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How come the smart guys are inside and the dopes outside?
I would love to know the point in film noir's evolution when it became the dominant documentary mode of the American screen, the persuasive familiarity of streets down which an audience might walk as readily as a character turning into time machine as storefronts and sidewalks and landmarks vanished with the century, leaving only the nitrate and acetate ghosts of a long-demolished neighborhood or the slant of a real fedora. Someone must have pinned it down in the years between the expressionist sets of Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and the eight million day-washed stories of The Naked City (1948). I kept wondering all the time I was watching Andre DeToth's Crime Wave (1954), a tight, tough little B-picture without an ounce of backlot on it. The story is nothing to write home about, but the characters are all precisely themselves and so is Los Angeles. They make 73 minutes go down easy, which with hold-ups, home invasions, and car chases from Glendale to Chinatown is no small feat.
The title has once again more or less zilch to do with the plot except pedantically as the film opens with a late-night filling-station smash-and-grab, the latest in a southbound string of penny-ante robberies committed by three recent escapees from San Quentin. "Each time a different car," Sterling Hayden's Detective Lieutenant Sims muses, rolling the words around his mouth like one of his ubiquitous toothpicks, "every job a soft touch. Chicken feed. Eating money." Guessing that the robbers are buying themselves time to make contact with a confederate and pull a big enough job to get out of the country, he begins to tighten the screws on his network of informants and likely accomplices, including two-year parolee Steve Lacey, a former pilot and expert mechanic played by Gene Nelson with a boyish flop of dark blond hair and the wounded hesitation of someone who doesn't trust his own decisions anymore; he's not just snapped awake but scared by the anonymous caller who knows his name, bitterly confident it's the start of his inexorable slide back into the unloving arms of the law. "Once you do a stretch, you're never clean again. You're never free. They've always got a string on you and they tug—tug—tug. Before you know it, you're back again." The inconvenient arrival and even more inconvenient expiration of one of his former yardmates leaves him with no choice but to call his parole officer unless he wants to be caught with a hot corpse and no alibi, but sympathetic O'Keefe (James Bell) is immediately outranked by the larger-than-life cynicism of Sims, the Satanic ideal of a hardboiled cop taunting the parole officer as if every case of recidivism is a win for his team, laughing outright at the loathing in Ellen Lacey (Phyllis Kirk)'s eyes as he handcuffs her husband in front of her: "You don't like that, do you, Mrs. Lacey? Well, just remember it can happen to you, too, if you're covering up for this guy." He doesn't look like the tough but fair arbiter of law and order, he looks like institutional power throwing its weight around because it can, and neither Ellen nor the audience may find much to hope for when events conspire to cast him as Steve's sole uncertain lifeline out of the bank heist he's been blackmailed into. We have already seen the camera prowling among the real-life desks and frosted glass doors of the homicide division at City Hall, observing the flotsam of Sims' dragnet—a husband and wife pulled in for a "little lovers' quarrel" that left him with a bandaged head, a suspect's former girlfriend swearing through streaked mascara that "not after what he did to me, I wouldn't help him or any of his friends," a middle-aged CI of long standing justifiably spooked about having "cops [sent] to get me out of bed." Any of these compromised, bargaining people could be Steve Lacey, unbroken after three days in city jail but up against the same criminal and official pressure as soon as he's out. There may be no choosing sides, only getting crushed in between.
