Myth Happens

It wouldn't be hard to work up a ghost out of They All Come Out (1939). A rail-hopping, road-thumbing drifter introduced short the price of his deluxe diner plate and about to hitch himself a ride into crime, Tom Neal in his first starring feature could be warming up for his most famous, hopeless, defining role in Detour (1945), just as his baby-faced, embittered short cut to the slammer all too neatly presages the actor's incarceration for what he would defend as manslaughter as involuntary and unbelievable as any of the misfortunes of Al Roberts. The part haunted him like radiation from one end to the other of his scandal-tangled life; it makes the sense of the film's own nightmare to find it encysted in the bright future of his B-start at MGM. History may or may not recur as farce after tragedy, but it can show up for irony any time it feels like.

The fly in this hauntologically attractive framing is the film itself. They All Come Out was written by John C. Higgins and directed by Jacques Tourneur and cannot with the best of intentions and a crowbar be made to fit into the lineage of their future specialties in film noir; it was promoted from the two-reeler ranks of MGM's Crime Does Not Pay (1935–47) and as such serves up an especially square helping of the Production Code. Whether dramatizing the wages of personal sins like gambling or embezzling, the more organized rackets of protection and counterfeiting, or the institutional bad apples of political machines and the police, the short subjects of this popular, topical series—during the war, it widened its remit to include espionage, sabotage, and even the global crime of Nazism itself—could be categorized unironically as anti-noir, doing their docudrama best to scare their viewers straight with a relentlessly authoritative combination of po-faced didacticism and grisly deterrence. Got a fail-safe plan for collecting your ill-gotten gains after prison, like Robert Taylor in Buried Loot (1935)? With the cops infallibly onto your scheme from the start, you'll have hideously acid-scarred your face for $200,000 worth of nothing. Tempted to scam the insurance companies by participating in staged automobile accidents in the Oscar-winning Torture Money (1937)? Too late by the time you discover the cost in back-alley road rash and real broken bones. Catching all the crooked breaks from till-dipping to manslaughter to murder like Barry Nelson in The Luckiest Guy in the World (1947)? Fear not, your streak will run out as bluntly and absurdly as if God's own hand bank-shot a bullet your guiltily bystanding way. Even the entries which do not rely on some kind of gotcha to punch their morals home take such conservative care not to make their crimes look accidentally interesting that when a sterling rookie is revealed as a secret hood in Joseph Losey's A Gun in His Hand (1945), the extent of his corruption is a penny-ante string of warehouse robberies whose gimmick of call boxes and burglar alarms hardly seems worth the cover of police academy. MGM treated the series as a kind of minor league for new talent before and behind the camera and it is fun to watch the early efforts especially of writers, directors, and actors who would become associated with more complicated explorations of crime, but the total humorlessness of the house style makes the project hard to take seriously even in single installments and after more than one even the most upstanding viewer may find themselves longing for some profitable mayhem committed with impunity.

They All Come Out might still have fared better as a short. Dedicated to the United States Department of Justice whose cooperation enabled its location shooting at multiple correctional facilities from Atlanta to Alcatraz and introduced by the combined authorities of a former attorney general and current director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it opens pacily enough with the convergence of the "interstate bandits" who acquire Neal's Joe Cameron for the price of a meal and a bed and the self-respect of fixing the car that ferried him from Birmingham to Hot Springs, the Depression-dream of easy money for nothing more than sticking it to the law and order that threw him off freight trains and pinched him for vagrancy and never kept him from starving. "It's the cops," he agrees grimly, accepting a cigarette from Rita Johnson's Kitty Carson, his sleek blonde savior of a moll in the market for a driver. "Always the cops. They run the country. Guy can't walk through any town without some big loudmouth copper wants to know all about him," explaining perhaps why he doesn't just shake the speed cop who whines up on their tail during his first getaway but neatly sideswipes the officer into a passing tree. Cornered by an old un-acquaintance in the last reel, forced maliciously into a robbery of the straight job he was working late in Cleveland, the same slam-bang license governs his realization that a gun in his face is nothing compared to the welding torch in his hand and the go-for-broke gruesomeness with which Joe turns the spark-splashing acetylene on his extortionist—clinched with two fists to the man's seared chin just in time for the witness of Kitty and an astounded night watchman—would stack up against any of Crime Does Not Pay's Grand Guignol. The problem is that in between these two points of hard-boiled interest come forty minutes of informercial for the American penal system and not even the loneliness of auto camps or all-night cafés can grit up its soft-soap hard sell. Forget the screws, the stoolies, the shivs and the injustices of The Big House (1930) or Brute Force (1947) or Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954). The modern penitentiary is an opportunity for self-improvement staffed by shrewdly compassionate authorities who serve more as guidance counselors than wardens, debating the social and criminal histories of their convict population before charting the safest and most productive course for each of them, as witnessed by the fates of the Reno Madigan gang. The youngest and least hardened offenders, Joe and Kitty who came up clawing out of broken homes into broken promises are the hopeful success stories, granted the chances they were denied on the outside by the minimum-security support of the Industrial Reformatory at Chillicothe and the Federal Industrial Institution for Women at Alderton. The surgical reconstruction of his never-healed wrist affords him the able-bodied opportunity to train as a machinist, she brushes up on her beautician's skills after some disillusioning real talk about the outlaw life, their eventual good conduct earns them the pen-pal privileges through which they contemplate the former mirage of a future on the level. As explained by the superintendent who shares her movie's scorn for subtext, "You're here to be helped—although you don't seem to realize it." Back at USP Atlanta, Edward Gargan's Bugs Jacklin is beginning to take the hint, since it turns out that the big lug of a recidivist wants clumsily and sincerely to make good for his estranged wife and their four-year-old son who in a gag I didn't expect from the 1930's sets off the metal detector on visiting day with a stash of bottlecaps. Even Groper Crane, the twitchy little triggerman played by John Gallaudet as though Elisha Cook Jr. and Dwight Frye were otherwise engaged, proves amenable to rehabilitation when his delusions of women hiding in his pockets to sneak his cigarettes refer him out of prison entirely and into psychiatric care, such that after some basket-weaving and a few sessions with Charles Lane, he can cheerfully dismiss his lifelong, paranoid, intrusive thoughts: "Ever since you explained why I had them, they ain't been bothering me at all." He is last seen spading the grounds of Springfield's Hospital for Defective Delinquents, a name regardless of its eugenicist antecedents I can't believe no punk band ever picked up. As for the unregenerate Reno Madigan, a slickster in the mode of a cut-rate George Raft, actually Bernard Nedell? Warehouse him on the Rock, let him dissolve into the clang of bells and the foghorn booming spectrally beyond the bars of his cell: a strange, sour note among all the reformist cheer, but well within the punitive prescriptions of Crime Does Not Pay. Compressing this material would not make it less sententious, but at least it would only hit the viewer over the head once that Joe who expressed such vivid contempt for railroad bulls and stop-and-frisk policing now accepts his salvation through the benevolent oversight of the carceral state. Instead, even the final scene in night court cannot resist reminding us through the paroled lovebirds of Joe and Kitty, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated:

"I don't know if you realize what you've done tonight. A known criminal tried to force you back into crime. A year or so ago, you both might have tried to settle this in your own way. But tonight you didn't. You both turned instinctively to the police. Your thinking is right. You have nothing to fear from now on."

Such a relief, don't you just want to throw a brick? More than any criteria of plot or style, this complacency is what keeps They All Come Out off the lists of proto-noir: there are no uncertainties in its world, only just deserts. The social dimensions of crime, the dust-bowl desperations of the country recede before the reassurance of the rectitude of the law. Joe Cameron could have hitched himself as far westward as California, but he would never have found himself on the lost highways of Detour, the shifting spaces of noir where staying in your lane never guarantees they won't move away the road. Tourneur would investigate them for RKO, but MGM wasn't even interested in the map. The photography by Clyde De Vinna and Paul C. Vogel has some nice, cheap, low-key set-ups when it isn't being Traveltalks for Prisons. The arithmetic lesson was done better in Fritz Lang's You and Me (1938). Let Tom Neal rest; the ghost in this picture is how much talent it leaves lifeless on the screen. This crime brought to you by my known backers at Patreon.

Fifty-five years ago, Wendell Corey drank himself to death at the age of fifty-four and I'm still sore at him about it. In honor of his yahrzeit, I finally decided to watch the film in which he made his screen debut, Lewis Allen's Desert Fury (1947). I wish I could have sat Wittgenstein down in front of this movie some afternoon when he needed a Technicolor shower bath for his brain. Fellas, it is gay.

Desert Fury does not come from the future. Cast with contract players, lit and shot in accordance with classical continuity, constructed around the expectations and fulfillment of melodrama within the cordons of the Production Code, it is legibly and inescapably a high-end programmer from the Hollywood studio system of the late '40's, specifically Paramount where Hal Wallis was assembling and showcasing a stock company of his discoveries. It just also feels as though it emerged from some oneiric hothouse where everything from the line readings to the color of the rufous earth is flatter, lusher, more banal, more perverse than even the average film noir, Western, or Gothic. Should your definitions of queerness incline toward excess, artifice, desires unclassifiable, non-normative, and skew-whiff, this picture will clear the bar like a green carnation. DPs Charles Lang and Edward Cronjager lend the same super-saturation to the syrup-gold of Lizabeth Scott's hair as the sucked-plum gloss of her Chrysler convertible, the pastel-sunned awnings of the small-town main street of Chuckawalla and the ultramarine overcast of its cloud-crammed day-for-night. The mise-en-scène pops like a stereoscope between location shots and rear projections of same, studio interiors as expertly dressed as magazine spreads and exteriors fragmented between the Arizona storefronts of Cottonwood and the California gingerbread of the Piru Mansion. The costume changes are as gratuitous as the continually flourishing strings by Miklós Rózsa, a rose-pink hair ribbon in a midnight thunderstorm. As escalated to the screen by Robert Rossen and an uncredited A.I. Bezzerides from the serialized source material of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town (1945), the plot purports to chart the coming of age of the headstrong, stifled Paula Haller (Scott) as she negotiates between the familiar affection of deputy sheriff Tom Hanson (Burt Lancaster) and the more dangerous mysteries of out-of-town racketeer Eddie Bendix (John Hodiak), complicated from both directions by the possessiveness of her deep-pocketed queenpin of a mother, Fritzi (Mary Astor), and the hostility of her new flame's longtime companion, Johnny Ryan (Corey), but in practice its action is repetitious to the point of ritual, a face-slapping, a slamming out of the house, a furious drive in a car that never seems to get anywhere, racing the straightaway between the sandstone bands of the mountains as though the fateful truss bridge at the town limits were an event horizon. Until a final detonation of secrets blows the pattern apart, its vivid thinness may be the practical result of paring the more communal novel down to its central actors, but it locks the film even further into its dreamlike, fetishistic structure of intersecting triangles around whose points the characters are flung by the gravity of their needs and fantasies. "This is what I like," Paula explains as she sits on a split-railed fence at the ranch where Eddie and Johnny are staying, the latter having pointedly absented himself to take care of the housework, "to be alone on the desert, with the sagebrush and the sky." Under this overheated cyclorama of a firmament, good luck.

From the first hit of its tempestuous theme over red-brushed, yucca-backed titles, I was not surprised that this film has both a camp cult and serious champions; Astor alone could attract both as the butch, imperious Fritzi who runs the town where a decade ago she came west for her health like her own small-scale Vegas, greeting her glamorous daughter with the casual, appraising, "You look good to me, baby, even when you're tired," watching her go with a world-weary snap of the fingers: "Nineteen years, like that." Loose-limbed in flowing slacks, she's never more jeweled and femme than when she bids to buy her daughter into respectability with a marriage to the clean-cut Tom, sweetening the deal for the former rodeo star with the dowry of a ranch. "I like to keep my amateur standing," the leather-jacketed deputy demurs. The film never does make much beyond echoes of the agreement that Paula looks far more like Eddie's late wife than her own mother, but it leans so hard into her habit of calling the toughly elegant older woman by name, treated to shopping trips and admired like arm candy in front of third parties, into Fritzi's offer on the night of the thunderstorm to sleep with the tear-tossed girl who has just been kissed for the first time by the forbidden awakening of Eddie Bendix and threatened for the first time by the lean, cold-eyed man who lives with him, that while I wouldn't have wanted the Breen office to scream sex perversion and slap down whatever weird partials Astor was layering into the maternal mix, I am not quite sure how it failed to hear them. Then again, no one clocked Corey.

