Myth Happens

The funny thing about Detective Lieutenant Thomas J. Doyle of the NYPD is not that he was my undoubted introduction to Wendell Corey. The funny thing is that I didn't remember him for years. He should have been too weird to mislay.

To the child I was the first time I saw Rear Window (1954), he didn't look weird at all. He looked rational, which in my passionate identification with the terror and unfairness of not being believed I tuned out except as a stumbling block in the struggle of James Stewart's L. B. Jeffries to convince anyone with the slightest authority or even interest that murder had been committed one thunderous night across the courtyard of his summer-broiled block of Greenwich Village. Especially since his suspicions sat so well with the elegantly tenacious investigations of Grace Kelly's Lisa Fremont and the earthier opinions of Thelma Ritter's Stella, it never occurred to me that Jeff could be wrong—a stir-crazy shutterbug climbing with the heat wave into a fantasy as far-fetched as any of the globe-trotting adventures from which his plaster-cased leg has laid him up for six stultifying weeks. I was in the habit of taking narrators at their word. The relevance of Doyle was his failure to believe the hero, all the more infuriatingly because of the friendliness with which he appeared to hear out and then brush off each new hint of evidence. Whatever else he revealed about himself in the process of fulfilling his obstructive function did not stick with me.

As an adult, the first thing I can see about Doyle—beyond the Technicolor-saturated shock-blue of his eyes, so effective in low-lit scenes where they seem as luminous as Kelly's or Stewart's for that matter—is the deck stacked generically against him. Not only does he represent the law in a story of amateur detection, he's the conduit of sensible, skeptical objections in a film that started as one of the nightmare fictions of Cornell Woolrich, however wittily the screenplay by John Michael Hayes situates it within a snapshot of mid-century lives in New York. He's a sharp dresser, a second-nature kibitzer, and we understand him to have been a skilled reconnaissance pilot during WWII, but it would be a miracle of literary protocols were he to be right that the disappearance of one of the courtyard's residents is the result of a normal marital split rather than the kind which involves dismemberment. He's not a stopped clock, nonetheless. However sarcastically he explains it to Jeff, he's ethically as well as pragmatically right in refusing to search a citizen's apartment without a warrant in hopes of finding the evidence to justify one: "At the risk of sounding stuffy, I'd like to remind you of the Constitution . . . They'd throw the New York State Penal Code right in my face and it's six volumes." Challenged as to whether he can explain the mysterious movements of the murderer-elect, he retorts easily, "No; neither can you. That's a secret, private world you're looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private they couldn't possibly explain in public." On one of its numerous levels, as densely stratified as the infrastructure and architecture of the city it miniaturizes, the film turns on this question of whether Jeff has the right to breach the understood contract of urban living whereby neighbors exist cheek by jowl without getting into one another's business such as is constantly on display this very hot summer when everyone lives with their windows open and their shades up when not actually sleeping out on the fire escape, not alienated from one another like the myth of Kitty Genovese which seems to get its first airing in the accusations which follow the killing of a beloved small dog, but coexisting in the communal pretense of privacy from which Jeff shaving in his pajamas benefits as much as the dancer across the way who starts her exercises in the morning without putting her top on. To his mind, what he has seen through the windows of the Thorwald apartment entitles him to interfere; Doyle disagrees and the film really settles the question only with its second-story denouement in which all sorts of barriers real and imagined are broken, some literally and some ironically and some sweetly most of all. Until then, surely it must be baiting the audience when it reserves the possibility that the cynically experienced cop may have the truth of the situation, especially when he's such a horse's ass about it. "It'll wear off—along with the hallucinations."

