of Madison Square Garden where the bright white lights and the screaming of the crowd and the bell and the announcer's voice and the fists of Duke Carney (real-life middleweight champion Freddie Steele) all jab into him equally. Technically most of the film that follows will be flashback, although the bridging voiceover is kept mercifully brief. "What am I doing here waiting for the kiss-off? I'm not the boy they want. I'm a long way from home." The crowd noise dissolves into pounding surf, Clark battered and half-naked into Clark bright-eyed in T-shirt and jeans, just putting the final touches on a sand sculpture for an appreciative audience of kids. Mike Gordon's not quite a beach bum, but he's floored to hear that one of the paintings he hangs in the local café actually sold. Expecting to find a barfly with more spare change than sense, he's brought up short again when the mysterious buyer is the guarded, elegant Laurie (Alexis Smith), who gives her last name as Rodgers and breathes a few bars of a popular tune over dinner and otherwise says nothing about herself except that a night swim with Mike makes her feel, shivering, alive, "as if somebody's given me a present." She kisses him with the same urgent abandonment—a present she knows she won't be allowed to keep. By morning she's gone, leaving nothing behind but an address at the hotel where she wants the painting sent. A streetwise romantic, Mike knows a metaphor when it bites him: "The sound of the Lorelei, singing." But when he strikes out cross-country to get some answers from "Dr. Arnold Vincent, 73 East 62nd Street, New York City, N.Y.," he finds himself among real rocks and riptides, the very nasty currents between chanteuse Laurie and her controlling husband, former prizefighter turned promoter Rex Durant (Zachary Scott), who offers Mike a top spot in his stable after seeing what the quick-tempered artist's fists did to one of his thugs. Mike thinks he's accepting to spite Laurie, who told him in so many classic words not to get mixed up in her affairs. Her brother, the perpetually half-shot Dr. Vincent (Jeffrey Lynn), reads the situation differently: "Passing yourself off as a fighter just to be around Laurie . . . I wonder if Durant's got your number." Whether Durant does or not, and if so, what he plans to do about it, would provide sufficient suspense for a self-respecting melodrama; being a film noir, Whiplash also starts the clock ticking on the mental wear and tear that Mike takes in making himself over into a killer in the ring and the inevitable reveal of the somewhat Gothic history that ties the Vincent-Durant clan together, that Mike stumbled so innocently into when he heard a familiar sweet, smoky voice cutting across the strings and horns of the house band at the Pelican Club and tried to follow the siren offstage.
Like John Garfield for whom he was often—unfairly—considered a cheap but palatable substitute, Clark could look simultaneously tough and sensitive and the screenplay by Maurice Geraghty and Harriet Frank Jr. takes clever advantage of both qualities by casting him as both painter and pugilist, the "Battling Artist" who fights under the name of "Mike Angelo" with a palette and brushes embroidered on the back of his robe and a gimmick of painting landscapes in gym sweats or drawing some fan a lovely, casual sketch right before he springs into the ring and methodically, viciously beats his opponent's brains out. He's small-framed but sturdy, light on his feet, and in the scenes where he's stripped down to trunks, gloves, and sneakers he demonstrates the good things/small packages axiom as forcefully as the constraints of the Code will allow. And his body is a site of contention in Whiplash—Laurie wants it to love, Durant wants it to fight, and Mike's willing to let it get beaten senseless just so long as he doesn't have to think about what he wants. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but emotional vulnerability hurts forever. He's not getting out of this match alive, though, unless he can start listening to the woman who broke his heart rather than the man who commiserates with him in the language of violence. It may be obvious to the audience that Laurie is an abused wife. Mike never noticed that she was more than startled by him at the Casa de Oro Hotel, she was afraid until he'd given enough away to establish himself as just a local artist, a little smitten and a lot gauche: until then he was a man who knew her name in a city where she'd thought she was safe. He didn't see her escorted out of Sam's café the next morning by the man she'd mistaken him for, the man she was right to be afraid of. Still smarting from the revelation of her marriage, from the impression—encouraged by Durant—that he was never anything more to her than an extramarital adventure that embarrassed her with its failure to let a one-night stand lie, the chump of all time declaring true love after six hours to a stranger who was just slumming, Mike looks at Laurie standing beside her husband in the tight scale-glitter of her nightclub act, all-gold as the Lorelei, and allows himself to fall for the old misogynist myth, ignoring every signal radiating from her silence. Even her brother's uncharacteristically direct warning that "Rex Durant is a special kind of husband. Likes to stick pins in people. Laurie, for instance" is met with a hardboiled sneer: "You're breaking my heart." (Alas for the last word, Mike is in Vince's office for a physical and the doctor merely raises an eyebrow: "Maybe you haven't got one. Let's see.") He's got something uncomplicated to hate and it feels good; it feels safe. It's the real siren's song and he comes very close to being wrecked by it. Meanwhile Smith has pleasantly more to do than stand around on a promontory looking misunderstood; in between charged encounters with Mike, where their still-smoldering chemistry and her refusal to plead or apologize scratches away at his defensive veneer, her home life with Durant is staged like the rounds of a no-holds-barred fight, as he feints and hammers and she makes it clear there's no love lost, no throwing in the towel. "You haven't won anything. I love him." Only to her brother does she show how badly she's crumbling, watching the man she loves take her husband's bait and reflect him outside the ring as well as in.