Fourth-billed, the role of Johnny Ryan would never have been star-making despite the prestige of an introducing credit, but it is a hell of a calling card for a character specialist: coiled and mesmerizing, stone cold and queer to the bone. Nothing much in his early scenes distinguishes him from the traditional muscle in waiting at his big shot's shoulder, cracking wise about coppers, placating the testier instincts of the sharp-dressed, dark-mustached man he shadows, but there's something about him that a goon's role doesn't explain, a watchfulness in his ice-clear eyes and the aerodynamically sharp planes of his face. He cooks and cleans like a housewife, takes orders like a soldier, attends like a personal trainer on the bare-chested, sunbathing Eddie, as mindful as a manager of the other man's reputation in the rackets after a recent bad break in Vegas. "Why would there be some of me apart from Eddie?" he returns like a riddle when Paula queries their closeness which seems to leave no room for any interests or aspirations original to Johnny. He smiles as if in the same confidence of a private joke when she challenges him recklessly, outright: "He won't leave me. I come in too handy." Working under the hood of their battered sage-green 1946 DeSoto Custom, oil-sweated in a white undershirt with his dark hair greased back, he has a hustler's delinquent look, although according to the history Eddie relates to a fascinated Paula, the pick-up went the other way:

"I was your age, maybe a year older. It was in the Automat off Times Square about two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday. I was broke. He had a couple of dollars. We got to talking. He ended up paying for my ham and eggs . . . I went home with him that night. I was locked out, didn't have a place to stay. His old lady ran a boarding house in the Bronx. There were a couple of vacant rooms. We were together from then on."

Times Square, for the love of Chip Delany. Fifteen years later, the scrupulous detail of the separate rooms has given way to the bachelor clutter of the Halverson ranch where Eddie jokes about his sleeping habits, after Paula's sharp glance at the rumpled, unmade bed—"I curl up like a kitten." One of Johnny's shirts is hanging off the windowsill on the other side. Catching her domestically clearing up, another moment of interrupted rapport with Eddie, he takes the stack of old newspapers and emptied ashtrays out of her hands with the dry, meaningful, "You shouldn't do that, kid. First thing you know, I'll be out of a job." It is not an untroubled arrangement. Despite or because of Johnny's all-round attentions, Eddie treats him with brusque presumption, slaps him as often and more demeaningly than Fritzi slaps Paula, gestures of dominance bristling with insecurities which Johnny's submissiveness seems to feed as much as allay, especially the times it feels more like tolerance than capitulation, biding his third wheel's time as he's done through previous infatuations, even the marriage to Angela which ended through the railing of the Chuckawalla bridge. The mode in which he is brazenly rude to Paula is commonly designated as catty when exchanged between women, but his threat to kill her if she doesn't get away from his man isn't just claws out: a hard-hollowed mask of lamplight in the crack of the frame, he looks like he'll do it if he doesn't slam the door between them. Few of Corey's characters had that tense solidity of violence; it's impressive that it didn't type him as a hood. And yet isn't the part in keeping with his later, heterosexual specialty in romantic losers? Already serving a breakfast for three, he has to listen to himself not just dumped by Eddie before he can drink his coffee, but fruitlessly pleading to stay on even without his cut, his eyes flickering with sudden sick defeat to the blonde girl watching over her cigarette with a defiance of triumph she isn't quite grown enough to conceal, though she has enough pity on the newly odd man out to hold up the dark fairy tale of their escape from Chuckawalla long enough to let a stranded Johnny collect his suitcase and join them as far as the nearest train station, chauffeuring the fugitive couple, as Eddie callously stipulates, to "earn his ride." With her first misgivings about the man she's eloping with, Paula draws the dot-to-dot parallel herself: "I hope you never get finished with me . . . I'd hate to be left alone on a desert road at night."

( I've been tied up with you too long to go on alone. )

It would be unfair, albeit almost irresistible, to subtitle any serious consideration of Corey's screen persona The Art of Losing. He excelled at the less heroic emotions, but he was compelling and credible wherever he fetched up in the audience's sympathy, he had a chameleon's invaluable near-miss of conventional looks and a voice as good as radio to play against them, and it continues to amaze me that he was signed direct from the original Broadway production of Elmer Rice's Dream Girl (1945) because not once in his screen career was he cast as such a successful leading man of romantic comedy as Clark Redfield, the brash aspiring sportswriter who makes his entrance under a stack of ARCs which he cheerfully admits he never reads before reviewing and doesn't win the heroine's heart so much as he accidentally bickers his way into it, a tethering jolt of realism for her fantasies and never quite as authentically cynical as he likes to make out. I would give a lot for a time machine and a ticket to the Coronet Theatre. Hollywood did not have such a surfeit of shape-changers of his caliber that he could afford to wash out after an effective decade of film and a Z-grade epilogue whose titles depress me. I know little about his life, the majority of it from his chapter in Karen Burroughs Hannsberry's Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir (2003). He was born in Dracut, raised in East Longmeadow and Springfield, acted with his wife at the Copley Theatre in Boston. I have always hoped that both of these interviews contain more truth than publicity, because who doesn't like dry stone walls and weird faces? He was not actually descended, as often claimed, from John Adams, but thanks to the gene puddle of colonial Newburyport, he looks like a distant relation of spatch. Either way, he might not have appreciated my observing his yahrzeit, but in the same way that I don't get to yell at him about his liver, he doesn't get to gripe about how delightful I find it that BAMF Style devoted a column to his look in Desert Fury—the signet ring seems to have belonged to the actor, as I have never seen him in a role without it—and a full decade before it made any difference to me, he got a repertory series of his own from the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. I have still not seen him at the end of his tenure with Paramount in Loving You (1957), but it's on my list because Boyd McDonald, in Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985/2015), rates Corey highly as "an inspiring example of how a man . . . can be alluring despite the fact that he is 43 years old and, worse, a Republican." If he was not himself allured by men offscreen, he gave a damn fine imitation of it on. Should you wish to sample his contributions to the unstable cocktail of Desert Fury, it is shockingly unavailable to stream legally, but Kino Lorber can do you the Blu-Ray/DVD. I was not sure what to expect from its legendarily queer reputation, but it's the real, elusive, subversive deal. "We've been together a long time." This love brought to you by my handy backers at Patreon.

I did not enjoy Harriet Craig (1950) for entirely different reasons than I did not enjoy Craig's Wife (1936). It starts like a slightly curdled sitcom, but it finishes full bore Gothic. What it lacks in social criticism, it makes up in emotional cruelty. When offered a choice between a queer-eyed despair of matrimony and the anamnesis of a particularly nasty case, I may have to acknowledge that the property may be domestic horror whichever way it cuts.

Less of a remake than a re-adaptation by Anne Froelick and James Gunn of George Kelly's Pulitzer-winning Craig's Wife (1925), Harriet Craig was the second of three vehicles for Joan Crawford directed by Vincent Sherman and as such fascinates me because even in an era where the spectacle of a destructive, transgressive woman offered as much tinsel-sanctioned escapism as cautionary moral, the point of identification eludes me. Brittle, immaculate, her brows as blameless as her shoulders are squared, Crawford's Harriet Craig has none of the night-blooming amorality of Lizabeth Scott's Jane Palmer, the flinty nihilism of Ann Savage's Vera, or even the surreal avarice of Jean Gillie's Margot Shelby, a femme so fatale she gets the same man killed twice in the scrap-budget noir Decoy (1946). What she provides is less sensational, more frightening: a vividly convincing, realistically proportioned primer of emotional abuse.

I do not throw the word around lightly, in life or in fiction. In her four years of marriage to Walter Craig, Harriet has not merely redecorated their spacious, tree-shaded middle-class home to a pinnacle of inviolable glamour consistent with the Kelly-penned premise of a woman who treats her house better than anyone who has to share it with her; like a demurely inexorable cuckoo, she has expunged almost all traces of her husband's childhood home as systematically and successfully as she has isolated him from his former circle of friends, the better to reproach a rare wistful objection with the wounded, solicitous, "Darling, I didn't think we needed other people around to make us happy." She is always indulging her husband, always forgiving him, always bearing fondly with his oft-reminded naïveté which obliges instruction in the home-wrecking implications of a neighborly gift of roses as matter-of-factly as she plans his meals, supervises his schedule, manages the household accounts. The sexual candor of their relationship would be charming if it were not spelled out in so many words as one more tool in her box of tricks, so efficiently deployed that he cancels a golf date with his oldest friend at the mere whisper of a long, hot bath, his sticky, beglamoured expression leaving less to the imagination than her departing skin-swish of silk. "She could build a nest in his ear and he'd never know it." It is equally impossible for his Tati-esque inability to find a comfortable position on his own sofa to play as real comedy rather than an acrid literalization of just how uninhabitable this so-called living room has become since the days when half the kids in the neighborhood used to run wild through it and his mother kibitzed Thursday night poker—like the rest of the house, it exists now as an exacting showcase for its new mistress, even the nap of the carpet on the grand proscenium sweep of the staircase brushed to printless purity. The Chinoiserie of its formally flamboyant style invites admiration as hands-off as velvet ropes and glass cases. As the shell-shocked new maid observes to the battle-hardened housekeeper in one of the ringing silences an even fractionally displeased Harriet tends to leave in her wake, "I bet if she had her way, she'd wrap up this whole place in cellophane." The effect may hew more faithfully than Arzner's film to Kelly's stated conception of Harriet as an "SOB," but it forces the point as far as muddling it: the picture that emerges is less of a woman in desperate symbiosis with her house whose homeostasis she must maintain even at a cost of monumental deceit than a woman whose rigid, compulsive manipulation of other people necessarily spills over into control of their physical terrain. "I don't like the feeling of being rushed along in the darkness," a night journey by train prompts her to admit. "Having no control, putting my life completely in someone else's hands—" Her preemptive strike philosophy of marriage, in which a man is targeted, trained, and then constantly surveilled so as to assure the woman of her upper hand while protecting his illusion of autonomy, cues up Frank Loesser's "Marry the Man Today" in a key of gaslight, a ball-and-chain joke played horrifically straight. Harriet in 1936 was willing to obstruct justice to prevent a murder investigation from invading the fragile, conditional safe space of her home, but Harriet in 1950 all but destroys her husband professionally in order to keep him from an assignment in Tokyo that might get him six thousand miles out from under her thumb. That she fails is ultimately a combination of overreach and chance, the uncontrollable variables which she always tried to keep as contained as the maritally auspicious rice inside her prize antique of a fourteenth-century Ming vase. Until it's poured out in a final, contemplative slithering of abandoned luck, it feels telling of our understanding of Harriet that we weren't sure if there was anything inside the symbol at all.