I believe I first saw Hayden in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and started to notice him with The Killing (1956), but I'm not sure I've ever seen him better than he is here. What the hell was he doing wasting his time with the patriotic pressboard of Suddenly (1954)? He comes alive as a rat bastard built like a Viking god, half a size too big for any room he's in and not caring. His tie's twisted around the wrong way, his suit's cut to slouch and his hat's dented in like he sat on it, but he's no sweetly rumpled Columbo; he might well be mussed up from beating the shit out of his latest luckless pigeon. He chews toothpicks because they're better for him than cigarettes, but they hang at the corner of his mouth like the pretext for a sneer. There's nothing sexual in his handling of Steve's arrest, but it's none the less obscene: the big man jerking around the unresisting ex-con who looks more like a collegian than a veteran in his half-zip pullover and garage jeans, enduring the trap-snap of steel around his wrists with his eyes closed and his mouth a bitten line, as if he's thinking himself anywhere but his own living room with his beloved wife watching. We know they love each other and we know it's not blind. We met them in the same iron-framed bed, dark-haired Ellen with her unsentimental pixie face reminding her prison-shadowed husband that "I didn't mind, did I? I love you, I wanted you, and now that I've got you, I care a lot less." The shot of his hand reaching out of bed for the receiver of a jangling phone and hers catching his wrist—from underneath—speaks mid-coital volumes right past the Production Code. (They're smoking in the next scene just in case you missed it.) When she's threatened in order to motivate Steve, it's more than a routine swing of the refrigerator door; she's not a symbol of the straight life, she's a small but not fragile woman who meets Timothy Carey's manic leer across a card table in a Chinatown flophouse and sits down, not to show fear, to play him at gin. She is not punished for having the decisiveness that her more diffident man lacks.
Everyone in the script—a three-way effort by Crane Wilbur, Bernard Gordon, and Richard Wormser from a short story by John and Ward Hawkins—will be that distinctly delineated, whether they're a well-intentioned witness or a crook keeping a low profile or a parole officer's wife sleepily passing her husband his shoes as he takes a two a.m. call from one of his "boys." Ted de Corsia had proven his noir bona fides as far back as The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and here brings a touch of aspirational sleaze to the part of "Doc" Penny, the pinstriped architect of a bank job that just needs Steve's expertise with things that go to be sure of the getaway; he makes his pitch in the domestic lull of washing up after dinner, his slick black hair and his black cigarette holder making him look like a Penguin wannabe. Much rougher on all fronts is his muscle Ben Hastings, played by a Charles Bronson so young he was still Charles Buchinsky, which means nothing to the canyon-lines already grooved on either side of his edgily smiling mouth—a weathered juvenile delinquent in the white T-shirt and black leather of someone who will definitely rebel against whatever you've got. Soon-to-be-blacklisted Nedrick Young amounts to a sweaty cameo as the doomed Gat Morgan and Jay Novello sidles off with his scenes as a stubble-faced back-alley medico who prefers dogs to people and insists on collecting his fee even from a dead man's pockets. Hank Worden as the stringy drink of water who employs Steve at the airfield has one of the oddest deliveries I have encountered even in bit parts, but he delivers his assessment of Steve as a mechanic with unimpeachable artlessness: "If it would be possible to marry an engine, I'm sure he'd never have married a woman." (Sims holds much the same opinion in a rather less complimentary key: "You got mush in your head. Take a wrench out of your hand, you couldn't find your way across the street.")
Crime Wave was shot late in 1952, although you can tell the season only by the tinsel garlands and enormous tissue-paper bells that criss-cross the streets of downtown Glendale like heaps of spider silk. Girl of the Port (1930) gave me no great confidence in Bert Glennon as a director, but as a cinematographer he turned in Academy-nominated work for Cecil B. DeMille, Josef von Sternberg, Dorothy Arzner, and John Ford and his photography here stands with the best of John Alton and Nicholas Musuraca. Day scenes as neat and unostentatious as newsreels turn their shadow sides as soon as the sun goes down, Klieg-lit into chiaroscuro tableaux that are all the more uncanny for being constructed out of obviously real places—no exaggerations needed. This darkness is always there. In the tall windows of Los Angeles City Hall that glitter at night like the lights of a freeway, its not-at-all-mocked-up corridors still incandescent after hours. In the steel timbering and great Deco-wheeled lamps of Union Station, blurred with countless transient voices. In the square glass bricks of Sawyer's Dog and Cat Hospital and the metal-shaded desk lamp of its surgery, the blank wall out back where a killer flicks from silhouette to center stage as he dodges the streetlights. In the marble echoes of the Glendale Bank of America where the lights go out at five minutes past noon. The cinéma vérité of both the opening stickup and the climactic chase owes a visible debt to Gun Crazy (1950), but a fistfight that bursts through the back door of a tenement and down the most dilapidated stairs I've seen since Chicago Calling (1951) looks like nothing but its own back-bruising self. You can even see one of the famous Red Cars of the Pacific Electric, trolleying right down Glendale Boulevard as the protagonists run for their bus through the brief, unmetaphorical rain.