I first saw Zachary Scott in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), where despite title billing he took a back seat to Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and I took note of his feral smile. I suspect his fox face typecast him as charming villains, more sharp than smooth, the kind who'll gnaw on your heart but never leave bones lying in plain sight, but he's good at suggesting an interior life for characters not necessarily written to have much more than malice and I appreciate that if this movie is going to place its villain in a wheelchair, it takes pains to observe that he wasn't warped by his thwarted ambitions or embittered by his years of disability. Rex Durant was just as "vicious—tormenting—sadistic" when he was a quick-legged middleweight at the top of his game and the paraplegia has made no difference to his character except to give him a leverage of guilt over Vince and an even more lasting hold on Laurie, who was trying to get away from him at the time of the accident that ended his career. I appreciate similarly the nuance of his nastiness. It would be one thing, and rather condescending, if Durant really were training the like-bodied Mike as his "legs," a proxy to win the title his injury denied him. But as we learn from the conversations that happen where Mike can't hear them, though he's given a clue by the stumbling, manic "ghost out of the past" of one of Durant's former properties, the promoter is doing no such thing. He trains up his "boys" as surrogate bodies, but he doesn't make them winners like he promises; he reenacts his own damage on them, taking them to the brink of the limelight and then, one way or another, breaking them. Kid McGee (John Harmon) weaves off with a handout from his former manager, a hopped-up bum with the plaintive refrain, "You told me I was gonna be the champ." Mike's going into fifteen rounds of title fight with a concussion he wasn't told about. Vince puts it most concisely, finishing the thought with a sardonic fingersnap: "He's like all the rest. Six months of fighting for you and—"
I was surprised by Jeffrey Lynn. I thought I hadn't seen him before; it turns out I just didn't remember him from The Roaring Twenties (1939) because he was neither Humphrey Bogart nor James Cagney. He came to prominence in a series of romantic melodramas for Warners and would undoubtedly have brightened Leslie Howard's life by being cast, as he was heavily favored to, in the part of Ashley Wilkes. He seems to have done mostly stage and TV work after the war. He should have done more noir. He looks good waking up in a three-piece suit and a five o'clock shadow and a hangover that's been going for years, the kind of erudite and bottomlessly sarcastic drunk who seems to drift through this genre far more often than dangerous dames really walk into the offices of private eyes; a decade on from the young composer of Four Daughters (1938), he still has the well-trained voice and the clean-planed, slightly impersonal good looks of a studio romantic lead, which underscores the sponginess of his diction when he's more than ordinarily stewed and makes the bitter little lines of his brows and mouth stand out like scars. He's introduced in the scrubs and stethoscope of his profession—perched on the edge of his desk, knocking back a shot between patients. Unimpressed with the picture and especially with the name on the door, Mike announces himself with the challenging "If you're busy, I'll wait." The doctor gives him a weary look and without interrupting the arc of his drink responds with matching irony, "Come in." The check-up he gives Mike is competent enough, but the viewer soon learns that Vince can be relied on to make a beeline for the booze of any room he's in; he's on edge around Durant, fiddling with papers and cigarettes and accepting drinks he knows he's only being offered as insults, and around his sister he looks like he's apologizing no matter what he says. "This time it calls for a knight in shining armor and I hardly qualify, is that it?" He'll get one last shot at it before the fade-out, like every good lost cause should. The pull quote for this post is one of his and follows a legitimately heinous muddle of Housman's "And malt does more than Milton can." Lynn is much too tall and much too good-looking for me to entertain a serious fancast, but I thought, inevitably, of Kennedy.