As played by Wendell Corey with his irreplaceable flair for romantic losers, Walter is either the MVP or the biggest miscalculation of Harriet Craig. Instead of a dolt or a prig whose exploitation we might approve as turnabout for his complacent chauvinism, he's sweet, smart, and defenseless, a rising engineer in the new field of electroacoustics characteristically apologizing his entrance, "We were running a test on a new amplifier—I couldn't leave the lab till it was finished!" He is responsible for several of his company's patents, including the new system in Japan. The days of an unscheduled marital separation can be stratigraphically dated by the sedimentation of shirts, ties, socks, and shorts, and what may well have been the same suit all week. He doesn't seem to suffer from social impairment when he loans out the Sunday comics to the kid next door and is delighted to have the pants beat off him at gin rummy by his boss' card-sharping wife, but at the least reproof from Harriet he freezes into an anxious, schoolboyish guilt, fumbling through recriminations for the reprieve of a kiss that ends too soon. Her slightly tart claim to love him for his guilelessness may be an admission that he was the easiest gazelle to cut out of his herd, but the neg itself suggests the devouring is not yet complete. His sly, surprising humor sneaks out, his active concern for the lives and loves of other people will culminate in the sentence, so shocking it gets him listened to, "I don't care what Harriet said." It heightens the film's resemblance to a kind of hell-flipped Ibsen. Corey's celebrated impersonation of a lust-smacked sap notwithstanding, Walter's so earnestly hooked on his wife's happiness that even as the frog-boiling constriction of their married life dawns on him at last, he's still grasping for ways to understand a relationship that never was any such thing. No single lie or insult breaks the spell so much as the evening he spends with the forbidden neighbors, folded comfortably on the floor in front of the repaired radio with a pair of needle-nose pliers still in hand, smoking his much-deplored pipe and hugged so unselfconsciously goodnight by a child like the one he's never been able to have with Harriet, it's a gift he could never have asked for. It's more than the post-war ideal of the nuclear family, so conscious a contrast to the pristine sterility of the Craig household—a more sentimental film would have slotted him automatically as a stepfather elect, but for all of his wife's insinuations about "well-to-do young widows who specialize in approaches," there's not a milliampere of romance between him and Fiona O'Shiel's Mrs. Frazier, who knits as easily on the couch in her cat-eye glasses as if he's been coming around to fix the radio for years. It is simply, humanly nice. The well-used furniture clutters up the room a little, the coffee table slides with magazines, the books lean on their shelves as if they are often taken out. Walter on his abstracted way to the door trips over a model train and apologizes and is not scolded for it, just as when he asked a peculiar question out of nowhere, it was considered and given a serious, kindly reply. It is a house in which people live as if they actually like one another. It is as painful and recognizable as Harriet herself that the concept has become so strange to him. Not much can amend the adolescence of his famous gestures, on returning to his own untouchable, alienated house, of ashing his cigarette deliberately on the rug and breaking his wife's treasured vase, but Corey at least performs the latter with the volcanism of bridge-burning rather than spite and notably unlike his counterpart in 1936, he never takes refuge in the self-righteous myths of misogyny. Even at the last, with his coat over his arm and his hand on the door he has to walk out for his life, his movie makes no claim that he's stopped loving Harriet, this dazzling woman who made him feel that every bit of himself he gave up was the dearest, most romantic thing he could do for her. "I didn't say I could forget you. But I won't be back."

Harriet Craig allows its title character her tragedy. When she reveals, in a raw volley of a monologue contributed by Crawford herself, the grinding, demonizing poverty of her childhood into which she and her mother were precipitated after Harriet caught her father cheating and he never came home again, we understand without any psychobabble that some deep, driving part of her has remained that child frozen in guilt and abandonment, who believes like every child that the divorce, the abuse, the death was within their control; whose sudden, shuddering sob at the finality of the front door clicking shut makes far more sense than the loss of a punching bag or a meal ticket because it is exactly the nightmare she warped herself and everyone around her to prevent and so made sure of, compacting her life ever more forcibly into its porcelain illusion of perfection until it shattered under the strain. "I think you're telling me the truth for the first time . . . You'd never feel safe with anybody until you'd crushed them." Cool motive, still domestic abuse. And such a waste, when we can see for ourselves the formidable energies Harriet pours into the domination of her household as if, indeed, conducting a scorched earth campaign. Her interview with the head of the electronics company is a masterclass of malign diplomacy, tearfully, tactfully discouraging all chance of future promotion for her husband without risking the security of his current position, relying with exquisite vulnerability on the discretion of his boss who will do his paternalistic part to protect the brave little woman who entrusted him with her marriage's secret shames; in the meantime she has arranged an alibi as airtight as if she's assassinating a man and not just his character, including the intelligence that the victim will be safely occupied with voltmeters and oscilloscopes all afternoon. Imagine her handling the Tokyo job. General MacArthur, look to your stars. It makes her fixation on the domestic sphere feel even more damaged and self-sabotaging, especially since she is shown to exist in a world in which women work—it's not even a compliment, just a natural question when the serious suitor of the orphaned cousin whom Harriet has leashed as her personal dogsbody asks, "Say, how come a smart girl like you isn't holding down a good job someplace?" Harriet gave up a good job of her own to marry Walter, citing emotional over financial security. The American Fifties have become such shorthand for grey flannel and homemaking, it is fascinating to see this decision in 1950 regarded as suspicious and retrograde. In general Harriet Craig takes a visible care to distinguish its story from a battle of the sexes. The "old crowd" from whom Walter has been cleaved off are not a bachelor gang, but a mixed group of mostly couples; he makes a sharp crack about girls sticking together when he discovers Harriet's cousin covering for her, but in fact he has more female allies than male, however unwitting or unnoticed, the reality check of the nextdoorekeh, the shrewd matron who asks the questions no one else does and applies her own conclusions, the housekeeper who explains her endurance under Harriet with the stubborn, if slightly saddened, "Mr. Craig is a very nice man." Harriet, actually, seems just as isolated from feminine solidarity as from male impediments. Her cousin is not her confidante but her catspaw and her treatment of the servants is more honest only in that it is curter and colder still. She revises the truth so often as needed, it is impossible to tell if she really felt snubbed by the women of Walter's crowd when she met them or if the accusation merely furnished the excuse not to interact with them again. At the expensive sanitarium where her mother drifts in a private, dissociated reality even less penetrable than her daughter's house, she even cuts short her debrief with the chief doctor when the older woman's professional judgment does not conform to Harriet's preferred narrative. She may not be able to exist with anyone, really, whether she can crush them or not. She always needs to have charge of the story. She needs the world to be her way, especially when it won't.

Unlike Craig's Wife, I don't have even a straw-grasping fix-it for Harriet Craig: that last shot of her ascending into the shadows of her home, a small, implacable figure in a phantom float of peignoir, her hair sharp as darkness, her face weeping stone, as if she has become already the haunting of this house whose heart she devoured until it died around her, is so absolute that while it does not affect me in the same way as the ending of the earlier film, it must be acknowledged as blastingly depressing. I do not know what to do with it. Harriet's traumatized drive to reconstruct a family even if she has to suture it together with gaslighting and intimidation is too wounded to feel like the kind of bitch-goddessing that can be either defiantly or ironically embraced, too particularized and wrecking for any wider commentary. The film may have been stranded between its source material and its own story, translating actions and recasting lines that no longer run in tandem with one another. Except that it retains the image of the house itself crashing down, it is superfluous for Walter to smash the vase into the fire screen when he has already turned the rice out of it like an hourglass, the ritual of their marriage run out. "Since when have I been such a moron I couldn't struggle along without you?" is a much more hurt and less high-hat line than its sniffily sexist original, but then it's even nastier for Harriet to escalate the argument by ridiculing her husband sexually, and then it further confuses the issue that Columbia borrowed an actor who can look so braced and vulnerable as Walter makes himself articulate the terms of their marriage that he thought went without saying: "I've wanted you to be honest with me. To trust me. I've wanted you to love me." The production may also just have thrown a rod somewhere. Perhaps I should see more mid-century melodramas. Insofar as I have much sense of Crawford's post-Code image, I associate it with anguished women in social binds whom the audience is supposed to feel for, not women whose intimately murmured delivery of the promise, "I'll never let you out of my sight again," could cause an audience to move out of state just in case she looks round. It is not a bad performance. It is an extremely good performance, amplified by Corey and the ensemble acting of K.T. Stevens, Allyn Joslyn, Lucile Watson, Viola Roache, and Ellen Corby. It just happens to be an extremely good performance of a kind of behavior I don't enjoy. It turned up on Tubi and I thought I knew what I was getting from the Arzner film; I did not. At least I appreciate that it contains something which I am not sure I have seen even in a pre-Code, namely the suggestion of a woman faking orgasm. "How many ways can you lie, Harriet? You lie when you cry, you lie when you smile, you lie when you talk. Do you also lie when you—" This truth brought to you by my new backers at Patreon.

I am sure it did my physical health no favors to stay up late with an old serial of Doctor Who (1963–), but the mental health benefits of watching Sylvester McCoy face down a tough crowd of gods with misdirection and timing are incalculable.

Dark carnivals are older than Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney, or even Robert Wiene, but The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988) may have the edge on metafiction with the insatiable audience of its Psychic Circus, a sort of austerity Nielsen family impassively consuming crisps and popcorn as they rate the gladiatorial parade of desperate or starstruck acts, among them a sly intergalactic explorer, his youthful companion light-years from her planet, and an earnest anorak of a superfan still chattering about his complete memorabilia right up until the ringmaster picks his melted glasses out of the grease spot of his failed turn in the spotlight. Grounded in the desert wastes of Segonax, the circus which used to be an emblem of freedom and imagination has been parasitized into a blood-engine of amusement on demand, cannibalizing punters and performers alike: "So long as you entertain us, you may live. When you no longer entertain us, you die." The conceit could only feel more on the nose if it had aired for the program's untimely cancellation rather than the finale of its next-to-last-until-revival season.

Fortunately for metaphor, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy has more than self-satire going for it. Beyond the Doctor-companion parody, T. P. McKenna's Captain Cook makes a wickedly funny foil in his own right, a crashing colonial fossil whom even death cannot prevent from perpetrating one more long-winded, self-aggrandizing anecdote of his exotic travels, while the "unusual little specimen" of Jessica Martin's Mags, so initially docile for her punk-streaked Goth-chic, turns out the kind of recklessly delightful ally with whom Sophie Aldred's Ace, even without a good rucksack's worth of Nitro-9, can take on killer clowns with laser beams and high-kick a zombie at the endless eye of a well. The truculent stallholder played by Peggy Mount leaves off crabbing about vagabond riff-raff and hippie weirdos and beams in approval at Gian Sammarco's Whizzkid in his chipper jumper and bow tie until this Carter-esque innocent on a bicycle, too, asks her the way to the Psychic Circus. "Everyone who's up to no good goes there. We locals wouldn't touch it with a barge pole." When it was still the pride and delight of the star-ranging circus folk whose merry prankster bus weathers among the dunes like the sold-out promises of the '60's, her disdain might have come off as plain conservative prejudice; under the new management of the Sunday-suited, stone-faced trio in the otherwise deserted stands, it is obviously the forewarning of a horror film. Whatever permeates the candy-floss posters and canvas-swathed shadows of the circus, it has split the original troupe between those like Ricco Ross' Ringmaster and Deborah Manship's Morgana who enable its mechanism out of survival and those who have been destroyed in resisting it, like the tragic lovers of Dee Sadler's Flowerchild and Christopher Guard's Bellboy or the even farther gone case of Chris Jury's Deadbeat, a broom-pushing burnout whose cryptic mumblings veer off in fright from the fortune-teller's crystal ball as if he's glimpsed in it something even more fearful than the Hanged Man her pack turned up for the Doctor. Most willing of all its servants is the baleful harlequin of Ian Reddington's Chief Clown, whose Glasgow-grinning whiteface and delicate double-voiced gestures seem designed to induce coulrophobia in anyone who didn't enter the big top with it, like Ace who had to be half-cajoled, half-dared past her touchy reluctance to take a chance on the Psychic Circus. "I've never liked clowns," she declares, which feels like a joke in itself considering who she's traveling with. From his introduction trying to teach himself out of Juggling for the Complete Klutz through the finale where the transparent patter of conjuring tricks turns suddenly to the real thing, as old and strong as an amulet snatched up through a smash of illusions, the serial showcases the quirky, slapstick side of the Seventh Doctor which cannot be separated from his restless, dangerous responsibilities, murmuring as a wind of chaos picks up around him, "Things are beginning to get out of control quicker than I expected." He rattles an optimistic tattoo on a pair of spoons, blinks at a ball that went up and never came down, drops all of his juggling clubs at the blasé revelation that a successful performance only means "you last longer." His Tarot card comes true, but he might as accurately have drawn the Fool strolling out to the brink of disaster, the Magician with his mountebank's table of props. Accused of being an old hippie himself, he flashes a self-deprecating peace sign. Despite the climactic identification of its antagonists as the "Gods of Ragnarok," the serial makes little use of Norse myth beyond the visual name-drop of runestones demarcating the boundaries between layers of time, but I might have to waive my firelike default of Loki to accommodate a dark-haired little man with a paisley scarf and a Panama hat and a funny umbrella not breaking stride as a dread realm self-destructs behind him, the trickster who brought down the house. "La commedia è finita!"