Hitchcock prided himself on disconnecting audience sympathy from moral alignment and while Rear Window does not push the proposition as far as something like Psycho (1960) or Vertigo (1958) or even Notorious (1946), it's clever of the film to assign its most reasonable arguments to a character who is hardly a model of reason. However unreliable the photojournalist could turn out to be in his mix of neighborly obsession and nail-biting boredom, Doyle's even less the cool, disinterested observer than Jeff—breezily susceptible, conservatively stubborn, such an incorrigible wisenheimer that even a deserved and icy dismissal can't deter him from getting in the last word. His expert opinion entails a remarkable amount of hanging out at the expense of his old friend's liquor cabinet, occasionally losing the drift of the conversation to the terpsichorean scanties of "Miss Torso." His bland glance at an overnight case spilling over with peach-silky lingerie cogently underscores his point about private worlds, but a leapfrog of logic from Jeff nonplusses him into an incredible, Leo Rosten-ish "Hanh?" The night he intends to close the non-case of Lars Thorwald is a magnificent exposition of failing to read the room with needless cracks about feminine intuition and too obvious an impatience with armchair sleuths until the audience in solidarity with Jeff and Lisa hardens against his entirely plausible interpretation of events. He looks like a sophisticate in his summer suits and his cavalier gesture of trying to toss back a snifter of brandy like a shot leaves him mopping it off his lapels with a self-conscious grin that finds no more purchase on his unamused audience than his genial condescension of the moment before. However Corey landed the role—he had demonstrated a convincing rapport with Stewart in the otherwise inert Carbine Williams (1952)—it could have been tailored to his quick, wry, fallible repertoire, right down to the part where even after Doyle comes through in the crunch, only the authenticity of his concern for a man he's spent most of his screentime gently deriding keeps him from looking like a complete bozo. Jeff, of course, has his own amends to make for failing to see what's in front of him whether through the safely cropped distance of a telephoto lens or his own assumption-blinkered eyes: "Boy, you should've seen her!" Heroically in heels on the fire escape, flashing another woman's ring like a high sign behind her back, Lisa I remembered seeing. Jeff I remembered, too, across the decades he and his story took to come into focus. Doyle, frankly, fucks up so hard, I don't know what my excuse was.

If family memory can be trusted, I really did see Rear Window for the first time following its spoof on Square One TV (1987–92) as Mathnet's "A View from the Rear Terrace" (1988). I rewatched it courtesy of the Minuteman Library Network, but on account of being one of its director's most famous and well-loved productions, it is readily available wherever movies are sold, streamed, or pirated. Happy birthday, Wendell Corey, one hundred and ten years ago. Being forgotten from a formative age feels unfair to every single one of your characters I have met. I'm still yelling at the next dry stone wall I see in the Pioneer Valley on your account. This hallucination brought to you by my secret backers at Patreon.

It really is not true of all the shorts I see, but I wish Channel Incident (1940) were a feature film. At nine and a half minutes, it has little time for more than a tableau of the Dunkirk evacuation, but its twist on national heroism so folklorically anticipates more inclusive revisions that the Ministry of Information should have put some other propaganda in the five-minute weekly free slot and let Two Cities or Ealing have a crack at the human interest.

The phlegmatically anonymous title gives no hint that its plot is the stuff of broadside ballads: when the all-hands call comes in from the Admiralty, the heroine wiping the engine grease off her hands sees no sense in turning over the motor yacht registered in her husband's name when she might take it out herself in hopes of finding him among the stranded soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force. "But you know what it's for, don't you, miss?" she's warned anxiously. "I mean, they won't let a woman." Her reply is confident as conspiracy: "They needn't know." She has a young lion's face; in trousers and a man's loose oilskin, her brown curls packed beneath a knit balaclava and a tin hat and her voice clipped low for the naval officer on the docks at Ramsgate, she looks like many a woman who went to war before her, a credible boy. She doesn't pass so well that the soldier who offered the services of his Bren gun isn't shortly rapping on her helmet with a mock-reproving "Here, does your mother know you're out?" but he settles down with a grin when she coolly replies in the middle of the night and the Channel, "Does the sergeant-major know you're here?" She holds her course under the whines and crashes of bombing and strafing runs, hauls the jetsam weight of men from the debris of swimming-deep water, calls to each new cargo of evacuees that she ferries to the minesweepers and naval trawlers standing out past the shallows of the beaches, "Any of you seen Number Three Company, 4th Division, REs?" Time and again the answer is no; she turns back toward the lines of wading, waiting men.