The movie's a lot like its protagonist, basically: rough edges, essentially sweet, and never goes so far in the wrong direction that it can't believably come back. The ending has an element of mutual rescue, which I always enjoy. It's yet another noir without a femme fatale. I am not sure where the title comes in, but it's a good pulp attention-getter and it suits the number of blows to the head Mike racks up over the not-too-long runtime. The supporting cast includes Eve Arden as Mike's sensible New York gal pal and the ever-adorable S.Z. Sakall as Sam, the café owner back on the West Coast—when he runs out of patience with Mike's moping, you can tell it's serious. It's probably not a good sign that every time I try to remember the theme tune "Just for Now" I wind up humming "Love Is Here to Stay," but anyone who can identify the close-harmony trio who perform "The Man with the Spanish Drawl" should drop me a line. This knockout brought to you by my artistic backers at Patreon.
Everything starts in medias prizefight; the dark, wiry contender currently being pummeled into toothpaste is Dane Clark, his extraordinarily beautiful face starred with sweat, his thick-lashed eyes drifting shut as he tries muzzily to remember how he strayed from his native beaches around San Francisco onto the ropes of Madison Square Garden where the bright white lights and the screaming of the crowd and the bell and the announcer's voice and the fists of Duke Carney (real-life middleweight champion Freddie Steele) all jab into him equally. Technically most of the film that follows will be flashback, although the bridging voiceover is kept mercifully brief. "What am I doing here waiting for the kiss-off? I'm not the boy they want. I'm a long way from home." The crowd noise dissolves into pounding surf, Clark battered and half-naked into Clark bright-eyed in T-shirt and jeans, just putting the final touches on a sand sculpture for an appreciative audience of kids. Mike Gordon's not quite a beach bum, but he's floored to hear that one of the paintings he hangs in the local café actually sold. Expecting to find a barfly with more spare change than sense, he's brought up short again when the mysterious buyer is the guarded, elegant Laurie (Alexis Smith), who gives her last name as Rodgers and breathes a few bars of a popular tune over dinner and otherwise says nothing about herself except that a night swim with Mike makes her feel, shivering, alive, "as if somebody's given me a present." She kisses him with the same urgent abandonment—a present she knows she won't be allowed to keep. By morning she's gone, leaving nothing behind but an address at the hotel where she wants the painting sent. A streetwise romantic, Mike knows a metaphor when it bites him: "The sound of the Lorelei, singing." But when he strikes out cross-country to get some answers from "Dr. Arnold Vincent, 73 East 62nd Street, New York City, N.Y.," he finds himself among real rocks and riptides, the very nasty currents between chanteuse Laurie and her controlling husband, former prizefighter turned promoter Rex Durant (Zachary Scott), who offers Mike a top spot in his stable after seeing what the quick-tempered artist's fists did to one of his thugs. Mike thinks he's accepting to spite Laurie, who told him in so many classic words not to get mixed up in her affairs. Her brother, the perpetually half-shot Dr. Vincent (Jeffrey Lynn), reads the situation differently: "Passing yourself off as a fighter just to be around Laurie . . . I wonder if Durant's got your number." Whether Durant does or not, and if so, what he plans to do about it, would provide sufficient suspense for a self-respecting melodrama; being a film noir, Whiplash also starts the clock ticking on the mental wear and tear that Mike takes in making himself over into a killer in the ring and the inevitable reveal of the somewhat Gothic history that ties the Vincent-Durant clan together, that Mike stumbled so innocently into when he heard a familiar sweet, smoky voice cutting across the strings and horns of the house band at the Pelican Club and tried to follow the siren offstage.