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was written by Stephen Wyatt, directed by Alan Wareing, and part of the tantalizing, short-circuited continuity of script editor Andrew Cartmel, and if its pacing is odd—the first of its four episodes plays more like a prologue than a slow burn, while its ending wraps up so fast it seems to be missing more than one beat—its production design is wonderful. Instead of a safe distanced gloss of futurism, it jumbles itself up with displaced components of the past like one of the unmooring soundscapes that Mark Fisher loved to write about, a confused and curdled nostalgia. We can be treated to the iconically sfnal sight of the pennants of the Psychic Circus fluttering against a cloudless sky in which a ringed planet ghosts like a daymoon, topped almost to camp by the addition of an alien biker gunning his space hog toward the tent like a hard rock album cover, but the circus itself is trapped in a degraded loop, as slightly unreal as if reconstructed from Ace's childhood memories of "kids' stuff" that was at once "naff" and "boring" and "creepy." A hearse full of white-faced clowns isn't scarier just because some of them are robots, but their use of colorful kites to hunt down desperate fugitives makes the sense of a nightmare, painted eyes staring down out of the sun. The ringmaster raps and freestyles echt '80's, but the robo-conductor which guards the derelict bus recites as it strangles intruders, "Any more fares, please? Hold tight, please. Ding, ding," like a murderbot by Flanders and Swann. Behind the billowing curtains are stones as old as shed blood, and behind the stones? Ace and the Doctor arrive at the circus thanks to a piece of mechanical junk mail which materializes inside the TARDIS to project its canned spiel, but they'll walk away from it only because a nazar of blue and white glass functions exactly as it folklorically should. The effect is an unsettling collage, recognizably put together wrong. No wonder the gods in their human guises look like the dead hand of a squarer age of TV. The worst fate the circus reserves for its victims is not obliteration, but conformity: "That's what you like, isn't it? Taking someone with a touch of individuality and imagination and wearing them down to nothingness in your service." Even the Doctor, we are warned by someone who should know, can't hold out forever against their hunger, their boredom, and their fickle, vaporizing tastes. And yet the story doesn't feel like it's meant to wound its audience, the one on the other side of the fourth wall or the Internet Archive as the case may be; it feels like double-speaking, which is what Seven does best, no less weird and entertaining for what it might be warning between the lines. The Doctor does an escape act. Ace activates a half-dismantled robot with the characteristically resourceful and violent mutter, "This thing had better work or I'll kick its head in." There are stilt-walkers and an astonishing request for an unissuable ticket in double time. Even around the inevitable quarry, the location shooting looks odd and dry and real. I imagine I would like a poster for the tour of the Boreatic Wastes, but I'll pass on the early collection of Ganglion pottery. This imagination brought to you by my local backers at Patreon.

Skeets Gallagher doesn't have to do anything to make me love him in Lightning Strikes Twice (1934). From the moment he sits up in Ben Lyon's bed with his silvery hair spiked out in all directions and his hangover audibly duking it out for supremacy with last night's lingering drinks, absentmindedly rolling two socks onto the same foot with poignant pointlessness as he fails to reconstruct the sequence of events which led from the floor show of a stag night to a bedroom strewn with confetti and a squeaky-faced balloon in a party hat tied to the foot of the bed, he is so archetypally the hero's dissipated friend that he can hang around kibitzing for as long as he feels like and I won't kick.

The film to which he belongs is an absolutely sterling example of inessential American cinema. It's a contract picture, populated by players who needed to fill up their dance cards for RKO; its premise hasn't altered since the days of New Comedy and its action only as a reflection on the shifting repertoire of stock characters across two thousand years; it doesn't have a plot so much as an escalation of lazzi and after about an hour the film runs out. One of the lazily irrepressible ne'er-do-wells of Depression-era escapism, Lyon's Steve Brewster has twenty-four hours to gain his flightily globe-trotting aunt's approval of his well-bred fiancée, make a good impression of his own on his naval officer of a prospective father-in-law, and successfully conceal his normal record of shenanigans from anyone with the capacity to call the banns off without a cent, a tall farcical order even without the complications of two grifting vaudevillians, three apparent murders, and one very persistent reporter, not to mention the wild cards of the maniacal-looking character who darts periodically through the mise-en-scène with gun in hand and the couple of policemen who have become glumly lost in the sewers of Pasadena. One presumes that only through an oversight on the part of screenwriters Joseph Fields and John Grey were none of the characters stolen in infancy by pirates. In compensation, Gallagher's Wally elevates the facepalm to a kind of interpretative dance while Laura Hope Crews' Aunt Jane is nothing but charmed by the phony versions of Judy and Captain Nelson even when Pert Kelton's Fay comes down to dinner in a squiffed version of her fan dance and Walter Catlett's Gus entangles himself in his aiguillettes while belting out such maritime malaprops as "I'm so empty, my mizzenmast is poking a hole through my jib sail." The authentic Judy is portrayed by Thelma Todd, enabling her to deliver in her most refined accents of disappointment the reproachful antimetabole, "I wanted a husband with the virtues of a lover, not a lover with the vices of a husband." The picture was produced in the freshly Code-enforcing latter half of '34, but it doesn't seem to have noticed from the breezy way it lets Gus assume that a present from Paris is a French postcard or Fay moan after a supposed car accident that she's broken "two ribs and eight commandments." Chick Chandler's Marty Hicks springs indefatigably after his story only for the detective about to go undercover as a missing butler to warn him off with a growled "I was solving murders when you were in three-cornered pants." As the original Nelsons bear down on Steve without a word from his itinerant aunt, a moderately reconstituted Wally dashes a spoonful of orange juice into his hair of the dog and offers so casually it's a crime the film doesn't take him up on it, "I'll sub for Aunt Jane."

Skeets Gallagher, who was occasionally credited by his given name of Richard, falls into the category of character actors for whom I have a great affection without actually having seen them in very much. In The Racket (1928), he plays a reporter so vague and crocked, with just the right wicked and whimsical air that if the film hadn't premiered a full two months after the publication of Frederick Nebel's "Raw Law," I would give him serious consideration as an inspiration and not merely dream casting for the character of Kennedy. In Possessed (1931), his society wastrel shares a glass of champagne with a discontented mill-town Joan Crawford and in a rare moment of sobriety encourages her to exploit the men she meets for all they're worth like Baby Face (1933) without the Nietzsche, cheerfully refusing to mentor her any further: "The East River is full of girls who took advice from men like me." Pale-haired and plaintively browed, he could have played the White Rabbit without the elaborate costume in the star-studded, live-action Alice in Wonderland (1933). His introduction in Lightning Strikes Twice is one of its nicest pre-Code throwbacks, as Steve comes to consciousness equally minus his recall of the previous night; apprehensively disentangling a sheer stocking from around his neck, he registers the heap in the quilts beside him, peels back the covers in trepidation of a feminine form whose name he will be expected to remember, and at the sight of another man asleep in his pajamas sighs in unfeigned relief, "You had me scared for a minute!" Prevented once again from relapsing into the pillows, Wally regards his morning person of a best friend with understandable acid: "I might add that your high spirits are very depressing." Plotwise, he contributes the brainwave of trying to scare Aunt Jane off the fraudulent Nelsons by bribing Gus to throw a fit in the middle of dinner—it takes an extra $50 for the old trouper to agree to the climactic spin on the ear—but he's far more indispensable to the preposterous atmosphere, wincing and ducking and blurting with ever-diminishing, Buñuelian optimism, "I want to go home." At one point in tandem with Steve, he simply hides, not very effectively, behind a couch.

Directed and co-conceived by Ben Holmes with Marion Dix, Lightning Strikes Twice should on no account be confused with a good movie, which is irrelevant to its value as a comedy of nonsense. It starts on a dark and stormy night when suddenly a scream rings out. One of its most valuable supporting players is a black cat to whom I am pleased to report nothing bad happens at all. Describing it as a mystery-comedy suggests that it remembers about its bloodstained overcoat and missing person more consistently than it does, but describing it as a romantic comedy suggests that it regards the inevitable union of Steve and Judy as more than a set of goalposts to be moved for as long as new gags can be crammed in front of them. It is a great showcase for wisecracks. Gus whistles over a diamond bracelet, "Blow the man down, lady, that certainly is a cargo of ice," and boasts of his bogus daughter's specialty, "When she's really what you call accomplished, she don't use no fans." Worried that the reportage of murder will unnerve his aunt, Steve is immediately reassured by Wally that "she never reads anything but the society column," and then, truthfully, "and Popeye." At a fleeting moment of dramatic tension, Judy promises not to leave Steve while he's in trouble, prompting the world-class romantic double-speaking of "Darling, then you'll never leave me." I am horrified that I cannot locate this picture for free on the internet as opposed to Watch TCM when the Internet Archive furnishes me with much classier movies every day. If you can get hold of it, have fun with whatever strikes you as worth it. Skeets Gallagher is good enough for me. This cargo brought to you by my accomplished backers at Patreon.

It will sound like either a euphemistic warning or damnation with faint praise if I describe The Well (1951) as the least typical drama about race relations I have seen from its era, but its no-frills, no-stars, resourcefully no-budget B-filmmaking doesn't just hold a candle to some of its more prestigious contemporaries, it leaves them looking like cautious antiquities when it bluntly eschews white saviors, saintly victims, and most importantly bothsidesism in its depiction of a small town brought to the brink of a race riot. The spark to the tinder of this placidly representative, integrated community is a mistaken case of interracial stranger danger, but it almost doesn't matter. It could have been a whistle, a zoot suit, the economy. It's America; that coal seam is always burning somewhere.

Co-written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, co-produced by Greene and Leo C. Popkin, and co-directed by Popkin and Rouse, The Well may not be revolutionary cinema, but it's doing its best to be real. Because the audience knows from the start that five-year-old Carolyn Crawford (Gwendolyn Laster) was not kidnapped, molested, or murdered by the unknown white man who was seen buying her a bunch of violets and holding her hand—like the echo of Kathy Fiscus, she's at the bottom of an abandoned well in the field of wildflowers she was dawdling through on her way to school—the alacrity with which the underlying tensions of a bucolic everyburg flash over into rumor-milled vigilantism risks resembling an obvious parable of monsters on Maple Street, but the film is scrupulous in its illustration of the stages by which the racial amity of the town understandably and upsettingly breaks down. Affronted by the suggestion of calling in the state militia, one white member of the citizens' committee protests, "Negroes and whites have been living together in complete harmony for years!" That the sentiment is more than Caucasian back-patting is supported by the casual mingling of Black and white residents at school, on the job, even in the meeting in the mayor's office. Nevertheless and without pieties, the audience is tipped to sympathize with the Black perspective on the contingent nature of such harmony. To a man, the town's law enforcement is white. Why wouldn't Martha and Ralph Crawford (Maidie Norman and Ernest Anderson) worry that their dark-skinned darling won't be as much of an amber alert as an equally flower-loving little white girl, especially once the involvement of a white man hits the grapevine? Why wouldn't it sharpen rather than allay their fears when the man is identified as Claude Packard (Harry Morgan), the visiting nephew of local leading citizen Sam Packard (Barry Kelley)? White women cluck over the shock of a child-murdering maniac in their midst, but Black men are laying odds on his release within half an hour of his arrest. The communal suspicion that Packard will pull whatever strings it takes to keep his nephew out of jail is not ill-founded when we can watch the businessman throwing his weight around, threatening the sheriff's office with legal action and trying to browbeat his nephew into perjuring himself in the meantime. As Black mistrust and white defensiveness polarize around the Packards, despite the lawful scruples of Sheriff Ben Kellogg (Richard Rober) we are given ever less reason to doubt the claim that rises out of the choral voices of the town, "You can get away with murder as long as you're the right color." Just by not sugarcoating its history, the film can look horribly prescient. "This is a unique situation," a Black student (Elzie Emanuel) observes at a point in the day when he and his friends can still hang out at the library with white patrons coming and going in the stacks behind them. "A white man's accused of a crime against a Negro child. This time, the shoe's on the other foot." He doesn't need to elaborate on the hysteria of miscegenation contained in that other shoe. The town's white population has been on edge ever since the telephone of gossip transformed a desperate jostle during a confrontation with Packard into a savage beating of the helpless white man, but the actual trigger for fighting in the streets is a white woman's self-serving claim to have been "insulted" just so her boyfriend can prove his chivalrous bona fides by bashing the first Black man he and his four buddies catch sight of. The N-word flies thicker and faster in this picture than in any other non-news media I have encountered of its time, but it isn't for shock value. Before the town begins to boil, its white characters use the politer terms of the day, "Negro" or "colored." The emergence of the slur marks a decisive shift toward the kind of mass violence described by Dr. Billings (Bill Walker) with such devastating candor that it carries the day for calling the governor for help:

"Has any of you ever seen a race riot? I have. I saw a whole town go mad, a town very much like this. I saw my own father's body tied to a car and dragged through the streets and the driver of that car was a man my father had known for twenty years. I saw a white child beaten to death by my own people. She was just about the age of your daughter, Mr. Lobel. Oh, you can't believe it unless you've seen it with your own eyes . . . It's something you can never forget as long as you live."