I understand it doesn't say much for the plot that it is possible to be distracted by the scenery that is nothing more than the city of the time, but there's so much of it and it's so well-shot, I don't really think it's a disservice. Frame by frame, Crime Wave looks fantastic. And its actors more than take up the slack of the story; I note with regret that Gene Nelson who is so good as a man ashamed of his past and frightened about his future and yet not quite as much of a pushover as either of those factors makes him look never seems to have done another noir and is in fact most famous for singing "Kansas City" and "All Er Nuthin" in Oklahoma! (1955). Phyllis Kirk seems to have done hardly any movies at all, although since one of them is DeToth's House of Wax (1953) I will probably see more of her. I'd seen Sterling Hayden as a crook before, but I hadn't seen him as a rat bastard, and apparently that makes all the difference. The internet tells me the film was shot in two weeks on a budget that was just slightly larger than Jack Warner laughing and I can't imagine how the originally pitched A-version with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner would have worked at all. Maybe it would have been a classic, but I don't know that it would have preserved for us this particular L.A., where Steve Lacey lives at "223 Front Street, Glendale, Calif." and looks it. This travelogue brought to you by my clean backers at Patreon.
The title has once again more or less zilch to do with the plot except pedantically as the film opens with a late-night filling-station smash-and-grab, the latest in a southbound string of penny-ante robberies committed by three recent escapees from San Quentin. "Each time a different car," Sterling Hayden's Detective Lieutenant Sims muses, rolling the words around his mouth like one of his ubiquitous toothpicks, "every job a soft touch. Chicken feed. Eating money." Guessing that the robbers are buying themselves time to make contact with a confederate and pull a big enough job to get out of the country, he begins to tighten the screws on his network of informants and likely accomplices, including two-year parolee Steve Lacey, a former pilot and expert mechanic played by Gene Nelson with a boyish flop of dark blond hair and the wounded hesitation of someone who doesn't trust his own decisions anymore; he's not just snapped awake but scared by the anonymous caller who knows his name, bitterly confident it's the start of his inexorable slide back into the unloving arms of the law. "Once you do a stretch, you're never clean again. You're never free. They've always got a string on you and they tug—tug—tug. Before you know it, you're back again." The inconvenient arrival and even more inconvenient expiration of one of his former yardmates leaves him with no choice but to call his parole officer unless he wants to be caught with a hot corpse and no alibi, but sympathetic O'Keefe (James Bell) is immediately outranked by the larger-than-life cynicism of Sims, the Satanic ideal of a hardboiled cop taunting the parole officer as if every case of recidivism is a win for his team, laughing outright at the loathing in Ellen Lacey (Phyllis Kirk)'s eyes as he handcuffs her husband in front of her: "You don't like that, do you, Mrs. Lacey? Well, just remember it can happen to you, too, if you're covering up for this guy." He doesn't look like the tough but fair arbiter of law and order, he looks like institutional power throwing its weight around because it can, and neither Ellen nor the audience may find much to hope for when events conspire to cast him as Steve's sole uncertain lifeline out of the bank heist he's been blackmailed into. We have already seen the camera prowling among the real-life desks and frosted glass doors of the homicide division at City Hall, observing the flotsam of Sims' dragnet—a husband and wife pulled in for a "little lovers' quarrel" that left him with a bandaged head, a suspect's former girlfriend swearing through streaked mascara that "not after what he did to me, I wouldn't help him or any of his friends," a middle-aged CI of long standing justifiably spooked about having "cops [sent] to get me out of bed." Any of these compromised, bargaining people could be Steve Lacey, unbroken after three days in city jail but up against the same criminal and official pressure as soon as he's out. There may be no choosing sides, only getting crushed in between.