Like John Garfield for whom he was often—unfairly—considered a cheap but palatable substitute, Clark could look simultaneously tough and sensitive and the screenplay by Maurice Geraghty and Harriet Frank Jr. takes clever advantage of both qualities by casting him as both painter and pugilist, the "Battling Artist" who fights under the name of "Mike Angelo" with a palette and brushes embroidered on the back of his robe and a gimmick of painting landscapes in gym sweats or drawing some fan a lovely, casual sketch right before he springs into the ring and methodically, viciously beats his opponent's brains out. He's small-framed but sturdy, light on his feet, and in the scenes where he's stripped down to trunks, gloves, and sneakers he demonstrates the good things/small packages axiom as forcefully as the constraints of the Code will allow. And his body is a site of contention in Whiplash—Laurie wants it to love, Durant wants it to fight, and Mike's willing to let it get beaten senseless just so long as he doesn't have to think about what he wants. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but emotional vulnerability hurts forever. He's not getting out of this match alive, though, unless he can start listening to the woman who broke his heart rather than the man who commiserates with him in the language of violence. It may be obvious to the audience that Laurie is an abused wife. Mike never noticed that she was more than startled by him at the Casa de Oro Hotel, she was afraid until he'd given enough away to establish himself as just a local artist, a little smitten and a lot gauche: until then he was a man who knew her name in a city where she'd thought she was safe. He didn't see her escorted out of Sam's café the next morning by the man she'd mistaken him for, the man she was right to be afraid of. Still smarting from the revelation of her marriage, from the impression—encouraged by Durant—that he was never anything more to her than an extramarital adventure that embarrassed her with its failure to let a one-night stand lie, the chump of all time declaring true love after six hours to a stranger who was just slumming, Mike looks at Laurie standing beside her husband in the tight scale-glitter of her nightclub act, all-gold as the Lorelei, and allows himself to fall for the old misogynist myth, ignoring every signal radiating from her silence. Even her brother's uncharacteristically direct warning that "Rex Durant is a special kind of husband. Likes to stick pins in people. Laurie, for instance" is met with a hardboiled sneer: "You're breaking my heart." (Alas for the last word, Mike is in Vince's office for a physical and the doctor merely raises an eyebrow: "Maybe you haven't got one. Let's see.") He's got something uncomplicated to hate and it feels good; it feels safe. It's the real siren's song and he comes very close to being wrecked by it. Meanwhile Smith has pleasantly more to do than stand around on a promontory looking misunderstood; in between charged encounters with Mike, where their still-smoldering chemistry and her refusal to plead or apologize scratches away at his defensive veneer, her home life with Durant is staged like the rounds of a no-holds-barred fight, as he feints and hammers and she makes it clear there's no love lost, no throwing in the towel. "You haven't won anything. I love him." Only to her brother does she show how badly she's crumbling, watching the man she loves take her husband's bait and reflect him outside the ring as well as in.
I first saw Zachary Scott in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), where despite title billing he took a back seat to Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet and I took note of his feral smile. I suspect his fox face typecast him as charming villains, more sharp than smooth, the kind who'll gnaw on your heart but never leave bones lying in plain sight, but he's good at suggesting an interior life for characters not necessarily written to have much more than malice and I appreciate that if this movie is going to place its villain in a wheelchair, it takes pains to observe that he wasn't warped by his thwarted ambitions or embittered by his years of disability. Rex Durant was just as "vicious—tormenting—sadistic" when he was a quick-legged middleweight at the top of his game and the paraplegia has made no difference to his character except to give him a leverage of guilt over Vince and an even more lasting hold on Laurie, who was trying to get away from him at the time of the accident that ended his career. I appreciate similarly the nuance of his nastiness. It would be one thing, and rather condescending, if Durant really were training the like-bodied Mike as his "legs," a proxy to win the title his injury denied him. But as we learn from the conversations that happen where Mike can't hear them, though he's given a clue by the stumbling, manic "ghost out of the past" of one of Durant's former properties, the promoter is doing no such thing. He trains up his "boys" as surrogate bodies, but he doesn't make them winners like he promises; he reenacts his own damage on them, taking them to the brink of the limelight and then, one way or another, breaking them. Kid McGee (John Harmon) weaves off with a handout from his former manager, a hopped-up bum with the plaintive refrain, "You told me I was gonna be the champ." Mike's going into fifteen rounds of title fight with a concussion he wasn't told about. Vince puts it most concisely, finishing the thought with a sardonic fingersnap: "He's like all the rest. Six months of fighting for you and—"