It should not feel like such a coup for an all-white writer-director-producer team that even though The Well doesn't get very far inside its Black characters—it doesn't get that far inside its white characters, to be fair—it takes care to present them both as individuals and as a community, an interrelated ensemble rather than select dramatic exceptions. We can believe in their families, their neighborhoods, their work friendships. "Tell him what kind of a break we'd catch if it was one of us," one deliveryman calls sardonically to another as their white coworker starts to argue devil's advocate. Most valuably for its subject matter, it never flattens its Black characters into virtuous objects or condemns them as equal aggressors as the violence engulfing their town spirals to scarier, wilder levels than most of post-war Hollywood would admit. Drivers are dragged from their cars, pedestrians narrowly dodge deliberate ramming. Black-owned businesses get bricks through the window, white-owned cars are trashed, impromptu gangs clash half-armed in the streets. The sheriff's orders to get Claude out of town for his own protection just get him roughed up at a roadblock and Bill Gaines (Alfred Grant) is mobbed by roving white men while somberly searching a nearby creek for traces of his still-missing niece. The production idealizes a tad from the real-life tendencies of race riots when it figures the police under Ben's leadership as a struggling force for peace and order, but it maintains its cold eye for inequalities: a Black teenager with a battered arm is booked as a grown man while his white assailants who evaded arrest are excused as "just kids." When one of Packard's warehouses is torched, the wealthy contractor rabble-rouses the town's disordered flares of white violence into a unified mob, cocked and aimed for a Tulsa-style massacre. "This is my town," he barks at the dogged sheriff, the rule of law eroding before our eyes in the rifles that bristle around Ben, point him out of Packard's office like an overstayed errand boy. "I'd rather destroy it than let those dirty black devils take it over . . . I'm going to drive them out even if I have to kill every mother's son of them." Thus when we witness the Black men of the town gathering with small arms of their own, as much as we can't cheer the furious heartbreak of Carolyn's father, uncle, and grandfather that sanctions their mobilization, neither can we dismiss the self-defense of their militancy. "Now listen, men. There's hundreds of them up there. But this time we're not running. This time we'll be waiting for them. For every one of us, there's going to be two dead ofays. Two," Gaines repeats in his deep earth of a voice, "for one." They are facing an existential threat, not the racist fantasy of one. It should not escape the audience that even as he works frantically to deputize as many citizens of whatever color as can be trusted to carry riot guns, Ben isn't stressing about Black revolution, he's snapping at the Mayor (Tom Powers), "Just tell me how I can stop Packard and that wild mob with a handful of deputies!"

Notably, the film does not point the finger at the press for inflaming the situation. Reporters are conspicuously absent from the churn of half-truths and anxieties around the disappearance of Carolyn Crawford; it is taken as read that ordinary citizens can be trusted to work up the necessary head of steam to turn on their neighbors all on their own. Instead, parallel scenes of news mutating through Black and white chains of transmission demonstrate the involvement of the town as a whole in creating the conditions for the conflagration, neatly sidestepping in the process another popular failure mode of stories about racism, the deflection of blame onto individual bigots instead of the systems which enable them. Packard sets the match, but the powder is all the white men and women who accepted and amplified an assumption of Black violence. The misinformation that spreads through the Black community is more a kind of stopped clock in reverse, a misconstruing of the available details that might as easily have been the truth. It matches the characterization, which insofar as it exists is never clear-cut. We know for a fact that Claude Packard is innocent, but he makes a bad showing as a suspect, his horror at the crime of which he's accused and his fear of being railroaded for it coming out in blurts of unconvincing belligerence, too easily boxed into losing his cool with the ever more bare-knuckled interrogations of the police—if we'd come in five minutes late, we might not believe him, either. Mid-century Morgan could play heavies and oddballs, a loyally murderous factotum in The Big Clock (1948), a half-daft deaf-mute in Moonrise (1948), a sleazetastic picture snatcher in Scandal Sheet (1952); a wry-faced, nerve-racked, transient miner doesn't cut the most prepossessing figure no matter his connections. His realization that his uncle doesn't believe him and doesn't care is one of the script's casually dispensed gut-punches: "Oh, I see. It doesn't matter whether I'm innocent or not. It doesn't matter what happened to that kid. Just protect the name of Sam Packard from any disgrace, that's all that matters!" Then again, we are encouraged to admire Ben Kellogg for his low-key, rugged integrity, the unimpaired efficiency with which he organized a search for a missing child of any color and persisted in the face of privileged obstruction and marginalized non-cooperation and was ready to put himself on the front lines of a race war to keep half his town from tearing the other half apart, and he doesn't give Claude a second thought of doubt even when the man stands off his powerful uncle and then folds up like yesterday's news. Rough around the edges as it is, The Well is confident enough in its audience's grasp of nuance to let characters we like be wrong. We are not intended to mistake Ralph Crawford for a bad father just because he's reluctant to be called away from the garage for the latest apparent instance of his little dreamer playing hooky: "It was hard enough to get a good job in this town and I don't want to lose it." Neither he nor his brother-in-law is trying to knock Packard down in the parking lot outside City Hall, but the combination of their urgency for news of Carolyn and his distaste to get away from their dark, hurt, scandalous faces is not fatal, not even bruising, but in the incendiary atmosphere after the arrest, a disaster. Everything happens too messily and too fast for anyone to see the real shape of it, sharp as blood coming up under a slap. It is part of what sells the turn of the film which might otherwise slew out of pure wish-fulfillment with the news that Carolyn has been discovered in the dry well, still alive.

( Mommy, I fell down. )

Although it won neither, it's a point in the Academy's favor that this independent production was nominated for two Oscars, one for Best Story and Screenplay—it lost to An American in Paris, which especially since its competitors included Ace in the Hole and Go for Broke! is mind-croggling—and the other for Best Film Editing, which it would have deserved just for the rescue sequences in which Chester Schaeffer's cutting timed to the most discordant, clangorous variations on the movie's otherwise overworked theme by Dimitri Tiomkin makes a gripping short documentary of earth-moving, full of sliding pistons and welding sparks. The town itself was composited from location shooting in Marysville and Grass Valley and the use of local extras plus the clarity of the cinematography by Ernest Laszlo accentuates the effect of catching a breaking story, not a scripted one. It doesn't hurt the suspense that the latter stages of the rescue function as much like radio drama as film. All of that admitted, The Well is a really unvarnished picture and it does strike some false notes. Would any Black teens in the budding civil rights era really have debated the influence of "race prejudice" on the American legal system? It is not inherently stupid of the script to assign Ben a love interest in the form of pert diner proprietor Casey (Christine Larson), but it's embarrassing that it can't think of a way to communicate her anti-racism except by the comedy of over-peppering one bigot's combination salad and clouting another with a skillet when a mob comes for her short-order cook. The mix of professional and non-professional actors can be uneven; there are people in this film who can make two or three lines riveting and people who have trouble remembering their messenger speech. The two halves of the film hinge thematically together, but a montage does the heavy lifting of smoothing the seam. On the other hand, I love its threading of walk-ons through the sprawl of the narrative, like the unnamed student who recurs sometimes in the foreground of the audience's attention, sometimes part of the surrounding action, exactly as real people move through a world they share, and it knows when to isolate unexpected moments like the cat-eyed killer stare a young Black woman turns on the white truck that almost plowed her down. This movie is full of people who aren't protagonists and we're never in doubt that they're alive. It may be funny that Greene and Rouse are most famous for D.O.A. (1949) when, despite its oft-copied gimmick, it's the most conventional of their films of my experience to date. I got this one from YouTube and didn't foresee almost anything about it. It can't have done much business in the South. This harmony brought to you by my unique backers at Patreon.

Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker (1953) may or may not be rightly considered the only film noir of the classic period directed by a woman, but it is a hell of a nightmare whichever way you view it.

It's a stark, tiny picture, as dry in the throat as a bone. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you, the title card feints like a docudrama before the hitch-hiker himself is haunting the margins of the credits like something dealt out of a bad hand of Tarot, his thumb hooked anglerfish patient and the long day's spill of his shadow dividing the highway into before and after. We don't see his face until the newspaper splash of his mug shot, only his spoor of cars and corpses, the dust-devil wind whisking dead leaves around his boots like one of Bradbury's autumn people inexorably this way coming. Neither Gil Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) nor Roy Collins (Edmond O'Brien) knows what they are driving toward as they turn south from the Chocolate Mountains toward San Felipe in Baja California, but their long-planned boys' vacation becomes its own black mirror the second the stranded motorist they stop for turns out to be Emmett Myers (William Talman), the ultimate back seat driver with all his directions in the chamber of his gun. The days are white as ash under a leaching sky, the nights so dark they hardly seem to exist beyond the traveling cell of the automobile. The weekend stretches into a floating static of flash bulletins of missing persons and a manhunt. There's a stop at a grocery, at a filling station, at an abandoned airstrip where headlights slice as mercilessly out of the dark as an eye that never closes. "This car rides pretty good," Myers appraises professionally as they coast down the deserted, scrub-lined road to Santa Rosalía, then drops the fate of his captives as casually as he chews on a sandwich packed by one of their never-seen wives: "When I get where I'm going, I think I'll sell it."

Whatever his roots in the case of real-life spree killer Billy Cook, whose still-fresh crimes Lupino—working with Collier Young from a story by Robert L. Joseph and an uncredited Daniel Mainwaring—was not permitted to dramatize directly, Myers is a mesmerizing creation even by the standards of weirdos and sickos in noir. Redheaded as a Devil at the crossroads of urban legend and true crime, he makes the film feel supernatural even as it grinds the reality of a back-country road trip into sweat and dust and stubble, shimmered elementally out of the hot asphalt hum of wheels inside white lines to play a game of human weakness whose rules are always changing at a prod from his Colt Official Police. His weathered punk's face blurs him ageless, wrapped like one of Death's outriders in his black leather coat. His telltale eye, always half-closed awake, half-open asleep, makes his default expression a liminal, malicious wink. He's an American mythago, a haunter of the wide open spaces which promise such freedom and desolation: the land into which you can disappear. And yet he is human; he has to be, because the nightmare doesn't hit half as hard if it couldn't happen for real instead of in the Twilight Zone. "My folks were tough," he recalls one night as his suburban prisoners build the fire, rustle up dinner from the day's canned goods under his watchful armed guard. "When I was born, they took one look at this puss of mine and told me to get lost. I didn't need them. I didn't need any of them . . . When you get the know-how and a few bucks in your pocket, you can buy anything or anybody. Especially if you got them at the point of a gun. That really scares them." A bad childhood and a blunt force credo are standard issue for screen hoods, but that bitter boast of independence strikes a strange, fragile note. If Myers is all that shark-heart self-sufficient, then what are Gil and Roy doing alive? Why didn't he shoot them at his earliest convenience like the honeymooning couple in Illinois, the salesman in Oregon whose lives were worth less to him than the bills in their wallets and the keys to their cars? Did he reckon a couple of middle-aged tourists sufficiently useful as camouflage from the authorities now searching both sides of the border for a lone gunman? Or is he keeping them around for some needier, less cold-blooded reason, a literally captive audience for his hair-trigger threats and the commands he barks in some deadly man-sized version of Simon says? The film knows to leave the question open; its raw and clinical study of damaged masculinities does not condescend to pop-psych. When Roy challenges his carjacker at the conclusion of his nihilist's manifesto, "You ever been at the other end of a gun?" it is scarier than any flare of nerves or bluster that Myers answers so quietly, "No. And I never will be."