I believe I first saw Hayden in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and started to notice him with The Killing (1956), but I'm not sure I've ever seen him better than he is here. What the hell was he doing wasting his time with the patriotic pressboard of Suddenly (1954)? He comes alive as a rat bastard built like a Viking god, half a size too big for any room he's in and not caring. His tie's twisted around the wrong way, his suit's cut to slouch and his hat's dented in like he sat on it, but he's no sweetly rumpled Columbo; he might well be mussed up from beating the shit out of his latest luckless pigeon. He chews toothpicks because they're better for him than cigarettes, but they hang at the corner of his mouth like the pretext for a sneer. There's nothing sexual in his handling of Steve's arrest, but it's none the less obscene: the big man jerking around the unresisting ex-con who looks more like a collegian than a veteran in his half-zip pullover and garage jeans, enduring the trap-snap of steel around his wrists with his eyes closed and his mouth a bitten line, as if he's thinking himself anywhere but his own living room with his beloved wife watching. We know they love each other and we know it's not blind. We met them in the same iron-framed bed, dark-haired Ellen with her unsentimental pixie face reminding her prison-shadowed husband that "I didn't mind, did I? I love you, I wanted you, and now that I've got you, I care a lot less." The shot of his hand reaching out of bed for the receiver of a jangling phone and hers catching his wrist—from underneath—speaks mid-coital volumes right past the Production Code. (They're smoking in the next scene just in case you missed it.) When she's threatened in order to motivate Steve, it's more than a routine swing of the refrigerator door; she's not a symbol of the straight life, she's a small but not fragile woman who meets Timothy Carey's manic leer across a card table in a Chinatown flophouse and sits down, not to show fear, to play him at gin. She is not punished for having the decisiveness that her more diffident man lacks.
Everyone in the script—a three-way effort by Crane Wilbur, Bernard Gordon, and Richard Wormser from a short story by John and Ward Hawkins—will be that distinctly delineated, whether they're a well-intentioned witness or a crook keeping a low profile or a parole officer's wife sleepily passing her husband his shoes as he takes a two a.m. call from one of his "boys." Ted de Corsia had proven his noir bona fides as far back as The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and here brings a touch of aspirational sleaze to the part of "Doc" Penny, the pinstriped architect of a bank job that just needs Steve's expertise with things that go to be sure of the getaway; he makes his pitch in the domestic lull of washing up after dinner, his slick black hair and his black cigarette holder making him look like a Penguin wannabe. Much rougher on all fronts is his muscle Ben Hastings, played by a Charles Bronson so young he was still Charles Buchinsky, which means nothing to the canyon-lines already grooved on either side of his edgily smiling mouth—a weathered juvenile delinquent in the white T-shirt and black leather of someone who will definitely rebel against whatever you've got. Soon-to-be-blacklisted Nedrick Young amounts to a sweaty cameo as the doomed Gat Morgan and Jay Novello sidles off with his scenes as a stubble-faced back-alley medico who prefers dogs to people and insists on collecting his fee even from a dead man's pockets. Hank Worden as the stringy drink of water who employs Steve at the airfield has one of the oddest deliveries I have encountered even in bit parts, but he delivers his assessment of Steve as a mechanic with unimpeachable artlessness: "If it would be possible to marry an engine, I'm sure he'd never have married a woman." (Sims holds much the same opinion in a rather less complimentary key: "You got mush in your head. Take a wrench out of your hand, you couldn't find your way across the street.")