Even without the title card of the MOI, the film would never be accused of disguising its propaganda. Peggy Ashcroft is playing such an Everywoman that her never-named protagonist is actually credited as "She," rather in the same way that the Wanderer is tied up at the jetty of the helpfully archetypal "North Island Sailing Club." Since the National Service Act 1941 has not yet made women liable to conscription into the auxiliary services such as the ATS, the WRNS, or the WAAF, her patriotism is domestically inflected, signaled by her wistful fingering of the pipe which is her missing man's sigil and then spelled out as she steers through the salt-spray night: "You mean the real skipper? He's over there, Johnnie. We're going to fetch him back." As the relentless work of the evacuation wears on without a familiar face among the rounds of wounded and waterlogged men, she begins to ask herself dizzily, "Where is he? Oh, God, where is he?" Could the Bechdel–Wallace test have been introduced to cinema-going lesbians of the Blitz era, they would have agreed en masse that Channel Incident fails it like a shot. Even so, its can-do spirit means it wastes no time on special pleading for its heroine's competence and initiative, which are taken as read by the men she de facto commands for her share of Operation Dynamo. Gordon Harker's Ferris and Kenneth Griffith's Johnnie may be respectively too old and too young for military service and therefore suitable for relegation to the blurring lines of women's work, but Robert Newton's Tanner is able-bodied and in uniform and cheerfully affirms their positions with that first night's "Okay, skipper!" None of the men she drives herself to exhaustion rescuing seem to find anything strange about a woman lending them a hand over the gunwales, not even the joker who remonstrates with the sailor who throws him a boat hook, "Who do you think you are, Bo bloody Peep?" Most importantly, the collective miracle of the little ships keeps her heroism from revolving entirely around her husband. She hasn't failed when she finds him ashore in England, a wounded man carefully unloaded from a destroyer with a cigarette between his fingers even as he's rolled up to the ambulance. Some strangers with a motor launch or a barge or a fishing smack helped him to safety, just as she relayed her own strangers home. In different places, they were still in it together. "Well, here I am."

Channel Incident was produced and directed by Anthony Asquith in September 1940, his first foray into the subject matter of war that would furnish as wide a range of films as the espionage quirks of Cottage to Let (1941) or the well-made attrition of The Way to the Stars (1945); it was written by Dallas Bower and Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie under his naval pen name of Bartimeus and may eschew almost all of the popular myths of Dunkirk. The photography by Bernard Knowles is documentary-style on a budget—tight and close on the characters so that if the water isn't open, the audience'll never know—and the interpolation of historical footage allows the smoke-billowed beaches of Dunkirk and their straggling soldiers in long shot to play themselves, a trick repeated at the end of the film to intercut Ashcroft at the end of her hope among the tired, daylit troops disembarking onto British soil at last. Perhaps at feature length it would have slackened if not sufficiently built out from its field-stripped premise, but as a one-reeler it's so compact that it feels spring-loaded. I shall fantasize that it might have been directed by Leslie Howard, who co-directed my beloved Pygmalion (1938) with Asquith and demonstrated his respect for the wartime heroism of women with The Gentle Sex (1943), itself originally conceived by Moie Charles as a short documentary for the MOI. In the universe of films we actually got, I'd pair the two as short and feature, or just yield to the obvious and screen this one before Dunkirk (1958). It can be viewed on its own thanks to the digitization efforts of the Imperial War Museum. I cannot but imagine it was on the radar of Lissa Evans when writing Their Finest Hour and a Half (2009). It is apparently the case that Winston Churchill really liked it. This company brought to you by my looking backers at Patreon.