Especially because they are the regular people in this story, it matters that Gil and Roy are as real as their roadside daemon and specifically so, their stressed and particular selves as opposed to placeholders for that object of fascination to the '50's, the average American male. It is not irrelevant to the plot that Gil is a draftsman whose head swims when he's forced to shoot a tin can out of his best friend's hand or Roy a mechanic whose pessimism about off-roading in a 1952 Plymouth four-door sedan is vindicated when the crankcase tears out, but it's more important to the volatile dynamics of this camping trip from hell that Gil almost sobs with relief as he pulls an innocently fearless child away from Myers as if she were one of his own daughters caught petting a rabid dog while Roy's humiliated hot temper leaves him even more vulnerable to his taunting captor when he wrenches his ankle in an abortive escape attempt and has to be cold-cocked for his own protection. He cries like a child in a fever dream, dust-throated from screaming at the indifferent drone of a low-flying plane, "Oh, please God, hear me, hear me! Come back!" Gil's wedding ring left stealthily beside the gas pump could be a hail-Mary breadcrumb or a condemned man's farewell. Not once are we encouraged to feel superior to the machismo they do not demonstrate, the maddening terror of helplessness which Gil—identified as a veteran, so perhaps more experienced in the tight-jawed endurance of uncontrollable, unrelenting strain—handles just marginally better than the more sullen and impulsive, unraveling Roy. The Hitch-Hiker is not a moral tale. Nothing the two men have done merits the crash of a serial killer into their lives. They are not cheating on their wives, neglecting their breadwinning, engaging in any of the extracurricular middle-class sins from which they might need to be scared back into the line of the white picket fence; their midlife restlessness maxed out at a detour through Mexicali, where Roy had wistful intentions of sampling the nightlife and Gil unsubtly pretended to sleep through a neon-backed hard sell for Juanita's famous fan dance and if they had stopped for their drink at the Alhambra Club, they might well have missed their appointment with Emmett Myers. Over and over, he mocks the bond between them, needling at their conformity, their domesticity, their mutual loyalty that so effortlessly rendered them hostages for one another: "You guys are really fools. If you weren't, one of you would have got away. But you kept thinking about each other, so you missed some chances . . . Now it's pretty late." But if the film is merciless in its perspective on male powerlessness, it's equally sensitive to male tenderness, rebuking Myers' self-aggrandizing individualism with the unselfconscious embrace in which Gil shelters his dazed, injured friend from their captor's sneer, a dogged care that may not save either of them and yet asserts something as important as survival. Auden may have found it geopolitically facile in hindsight, but there's a reason generations of readers still quote despite him, We must love one another or die.

The desert scenes of The Hitch-Hiker were shot in the fantastically rugged badlands of the Alabama Hills, defamiliarized by echt noir DP Nicholas Musuraca from the locus classicus of Hollywood Westerns to a harsh and alien panorama of dust-veiled ridges and sage-clumped tracks, flats of cracked clay and jumbled skulls of stone like fossilized clouds. Myers looks as natural as a lizard lying back among the dinosaur-haunched boulders with a rifle in his hands, but Gil and Roy rolled to the chin in their sleepless blankets could have been mummified by the hard-boiling air in which vultures spiral more lazily than the occasional passer-by leading a burro on foot, pulling over a fender-bent jalopy to offer an assistance which the captives bent over their blown tire are not permitted to acknowledge. Even when the action reaches the sea-coast of Santa Rosalía, it's all heaps of limestone as rough as sharkskin, as driftwood-bleached as the white strings of the surf. Nowhere, not the trickle of a creek by night, the refuge of a canebrake by day, looks really hospitable unless it's indoors and serving beer, which makes it all the more important that Lupino's Mexico is more than a dustily picturesque backdrop for some gringo psychodrama. All Spanish in this film is unsubtitled, translated only when Gil is acting as interpreter for the impatient bigotry of Myers who doesn't like him speaking "Mex." Most of it is exchanged between locals, like the husband and wife puzzled by the silence of the Americans they addressed in English or the owner of the filling station distraught over the shooting of his dog, interviewed like the grocer and one of his customers by Captain Alvarado (José Torvay) as he pursues the possibility that the hitch-hike slayer's latest victims may still be alive. On the one hand, his scenes distract from the claustrophobia of what the title card described with Breen-baiting vagueness as the true story of a man and a gun and a car. On the other, they reinforce the reality of his country beyond the exigencies of the plot and prepare the audience for the brilliantly anticlimactic ending, the farthest thing imaginable from Tinseltown heroics. "Alto!" the Mexican police are shouting, Stop! as two men scrabble on gull-spattered boards in the silver-salt fog of a dockside night, hammering inelegantly at one another while bullets skip like stones across the foam-flecked black water; the fracas ends with one of them thrashing in his handcuffs like a panicked animal as one of his former prisoners slugs him viciously in the face, a violence without catharsis, without manliness, with no more restoration even in the final seconds than Gil saying out of a shuddering breath, as if he's trying to make them both believe it, "It's all right now, Roy. It's all right." Myers spits his contempt in his own blood like Loki poison-blinded, a quake at the roots of the white-bread world. How is anything supposed to be all right in the face of that gesture—or everything that led up to it? He leaves the audience shell-shocked and not because we've never seen anything like him. The only thing different nowadays would be the model of the gun.

I happen to believe that Lupino directed more than the one film noir, but I do not begrudge this one its laurels; in the same way that earlier projects like Not Wanted (1949) and Outrage (1950) explored the deliberately female traumas of pregnancy and rape, The Hitch-Hiker pushes full-tilt into the fears that keep men up at night or reaching for their guns and the results are uncompromising. We wait all movie for one of our beleaguered heroes to fulfill the promise, "When he gets ready to jump us, we'll jump him, not before," but that two-fisted moment never comes. The totality of their bravery is their ability not to be murdered before the federales have a chance to catch up, a fingernail of determination and a lot of dumb luck. Even for noir, it's demolishing. I watched it accidentally for Thanksgiving in 2018 and wish it hadn't felt even more all-American on rewatch. It can be found on YouTube or the Internet Archive if you feel like taking the hit; I note that Kino Lorber's Blu-Ray/DVD shares my feelings about nightmare. Slowly I am getting around to the full catalogue of the Filmakers, six out of ten of whose feature films were directed as well as co-written and produced by Lupino, who really seems to have been interested in breakdowns, of her characters, of their world, which remains ours. Even a stone killer isn't wrong when he says that dying is "just a question of when." This know-how brought to you by my ready backers at Patreon.

As we near the end of Pride, in memory of Boyd McDonald, I offer a sexual moment from an old movie. It's straight, but it startled me. I was delighted.

Like the 1948 source novel by Niven Busch both concentrated and reimagined by screenwriter Charles Schnee, Anthony Mann's The Furies (1950) does not directly retell any particular classical tragedy so much as it channels their mythic charge of oath-breaking, kin-killing, and incest into a distinctly American dynastic struggle scratching up the blood through the earth of the West. In the New Mexico Territory of the 1870's, T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston) presides like the king of his own city-state over a vast and rapacious ranch known as the Furies, so confident in his force of arms and capital that he can issue his own currency in the form of promissory notes engraved with their own Latin motto and the dance-hall Europa of "a lulu of a girl riding a bull." Spurning his softer-hearted son, he's bred up his imperiously independent daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck) as his like-minded right hand and heir, but when he capriciously dispossesses her in favor of his long-time mistress Flo Burnett (Judith Anderson), he unleashes in full the powers of female vengeance that have been banked and waiting ever since with chthonically short-sighted possessiveness he tied his daughter's full control of the Furies to his approval of her choice of husband. The repercussions will detonate throughout the Territory, escalating in such unforgiving jolts that the narrative ultimately leaves itself no way out of the scorched earth of a mutually assured blood feud except by a last-minute recuperation of patriarchy even less satisfying than the deus ex of the Eumenides, but even at its most strenuously heteronormative it never does exorcise the psychosexual weirdness that coils from its earliest scene of handsome Vance in one of her dead mother's gowns welcoming her father home with a kiss, the lady of his house and its rightful son. "You won't have it easy, finding a man," T. C. warns his daughter, a brag and a flirtatious dare. "I've spoiled most of them for you."

In fact, he has left his mark on the two other men in Vance's life. Never quite her lover despite the years of closeness between them, Juan Herrera (Gilbert Roland) belongs to a cliff-dwelling clan disdainfully dismissed as "squatters," their Spanish colonial claim engulfed by the expansion of the Furies and their persistence on their ancestral land partly dependent on the protection of Vance. Even more messily knotted into the bloody history of the Furies is the uninvited guest at her brother's wedding, Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey), a professional gambler whose father lost his land in court and his life in a gunfight to T. C. Jeffords. The antagonism alone might make him enticing to Vance, but his lazily unintimidated outfacing of her father—ordered off the premises for a "grit-eating blackleg gambler," he rejoins courteously, "You stop telling lies about me and I'll stop telling the truth about you"—elevates this lean-faced stranger in fashionable town clothes from a passing diversion to an irresistible objective, so much so that she favors him with a ride out to the familiar lanes of the Darrow Strip and an expectation of his formal call at the Furies, which is really a challenge to defy her father again and which he conspicuously does not accept. The ensuing confrontation in his slant-beamed rooms at the Legal Tender seals them as lovers and raises eyebrows regardless of the decade it's viewed in. While the equivalent scene in the novel opens with the same shock of a slap for risking the deadly attention of the Furies, the film augments the violence with the wildcat handful of Vance flailing to scratch, kick, and even bite the first man who ever dared to hit her while he pins her arms and finally flings her onto the settee still dripping from the basin of water in which he dunked her face-first to "cool down." At the same time, it's more playful than the novel's whiskey-drunk, dreamily fevered coupling as Vance confirms that she brought the cake which melted all afternoon for a caller who never showed just to smash it in his face. She's winding up to be as good as her word when Rip intercepts her, suddenly laughing as if he's recognized the rules of the game: "Ah-ah! It's too good for that." In taking the cake away from her, he's gotten some of the icing on his hand. He looks her directly in the eye as he licks it off. It's a fast and astonishingly filthy gesture, both the physicality of it—for a few frames of film, it's a lot of tongue—and the established symbolism of the cake which a girl of the Territory bakes for the man she invites to court her, which Vance has never before offered to any man, an even blunter signifier of sexual initiation than the simile older than Anakreon which likens her to "a filly that never had a rope on her." (πῶλε Θρηικίη, τί δή μεν λοξὸν ὄμμασι βλέπουσα νηλέως φεύγεις, δοκεῖς δέ μ’ οὐδὲν εἰδέναι σοφόν;) It stunned me that for all their usual screaming about open-mouthed kisses, no one down at the Breen office had flagged this even more open-mouthed innuendo, far more sexually suggestive than the kiss it leads into. Fortunately, without so much as a trip to California, I could look into the PCA file for a clue to what had happened and as soon as I found it, I rejoiced, because it looks like the glorious backfire plaintively described in the memo from "J.A.V." which records the mixed success of trying to get Hal Wallis Productions to cut the picture to the satisfaction of the censors:

That left Item 3, the open-mouth kiss, still up in the air. It was decided that we could not afford to ignore such a brazenly lustful kiss, and that if it were necessary to create an issue over it, there was no avoiding it. We would not approve the open-mouth kiss . . . With regards the open-mouth kiss, we were surprised to find that they had substituted a new "take" of the scene, which completely eliminated the open-mouth kiss, but which substituted another kiss that inescapably suggested an illicit sex affair.