Crime Wave was shot late in 1952, although you can tell the season only by the tinsel garlands and enormous tissue-paper bells that criss-cross the streets of downtown Glendale like heaps of spider silk. Girl of the Port (1930) gave me no great confidence in Bert Glennon as a director, but as a cinematographer he turned in Academy-nominated work for Cecil B. DeMille, Josef von Sternberg, Dorothy Arzner, and John Ford and his photography here stands with the best of John Alton and Nicholas Musuraca. Day scenes as neat and unostentatious as newsreels turn their shadow sides as soon as the sun goes down, Klieg-lit into chiaroscuro tableaux that are all the more uncanny for being constructed out of obviously real places—no exaggerations needed. This darkness is always there. In the tall windows of Los Angeles City Hall that glitter at night like the lights of a freeway, its not-at-all-mocked-up corridors still incandescent after hours. In the steel timbering and great Deco-wheeled lamps of Union Station, blurred with countless transient voices. In the square glass bricks of Sawyer's Dog and Cat Hospital and the metal-shaded desk lamp of its surgery, the blank wall out back where a killer flicks from silhouette to center stage as he dodges the streetlights. In the marble echoes of the Glendale Bank of America where the lights go out at five minutes past noon. The cinéma vérité of both the opening stickup and the climactic chase owes a visible debt to Gun Crazy (1950), but a fistfight that bursts through the back door of a tenement and down the most dilapidated stairs I've seen since Chicago Calling (1951) looks like nothing but its own back-bruising self. You can even see one of the famous Red Cars of the Pacific Electric, trolleying right down Glendale Boulevard as the protagonists run for their bus through the brief, unmetaphorical rain.
I understand it doesn't say much for the plot that it is possible to be distracted by the scenery that is nothing more than the city of the time, but there's so much of it and it's so well-shot, I don't really think it's a disservice. Frame by frame, Crime Wave looks fantastic. And its actors more than take up the slack of the story; I note with regret that Gene Nelson who is so good as a man ashamed of his past and frightened about his future and yet not quite as much of a pushover as either of those factors makes him look never seems to have done another noir and is in fact most famous for singing "Kansas City" and "All Er Nuthin" in Oklahoma! (1955). Phyllis Kirk seems to have done hardly any movies at all, although since one of them is DeToth's House of Wax (1953) I will probably see more of her. I'd seen Sterling Hayden as a crook before, but I hadn't seen him as a rat bastard, and apparently that makes all the difference. The internet tells me the film was shot in two weeks on a budget that was just slightly larger than Jack Warner laughing and I can't imagine how the originally pitched A-version with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner would have worked at all. Maybe it would have been a classic, but I don't know that it would have preserved for us this particular L.A., where Steve Lacey lives at "223 Front Street, Glendale, Calif." and looks it. This travelogue brought to you by my clean backers at Patreon.
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Between him and Jean Hagen and John Huston and Marilyn Monroe, I am increasingly thinking I am just going to have to watch The Asphalt Jungle (1950). He enters the frame and takes over the room. Like, I know he's six and a half feet on his own recognizance, but that's not the reason the audience can't look at anyone else onscreen. He can just be that magnetic. I'm not sure I'd ever seen it before. Hell of a thing to turn it on for this role.
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Here is a cool rundown of the film's Glendale/Atwater/Toluca Lake locations then and now--except the "now" is from 2008, and I'm fairly sure there have been even more changes since then.
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What else do you consider the essential Sterling Hayden that I haven't seen?
Here is a cool rundown of the film's Glendale/Atwater/Toluca Lake locations then and now--except the "now" is from 2008, and I'm fairly sure there have been even more changes since then.
Thank you for finding that! That's extremely cool. And really extensive. (They got a picture of the Christmas decorations!) It seems completely unpredictable how much some locations will look like themselves across six decades and how much some others will change.
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Certainly The Asphalt Jungle (which also has a great performance by Sam Jaffe). Also interesting is the TV movie A Carol for Another Christmas (which once again pairs Hayden with Peter Sellers).
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I will report back once I have seen it! As stated above, I think it's becoming inevitable.
Also interesting is the TV movie A Carol for Another Christmas (which once again pairs Hayden with Peter Sellers).
I've never seen that! I know it was written by Rod Serling and that's about it.