What an age of ephemera we live in when I can watch a post-WWII U.S. Army training film about venereal disease just because the medical officer who has to deliver the bad news is played by Wendell Corey.

Easy to Get (1947) was never intended for my eyes. Its production by the Army Pictorial Service explicitly restricted its audience to the servicemen at home and abroad whose adult education was necessarily exempt from the squeamish blinders of the Production Code which deemed the mere mention of condoms as taboo as full-frontal footage of uncut schlong, a serious impediment to a campaign of prevention and control whose even mixed messages needed not to be mealy-mouthed. Right down to the ominous entendre of its title, the 22-minute film follows the wartime playbook for sex hygiene as it dramatizes the communicable woes of a couple of representative GIs whose best-laid good times gang aft gonorrhea and syphilis. Clean-cut Corporal Baker gets the disenchantment of his life when it turns out the small-town sweetheart he met at the soda counter of a drugstore left him with more than memories, but even streetwise Private Anderson doesn't realize how much more than two bucks it'll cost him when he springs for another round in the sack instead of a post-coital stop at the nearest prophylactic station. Each of their predicaments occasions some interrogation by the medical officer who leaves the impression that he'd love to treat a sore throat for a change, but the real catechism comes from the narrator whose man-to-man omniscient razzing escalates from the clinical threats of gonococcal arthritis and syphilitic aortitis to the triple-distilled horror of what happens to a soldier's meat when he decides that rubbers are for sissies and whiskey's just as good a first-line agent as sulfathiazole and calomel. "Maybe you don't want to stay healthy and keep yourself clean," he dares his audience as the camera pans across a ward of shots of penicillin in the ass; the chancred money shot is yet to come. "Maybe you want to hop in bed with one girl after another. Well, maybe you'd like to hop into the same boat with these men!" It should go without saying that some tolerance for various conditions of dick is required by this film, but its anatomical correctness is actually most interesting when it eases off the scare tactics in favor of matter-of-fact tutorials in the antibacterial protocols of the pro station and its personally packaged equivalent of the pro-kit as a simple, sensible precaution after the fact. Protection is encouraged with similar frankness; the average soldier is assumed to know how to roll on a condom and it is fascinating to hear the assurance a full four decades pre-AIDS that a partner who won't have sex safely isn't worth having it with. The insistence on abstinence as the only surefire prophylaxis, however, dilutes this refreshing pragmatism and shrink-wraps it in misogyny when it relies on characterizing every woman as a potential fireship. "Doesn't matter if she's a high school girl or a juke joint girl—inside her there may be sores full of crawling little germs." Only for purposes of a grotesque vignette about congenital syphilis does the film admit the danger of infectious men; otherwise the identification of women with mortal corruption goes as hard as a Rops etching. A honky-tonk singer leans invitingly at her piano, spirochetes wriggle on a slide, a pair of streetwalkers bait their smiles into the dark. Not even public health could push the Army to acknowledge the presence of men who have sex with men in its ranks, but each time the narrator heterosexually thunders, "And you catch it only one way—from a woman," the more queerly minded viewer may worry about the soldiers who took the apparent obvious loophole to heart.