No shit, Geoffrey Shurlock. The final take is right up there with Richard Conte kissing his way down Jean Wallace in The Big Combo (1955). As soon as Rip can ditch that cake, I wouldn't bet money on them making it as far as the bed which sits innocently under a quilt and some carelessly hung items of clothing in full view of all this close-quarters friction. Even the censors' effort to salvage the substitute kiss by instructing it to be considerably shortened seems to have failed when the memo is forced to concede that "the editing which had been done, if any, was indistinguishable also." It does not record whether the Wallis unit took the issue to the Board of Directors of the Motion Picture Association of America as threatened, but no kiss that comes in two rounds looks all that shortened to me. And thank God: it's a bright spot of raunch in a transaction-driven revenge tragedy. Whatever the tensions of their relationship over the course of the film, what we see in this moment looks more than anything like fun—Vance kisses Rip as eagerly as he pulls her to him, her satisfied laughter matching his appreciative grin—like pre-Code sex, which didn't have to be vanilla or even allied to love, not to mention a blatant telegraph that Mr. Darrow, sir, knows how to show a lady a good time. I am not normally in agreement with the claim that the elevation of Joseph Breen forced filmmakers to find creative ways to communicate around the Code, but in this case I'll make an exception. However brazenly lustful the original kiss, I really doubt it included the implication of cunnilingus. Thank you for your service, J.A.V. The squeaky wheel gets the slippery metaphor.

The PCA's other major criticism regarding these two characters does not offer nearly as much food for schadenfreude, but underscores once again the tendency of the censors to miss the emotional forest for the carnal trees:

The repeated routine of Rip physically assaulting Vance before becoming romantic with her seems to us on the brutal and lustful side, and, it seems to us, could even be interpreted as possibly suggesting a bit of sadism.

To get the well-actualliest objection out of the way first, Rip and Vance are capable of interacting romantically without violence, as proven by several significant kisses including their first and last. More pertinently, while there's no mistaking the kink of their dynamic despite the cautious language of an either obtuse or uncomfortable Breen, to characterize it as one-sided misreads their relationship as a flat case of frontier shrew-taming; it is much more carefully observed by the film as an erotically charged competition over who, in fact, has the rope on whom. Vance looks like the loser of the agon—Mary Renault would have loved this movie—when her desire for Rip persists unabated even after he accepts $50,000 from her father over her hand in marriage, but when she discovers that he's kept the money in trust for her just as if it had been a real dowry instead of a contemptuous payoff, does the sentiment betray him as the more loving one? Or is he still holding the reins, smiling ironically as she compliments him and then slaps him across the face, takes a shot past his shoulder with his own gambler's derringer that she casts back into his lap as soon as he identifies the unsatisfied need it was an eloquent tell for? He warns her from experience against losing sight of love in the pursuit of hatred and sets the price of his alliance against T. C. at the choice cut of the Darrow Strip. She invites him to hit her, then to kiss her, then leaves him with his dick out and his own words ringing in his ears, admission to her body priced at that ten percent of "the sweetest part of the Furies." The face-slapping may complicate it from the vantage of the twenty-first century, but it's such an even-handed wrestle that even their eventual, ambiguous proposal debates the billing of "Darrow and Jeffords or Jeffords and Darrow" and Rip's claim to the final say in their marriage is challenged immediately by the contingency of Vance's acceptance: "Mr. Darrow, sir, I hope you can chew what you just bit off." I regret the loss of the novel's climactic mutual rescue because it's a particularly nice example of the species, a leap of faith as well as life-saving, but the film's take on their chemistry is otherwise successfully hot, twisty, and so dramatically different from the actors' previous pairing in The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) that I hope some arthouse theater somewhere has double-featured them. Adobe-blonde for Vance, Stanwyck looks better than any other time I have seen her fair-haired. I'm not sure she and Corey share any scenes on horseback beyond the closing shots of the finale which I have trouble regarding canonically, which makes these studio promos especially entertaining.

I suspect my ideal version of The Furies falls somewhere between novel and film. In favor of the latter, Schnee's sharpening interest in the structures of money and power tightens the narrative by recasting the come-by-chance stranger of the novel's Curley Darragh as an avenger in his own right, his financial cynicism honed further as he branches out from gambling into the banking that makes him such a capable ally for Vance in her plan to cheat her father out of his empire fair and square with his own paper. In favor of the former, I can see no reason beyond someone's pre-production cold feet over interracial romance for the demotion of Juan from Vance's lover and defiantly wedded husband to a merely intimate friend, not least because it eviscerates the act of kin-killing at the heart of the novel, the lynching by which T. C. asserts his rights to his daughter even more brutally than he evens the score of her attack on his intended wife and which summons, truly, the Furies whom the film even has the sense to incarnate in the snaky-haired Señora Herrera (Blanche Yurka), the dead shot "mother witch" who laughs like the grinding of great stones in the earth and croons as if she's charming her prey to her rifle, "Come, my old one, come, my toro, closer." In a film so exceptionally, visually dark that it seems to use day-for-night even for actual day, the scene still stands out in a cold terror of dawn-shadowed cliffs and saguaros, but even the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Victor Milner can't give it blood-guilt. Then again, I can't see any reason beyond patriarchy for an ending that crashes the plot to such a reconciliatory halt, the rest of the film buckles behind it, especially the concluding strains of a ballad so inappropriately valorizing that I have to view it as the satyr play in order not to want it ripped off the print. The novel is quite clear that it is Vance who outlives her father and her husbands to become the legend of the Territory, carrying what the film's title crawl calls "this flaming page in the history of the great Southwest" into the metatextually modern day. On yet another hand, the novel doesn't have Wendell Corey licking frosting off it. Criterion handles the Blu-Ray/DVD which I watched thanks to the generosity of Greer Gilman, but it streams on some of the usual suspects if you prefer that sort of thing. I expect it rewards closer classical examination than I have given it, if anyone wants to knock themselves out over the Minoan echoes of T. C.'s single-handed wrestling of a wild bull. This lulu brought to you by my sweetest backers at Patreon.

Holiday Affair (1949) is a screwball comedy that tripped and fell into three dimensions; it's great.

The premise plays like a foregone conclusion. In the tinsel crush before another Manhattan Christmas, Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh) has her life on track as sure and circular as the ones on which the snow-dusted streamliner of the opening credits is running round and round the toy department at Crowley's. War-widowed young, she's worked hard to keep herself and her now six-and-a-half-year-old son Timmy (Gordon Gebert) in their two-bedroom on East 75th Street and while their finances may not stretch to the $79.50 of red-and-silver electric train Timmy deliriously mistakes for his Christmas present, in return for her long hours shopping for nylons and union suits and other items of competitive interest to her department store, the gap-toothed kid and his pet turtles are thriving; she doesn't discourage the attentions of Carl Davis (Wendell Corey), an amenable lawyer whose professional experience of divorce hasn't soured him personally on matrimony, but thus far the man of the house remains the son she greets and affectionately introduces as "Mr. Ennis." When she's clocked as a comparison shopper by Christmas temp Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum), however, we can feel the tracks jump a little under her daily routine, even more when this complete stranger of straitened means and slow-burning charm covers for her job at the expense of his own and then lets her make it up to him by sharing his lunch of hot dogs and peanuts with the seals at the Central Park Zoo, and before long the status quo is threatening to come off the rails entirely through nothing more than a ring of the doorbell, a secret Santa, a courtroom wind-up, a telltale necktie. As the days peel off toward New Year's when Connie has agreed to marry Carl, do I even need to finish this sentence? Everybody knows the three-cornered drill.

The reason I need to finish the sentence is that even while it conforms in general outline, Holiday Affair has almost as little interest in the three-cornered drill as Mary Renault in the standard boy-meets-girl manoeuvres. It may be a truism of the genre that when love goes up against security, security is going to be left holding the bag, but whatever the men in this movie represent to its heroine, they never reduce to cartoons of it. Playing Mitchum's cool jazz less fatalistically, more pragmatically than his noirs, Steve has overtones of a demon lover, a sloe-eyed Christmas gift from the universe that always pitches curveballs—everything the heroine wants and can't make herself reach out for, so that a kiss out of the blue or a counter-proposal that explosively depressurizes a Christmas dinner feels more like sexual fantasy than chauvinist presumption—and the immediacy of his connection with Connie is established through a conversation that neither of them realizes has lasted two hours until she catches sight of her watch. "You always make people talk this much?" Steve marvels as they head off to clean out the housewares department at Gimbels. "No," she answers truthfully, "and I don't always like listening this much." His sketch-tacked room on Christopher Street and the dream of building boats for which he dropped out of the executive rat race he was funneled into direct from demob make him an attractive exponent of the counterculture, but he's not some footloose free spirit rolling with life as it comes; he's quietly, startlingly hardheaded, living hand to mouth if he has to while his odd jobs pay down into a share in a boatyard in Balboa, California. His interest in Connie is expressed as directly as his philosophy of always shooting higher than the moon and when she darts an uncertain glance at the door he just closed on his landlady's suspicions, he gently folds up the Murphy bed, most un-demon-like. "Let's worry her, huh? But let's not worry you." However narratively foreordained their union, Steve doesn't take it for granted. For his part, as the man whose bald purpose in the plot is not to marry Janet Leigh, Carl is blessedly neither written nor played as a Ralph Bellamy second banana. Apart from his actor's gift for the wry and woundable, the character isn't dull or dutiful or even just the mild case of stuffed shirt for which his profession is so often Hollywood shorthand, he's funny and supportive and unexpectedly sensitive to the dissonances in Connie's volte-face acceptance of his long-understood proposal. It isn't obvious that their marriage would be a misalliance from the easy good humor with which he's introduced helping wash the dishes of a dinner he finished work too late to share, coaxing a laugh out of Connie at the end of the long day as he ties on an apron to tackle the pots: "You know, I'll never forget the day you hired me. There I was, sitting at the agency with all the other girls—I was afraid you were going to take Evelyn." He's genuinely fond of Timmy, who regards the prospect of a stepfather ambivalently from inside the accustomed dyad of Mr. and Mrs. Ennis. He isn't saintly—a sharply insecure overstep on his part touches off an early, telling temblor in the Ennis household—but he is an adult and as the realignment of Connie's romantic loyalties assumes a neon unignorability, Carl doesn't respond like the other man in a screwball comedy, complacently oblivious or indignantly territorial. Hurt and clear-eyed, he doesn't lose his head or his dignity, only his "wishful thinking."

Most importantly, as Steve eventually spells out for viewers who may not have caught up to the maturity of the script, the story isn't a contest of "two fellows and a girl. This is two fellows, a girl, and her husband . . . I can't fight a shadow." The crux of Holiday Affair is not which of her two suitors Connie is going to choose, but whether she will be able to allow herself to choose her own life, which we come to realize has been on some deep and unacknowledged level suspended since it was shattered by a telegram from the War Department in 1942. Leigh's too efficiently, defensively intelligent in the part to calcify into a New York Miss Havisham, but Connie has enshrined herself in the memory of her marriage, talismanically combing her son's hair over in imitation of the photographs of his father which can be found everywhere in their apartment, memorializing herself so protectively as "Mrs. Ennis" that even after two years with a devoted beau, the introduction of sexual desire feels like infidelity to a ghost. The fate of an eye-watering tie hangs the lampshade on it, but even without such expressive symbols the film does a remarkably frank job of detailing that she finds Steve so destabilizing precisely because of his combustible potential, whereas she could have safely married Carl because he just doesn't ring her bell that hard. Their most categorically romantic moment shows up their unequal affections: kissed by Connie in front of their half-decorated tree, Carl twists on the string of Christmas lights around his shoulders with the shy innuendo, "See what you do to me?" Even before her answering grin is wiped off by her son's disapproving stare and the subsequent appearance of Steve with his arms full of packages from Gimbels KO's any chance of reviving the mood, it's sweet, sad, and conspicuous that she planted one on Carl with the rather less incendiary, "Oh, you're a very pleasant man." He would never have threatened the primacy of the idealized Guy Ennis, solidified readymade into the kind of nuclear family placeholder who could offer a house in the suburbs, a dog for Timmy, stability for a woman who doesn't want to find a "wild and fiery love" just to lose it as searingly. Steve who presents himself to her with go-for-broke emotional honesty and expects her to return the courtesy whether yes or no can't be so easily ticky-tackied; he would make her risk the kind of all-in commitment that pairs this film so well with Sondheim's "Being Alive." Someone to need you too much, someone to know you too well, someone to pull you up short, to put you through hell . . . and give me support for being alive. The cleverest and most adult part of this process, so characteristic of Christmas stories, stories of regeneration, of the sun coming back out of the dark, is that it doesn't happen because of Steve. If Connie hadn't already been coming back to life on her own time, she wouldn't have spent those two hours talking in the park with an ex-sales clerk from a rival store, wouldn't have let him accompany her on her rounds of commercial espionage, wouldn't have sought him out on Christmas morning or yielded to her son's pleas to bring him home for Christmas dinner or fought with him about her future as if it mattered to both of them: "Anything can change a life that's ready to be changed." She's never really grieved the young soldier with his arms around her in the happiest of their photos, his serviceman's cap cocked jauntily on her head; she's never really allowed him to be dead. Now she can either force herself to stay married to a ghost or she can recognize the reality that she's alive and her husband, however important a part of her past that no one who loves her would want her to forget, isn't. Regardless of what she does about either living man, she has to reckon with her own solstice. "All anybody wants is for you to live in the present and not be afraid of the future."