I was surprised by Jeffrey Lynn. I thought I hadn't seen him before; it turns out I just didn't remember him from The Roaring Twenties (1939) because he was neither Humphrey Bogart nor James Cagney. He came to prominence in a series of romantic melodramas for Warners and would undoubtedly have brightened Leslie Howard's life by being cast, as he was heavily favored to, in the part of Ashley Wilkes. He seems to have done mostly stage and TV work after the war. He should have done more noir. He looks good waking up in a three-piece suit and a five o'clock shadow and a hangover that's been going for years, the kind of erudite and bottomlessly sarcastic drunk who seems to drift through this genre far more often than dangerous dames really walk into the offices of private eyes; a decade on from the young composer of Four Daughters (1938), he still has the well-trained voice and the clean-planed, slightly impersonal good looks of a studio romantic lead, which underscores the sponginess of his diction when he's more than ordinarily stewed and makes the bitter little lines of his brows and mouth stand out like scars. He's introduced in the scrubs and stethoscope of his profession—perched on the edge of his desk, knocking back a shot between patients. Unimpressed with the picture and especially with the name on the door, Mike announces himself with the challenging "If you're busy, I'll wait." The doctor gives him a weary look and without interrupting the arc of his drink responds with matching irony, "Come in." The check-up he gives Mike is competent enough, but the viewer soon learns that Vince can be relied on to make a beeline for the booze of any room he's in; he's on edge around Durant, fiddling with papers and cigarettes and accepting drinks he knows he's only being offered as insults, and around his sister he looks like he's apologizing no matter what he says. "This time it calls for a knight in shining armor and I hardly qualify, is that it?" He'll get one last shot at it before the fade-out, like every good lost cause should. The pull quote for this post is one of his and follows a legitimately heinous muddle of Housman's "And malt does more than Milton can." Lynn is much too tall and much too good-looking for me to entertain a serious fancast, but I thought, inevitably, of Kennedy.
The movie's a lot like its protagonist, basically: rough edges, essentially sweet, and never goes so far in the wrong direction that it can't believably come back. The ending has an element of mutual rescue, which I always enjoy. It's yet another noir without a femme fatale. I am not sure where the title comes in, but it's a good pulp attention-getter and it suits the number of blows to the head Mike racks up over the not-too-long runtime. The supporting cast includes Eve Arden as Mike's sensible New York gal pal and the ever-adorable S.Z. Sakall as Sam, the café owner back on the West Coast—when he runs out of patience with Mike's moping, you can tell it's serious. It's probably not a good sign that every time I try to remember the theme tune "Just for Now" I wind up humming "Love Is Here to Stay," but anyone who can identify the close-harmony trio who perform "The Man with the Spanish Drawl" should drop me a line. This knockout brought to you by my artistic backers at Patreon.
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I'm trying to recall where I first noticed him. i think it must have been Casablanca.
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I suspect Casablanca in my case just because I saw it so early—it was my introduction to almost everyone in its cast. Peter Lorre is the potential exception because of Arsenic and Old Lace.
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That's charming. Most people's Lorre is pretty broad.
I have not yet managed to write about it for a variety of reasons, but last month I actually managed to see The Lost One (Der Verlorene, 1951), Lorre's only film as director, and it was great. Plotwise, it's about three movies packed into the same runtime, but it has all its symbols lined up correctly and all the structure under the surface is perfectly timed and it is ultimately a serial killer movie which does not in the least resemble M (1931). The print we saw had the worst subtitles ever—sans-serif white on a rather washed-out black-and-white print, meaning nobody I was seeing it with including me got more than two-thirds of the dialogue unless it was German I didn't need a dictionary for—but that can't be a feature of all of them. I'd love to see it restored. It demonstrated very clearly that Lorre should have directed more films, except that in 1951 he had managed to make a movie that absolutely nobody in Germany wanted to see and nobody in America either.
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We actually came out saying it would be a great double feature.
If we can think of a third one we can have a Misunderstood-Actor/Directors' film festival.
We would have to run it separately or perhaps as a kind of satyr play afterward because it's such a tonal break from the other two, but I was very fond of Clive Brook's On Approval (1944).
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What is this?
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That's cute! And does not look like a bad place to start learning about classic monsters, especially if it's got actual Karloff.
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Thank you!
Intriguing that the creators avoided several tired disability tropes.
I had absolutely no idea what the movie would do on that front when the character was introduced and I was pleased.
(So, see, if a movie from 1948 can do it, a movie from 2018 has no excuse.)