All these techniques of practical instruction and moral admonition can be found in the wartime literature of posters, pamphlets, and even previous productions of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. What sets Easy to Get in a class of its own is its Blackness. Released in the last year before the formal integration of America's armed forces, its setting of an all-Black unit tacitly illustrates the segregated conditions under which it was made to appeal specifically to Black servicemen for whom the default white archive of training films did not hold the same authority and at the same time offers a kind of accidentally unmarked sketch thanks to the everyman dictates of its genre by which its unfortunate GIs are no hornier, more reckless, or more ill-informed than their white counterparts who lost furloughs or missions of their own to VD. Whoever plays Corporal Baker—uncredited as usual for training films, but in his case I would welcome any pointers, since I do not recognize the actor and have found no external information to clue me in—his ten days of deep talks and movies and moonlit trysts with dream girl Ruby Dee are so achingly romantic, the least he owes her is a notification of exposure. However ironically it ends in line at the dispensary, the joint where Russell Evans' Private Anderson picks up the prostitute played with challenging smolder by Muriel Smith is authentically hot, jumping with fast-footed swing that couldn't more blatantly stand in for the jazz going on upstairs. With minimal exceptions such as Corey's medical officer or the solid citizen who keels over from tertiary complications at the luncheonette, the barracks, battlefields, bedsides and streets of the film's location-spiced sets are populated by Black officers, enlisted men, and civilians alike. It blurs the docudrama a little, as the intended audience might well be stationed in Allied-occupied Germany or Japan where the red-light districts wouldn't look so much like Philly or Detroit, but it recalls the world of race films, in which white characters could be peripheral if they existed at all. Joseph M. Newman's direction is on brand for his later, socially conscious noirs like Abandoned (1949), but I would love to know the authorship of the narrator who sounds like the sarcastically disembodied, unracialized know-it-all of so many educational films and yet introduces his final speaker with the curious, unmistakable, "Mr. Robeson has done as much good for our people as any man alive." It seals a tone that has been shifting steadily toward a quite marked state. Post-war, Easy to Get transposes the patriotic exhortation not to let down the Allied effort by catching a sexually transmitted infection—the posters in particular are remarkably blunt about representing cases of VD as victories for the Axis—into the language of racial uplift, invoking the heroism of Black American men against Nazi ideals through footage of Joe Louis demolishing Max Schmeling in 1938, Jesse Owens and Cornelius Johnson and John Woodruff racking up gold after gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. "Metcalfe sent the stars and stripes up above the swastika and the rising sun so often that Hitler and Hirohito should have taken the hint right there and quit." In fact, Lieutenant Ralph Metcalfe himself shows up to corroborate the value of physical as well as mental fitness, paving the way for the God-level cameo of Paul Robeson, not yet blacklisted and titanically political. "None of us will forget what we've learned from this movie," the voice of Othello, Ol' Man River, the Harlem Renaissance concludes, "but more important, let's not forget our responsibility to our communities, our families, and ourselves." Whatever the film's other omissions and hedges, for just a moment it seems much less conservative calling on Black pride rather than generalized nationalism; the enemy is more than VD, America the theater of war. Robeson had just headlined the American Crusade Against Lynching because the President of the United States was dragging his feet on civil rights. It sends the film out on a note of conviction that his call to public health sounds anything but respectable or trite.

Should you decide to check out this core sample of post-war sexual and racial attitudes for yourself, I cannot stress its not-safe-for-work-ness enough: one minute it's describing the ravages of neurosyphilis, then it's debunking myths of treatment and transmission, the next minute it's just cock. The combined effect can be watched on YouTube if you're willing to confirm your age and at the National Library of Medicine if you'd rather not bother. In trying to unearth more detail on its production, I turned up the puzzling record of an American medical officer stationed in Bad Nauheim referring to an "'Easy to Get'—VD Training Film (New)" in a letter dated February 1946, which does not at all accord with Corey only leaving for Hollywood in the summer of that year, having spent the previous six months co-starring on Broadway in Dream Girl. I may have to poke at the National Archives. He is extremely recognizable even glumly getting up from his microscope to tell a soldier who thought he had the most wonderful furlough, "You've got gonorrhea, Baker." This strain brought to you by my healthy backers at Patreon.

I have the same problem with Nikyatu Jusu's Suicide by Sunlight (2019) as I do with certain novellas, namely that I want the full novel, or in this case the feature. With their seventeen minutes of short film, director Jusu and co-writer Robin Shanea Williams more than sketch a New York City a half-step of science and folklore from our own, where Black vampires afforded the sunscreen of their melanin may more successfully pass for human than their night-confined white counterparts, a neat flip of privilege which plays perceptively with the advantages and marginalizations faced by the day-walking Valentina (Natalie Paul) as she navigates her professional obligations as a nurse on a children's cancer ward and her personal desperation as the mother of twin daughters withheld by their all too fearfully human father in a snapshot that feels as deep as a grimoire. The time we spend with her is tender and carnal, vulnerable and intimidating, intensely—as it should be, with all the blood in it—alive.