Produced and directed by Don Hartman with a screenplay adapted by Isobel Lennart from John D. Weaver's "The Man Who Played Santa Claus" (1948), Holiday Affair must have looked like the most wholesome property on the RKO lot, especially as a change of pace for its recently marijuana-busted star. It's an even nicer change of pace that it turned out so perceptive, melancholy and astringent: its sweetness is earned, not drizzled on. Imagine the fondant if it had been made at MGM or 20th Century Fox, or even if it had been cast as announced with Cary Grant, or James Stewart, or Teresa Wright, all of whom I like. There's a real-sized quality to the picture that keeps it out of the soap of Hallmark cards and social messages; even its most conventionally screwball developments, such as the intricately awkward triolet of explanations drawn out by the sarcastically bemused police lieutenant (Harry Morgan) who's stuck on the desk for Christmas, are played more for their emotional impact than their situational absurdities and without that protective layer of anarchy can be actually quite painful. Timmy makes a miniature odyssey to the top of a department store to return his beloved Red Rocket Express like he's just been watching Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and in one keenly observed and executed scene melts down like a real six-year-old from his own emotional overload and the tensions of the adults around him. Carl who might be archetypally expected to take either a gallant bow or a humiliated pratfall instead takes eleven o'clock center stage for a break-up so affirming it alloys a friendship, the polar opposite of the friend zone—when he rests his case with the "sneaking suspicion that I ought to see if somewhere there isn't a girl who might be in love with me," one can only hope there were volunteers from the audience. Even Steve doesn't pursue Connie at the last, leaving the choice up to her. Everyone in this movie has to make the decision for themselves, taking chances without certainty. It's a screwball moral; it's a dangerous genre, so often riding the edge of tragedy. Holiday Affair ends as it began, with a model train clacking its way to a dream destination. It could be watched just as appropriately for New Year's.

Naturally, TCM has been running this movie as a staple of its Christmas programming for decades and because I have a mediocre affinity for Christmas movies and romance, I just missed it. My thanks to Gwynne Garfinkle for the encouragement to correct this oversight last week on TCM, even if their one-line summary does commit character assassination on both Carl and Steve. I am fascinated by Corey's sideline in romantically sympathetic also-rans, the kind who deserve someone who lights up like a Christmas tree for them in return. James Agee once legendarily slated Mitchum's romantic appeal as "Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates" and I wish I knew if he had ever revised his opinion after exposure to Holiday Affair or even The Big Steal (1949). I have an active aversion to love triangles and I endorse this picture—a romantic comedy where conversations decide more than kisses. It can be watched variously streaming including on the Internet Archive and the Warner Archive still seems to offer it on Blu-Ray/DVD. As this spring rains steadily through the smoke of international wildfires, it's hard not to feel a little retro-punched when Carl and Steve, musing on the decline in white Christmases since their childhood, agree that it's "probably got something to do with the atomic bomb." I happen to believe in the pull quote of this review, which is possibly the movie's best line and Carl's. This present brought to you by my pleasant backers at Patreon.

If I were given to lists of favorite movies, The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) would go in my top drawer of noir. It isn't the bleakest, the trickiest, or the most subversive, but it's so beautifully shape-changing, a Pyrrhic triumph of romanticism for the shadow side where no one, not even the story, casts anything as simple as a split.

It's a small-town night in southern California, after hours in a maze of municipal offices where the cleaning lady is almost the only person soaking up the hollows of desk-light. White-dressed, white-gloved, demurely decorated as befits the companion of a wealthy aunt lately troubled by prowlers and the scare of a break-in, the woman who gave her name as Thelma Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) is recognized by the man who asked for it as "a lady in distress, a pretty lady. Distress is my specialty tonight." Like so many of the things people say in this picture, it's not entirely false and it's not the whole truth. Looking for a chief investigator, she's found instead an assistant district attorney doing his best Sydney Carton, which is to say that he's a lawyer and he's drunk—after five years of playing second fiddle to his in-laws in his own marriage, Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) is spending his anniversary with a quart of rye instead of his wife and trying to nerve himself up to the recommended remedy of picking up a "dame." His chances with the politely disengaged stranger seem slim to a slap in the face, especially after a pass of such appalling ineptitude that it testifies better than any protests to his normal fidelity, but the transparency of his loneliness topped by the insistence of his offer to fix the parking ticket she got for wasting her time with him salvage the evening to the surprising point of a passionate kiss, right before Thelma punts him and his three-sheets professions of love out of her car and back to the wife she's correctly divined is waiting up for him, turning away on her pillow to pretend she hasn't seen her husband as plastered as he is. As benders go, it's not much to brag about, and its epilogue by daylight between an unruffled Thelma and a sincerely apologetic Cleve doesn't seem to invite a reprise. Nonetheless, when her husband meets her preparations for their traditional summer at the beach house with the diffident proposal that this year she and the children could just stay home with him, Pamela Marshall (Joan Tetzel) laughs so fondly it might haunt her in weeks to come: "You sound as though there's some blonde after you and you're frightened."

Scripted by Ketti Frings from a treatment commissioned by Hal Wallis from Marty Holland specifically for Stanwyck to star in, The File on Thelma Jordon burns slower than any other noir of my acquaintance; indeed, despite some early, accumulating signs that all is not as it appears to the fast-falling Cleve, the elegantly paced estrangement of its entire first act could belong as easily to some other disillusioned genre, one of the post-war melodramas of suburban anomie exploring the emptiness and constriction of the conventional hallmarks of middle-class success. Cleve isn't philandering out of boredom, a conjugal bed gone cold. The Marshalls' marriage is in trouble beyond the normal parameters of poshlost. It's dominated by the interference of her father, a retired judge so well-known and influential that his son-in-law can never forget that he didn't get his job with the DA's office on his own merits, who dotes on his dark-haired sprite of a daughter as if she didn't have a husband and two children of her own, none of which would cut so deeply if she didn't seem so content to be doted on at the expense of her connection to her spouse, whose ever more obvious avoidance is not helping matters: "Why does he do this to me? Every time mother and father are here—" Their feelings for one another are bittersweetly clear in the way they rush together at the realization that Cleve mistook Pam's summer packing for a more final kind of moving out. It would take a lot less than a blonde to crack them apart. It makes his infidelity more complicated, less sympathetic perhaps, more real. His affair with Thelma seems to form out of a shared and wistful sense of alienation as much as attraction, whatever the dark horse wattage of that mash in the front seat of her sedan. Without apparent consciousness of any double entendre, she describes herself over the drinks that turn into their first, illicit, interrupted date as "a great extra partner," a former hotel hostess who filled in at bridge and tennis as pleasantly and invisibly as she now reads magazines to her aunt, the enticing copy of their advertisements intended for other, more privileged consumption. "It's just that I'm so tired of being on the outside looking in," she distills down the problem, and then lightly to Cleve, unmistakably, "And here I am again, doing the same thing with you." They kiss before the gates of her aunt's garden, in which it should go without saying there may be discovered a snake. There's a stifled, adolescent quality to their romance as they spend most of their dates parked clandestinely in local lovers' lanes, Thelma always waiting for him in the tree-walled road outside her aunt's estate after he's rung her up under another assumed name. Especially with Cleve dividing his time between the work nights he can spare for his lover and the weekends he's committed to his family, inevitably it recalls her account of a brief, disenchanting liaison with a gambler in Florida, the kind of man who promised glamour but whose gifts always had other women's names inside them. "Come on," Thelma sighs as a second pair of headlights pulls up to the glittering strip of the overlook where they have been discussing everything from the state of Cleve's marriage to their own uncertain future, "we're being driven out of here, too." Their relationship belongs to the shadows, but the shadows are no refuge. They contain too many other things, like the car that sometimes seems to be tailing them, the man who materializes possessively out of the night-slicked leaves, the Gothic bedlam that erupts inside the mansion of Vera Edwards (Gertrude Hoffman) on the wind-shaken night her niece was supposed to borrow the car for a weekend for two. When the film tips at last into the reckless moment of noir, it's a doozy: a sort of counter-forensic scramble to repair a disturbed crime scene with all the right fingerprints in all the right places, unraveling against the clock of the time it should have taken a horror-stricken niece to phone the police on discovering her aunt dead on the floor beside her open safe. With $200,000 of missing emeralds and a rewritten will in play, wire-rimmed chief investigator Miles Scott (Paul Kelly) has more than suspicions. "I don't think there was a burglar. Cozy her up," he instructs the colleague who's been watching silently all the while he interviews his prime suspect, the dead woman's sole heir. "See what you can get out of her," and while the cops out in the garden are plaster-casting his own footprints, Cleve closes himself in the sunroom with Thelma and the first of this story's skins begins to peel off.

( Maybe I am just a dame and didn't know it. )

If The File on Thelma Jordon had to be the noir swan song of Robert Siodmak, whose direction of a stunning twelve examples between 1944 and 1950 contributed as much to the style as the fiction of Cornell Woolrich or the cinematography of John Alton, it was at least a high note. Between the photography of George Barnes and the art direction by Hans Dreier and Earl Hedrick, it's full of gorgeously staged set pieces, some dark and some day. As the shutters bang outside and the wind hisses the branches, the stairwell the aunt peers fearfully down into is filled like a pool with a swaying depth of shadows, as if by descending she might drown. Spidering around the dim-sliced corpse-scene of the library, the lovers' haste to restage a discovery of murder is at once tautly suspenseful and blackly funny as the phone begins to ring, a light switches on in the gatehouse, Cleve forgets that his fingerprints shouldn't be on Thelma's banister and polishes for dear life. They live so much in a night-world, the sun seems to catch them in a rare and slightly inappropriate element, but her last morning's march from the jail to the courthouse—played respectively by the Los Angeles County Jail and what was then the Santa Ana County Courthouse—is a crane-shot, indomitable tour-de-force as the press of reporters and spectators swells behind her, arm in arm with her lawyer and never once, even as she sweeps under the skyway where Cleve slows in his tracks to stare after her and up the turn of the stairs where Tony waits in the throng, looking anything but ahead. Even casual shots can be flamboyantly composed, as when the camera withdraws from the forensic findings of the plaster casts to the McCoy of Cleve himself, mirror-doubled for a wink as the point of view slides by. The sophistication of the script lends itself well to the rabbit hole of trying to decode the nuances of conversation in hindsight and the plot really is not all that much like Double Indemnity (1944), Pitfall (1948), or even Pushover (1954), which feels otherwise like its closest cousin in casting and relationships. Without ever playing like an acting exercise, it's the showcase for Stanwyck that it was designed to be, but in addition to the treat of Corey with his cat's mouth and his deep-hollowed eyes in a full-blown romance, I admire the long-limbed jumble in which he climbs from the back into the front seat of Thelma's 1946 Chrysler Town & Country, suggesting that only by the luck of the dumb-assed does he avoid doing himself a mischief on the gearshift. The non-speaking parts of the Marshall children were played by Robin and Jonathan Corey, the actor's real-life kids. I have no idea of the provenance of the sheepdog. By now it should be exhaustively apparent if this film will hold interest for anyone other than me, but I do think it's an objectively terrific picture. I waited for it to come around earlier this month on TCM's Noir Alley, after which it turned out to exist rather decently on YouTube and Olive Films has the Blu-Ray/DVD. What a wealth of loopholes there are in the statement "I don't believe anything I don't see." This file brought to you by my beautiful backers at Patreon.