Part of the film's richness is the fluidity of its vampirism, which is not treated as a stand-in for real-world difference so much as just another axis to intersect with. From the introductory vox pop playing on a hospital TV, we can tell that old-fashioned human racism hasn't died with the revelation of vampires because the white anchor interrupts the Black NYU professor who has just been trying to clarify how few of these hidden day-walkers are killers of any kind, "I'm sorry to cut you off there, but I just have to ask—if we're talking African-American vampires, then what's going on with the white ones?" Some kind of class tension cuts between Valentina and her ex as she hisses down her side of a freeze-out phone call, "You know, I can get gutter if that's what you want to see. Dirtier than you ever imagined." Langston (Motell Foster) wears a camel-hair topcoat, hustles their wide-eyed daughters up the steps of a Brooklyn brownstone and slams the door so hard in his camo-jacketed ex-wife's face that we understand the old rules of invitation still apply beyond the practical impediments of keys and locks. "If you don't control yourself," he rebuffs her pleading as coldly as a husband out of Ibsen or Highsmith, "you'll never see them again. I swear to God, everybody will know." From the glass-rattling more-than-mortal force with which Valentina lashes back, "Everybody will know what?" we understand him to mean the exposure of her vampirism, consequences unknown, stigma self-evident. But other valences of outing linger, especially as we watch her resplendent predator hit the clubs for an electrically shot montage of bold and carnivorous seductions, her fierce femme pickup of a blonde woman and her bathroom tryst with a brown-skinned man recalling the professor's authorship of the intriguingly grouped Vampires, Negroes, and Fairies. Queerness has long been in the bloodstream of the vampire mythos; so has the language of addiction invoked just as directly when she ends the night puking all that deliciously drawn blood into an unglamorous toilet without even a lover to hold her hair; but when she lifts the frail wrist of a terminally ill child to her lips with his consent, she becomes something there's no well-worn metaphor for. Even the conventions of a passing narrative are complicated by the simple visual of dark-skinned, strong-curved Valentina with her thick crown of locs which she bundles no-nonsense for her job and draws up queenly for her nights on the town. "What I really am?" she laughs bitterly at Langston: such an open-ended question for which only the one answer matters to him. "You hate the fact that I'll outlive you and I'll show the girls who they really are—" To the preacherly accompaniment of Revelations 17:6 and Proverbs 30:14, the camera passes like candid portraiture over Black faces whose secret nature is tipped only by the amber flare within their eyes like an eclipse's corona, the smoldering threads of sunlight metabolizing within the varied darknesses of their skins. One belongs to a gurgling, sharp-toothed infant. "You don't have to believe it to be true. This is the Word of God. This is our world."

Most of all it is Valentina's world, so confidently observed that it never feels like a treatise no matter the density of its themes. She leaves nightly voicemail messages that might never reach her beloved Faith and Hope (Madison Spicer and Juniah Williams-West), channels her maternal loneliness pricked by her blood-instincts into her devoted care of Micah (Destin Khari), even with earbuds in can't tune out the pair of young lovers necking on the Lexington Avenue Express with a playful fang-nip or two. Her hunter's reputation precedes her when she comes face to face at last with the woman who has been raising her children and sleeping in their father's bed (Alexis Nichole Smith), but then she has to make the girls believe the most important thing when they discover her blood-muzzled in blue shadows splattered black, the hand she reaches out to them crescent-nailed in gore: "You don't have to be scared of Mommy. You're more like Mommy than you know." It's such a delectable, dangerous moment for the film to risk, it's as good as a cliffhanger for audience investment, but even if this glimpse is all that ever exists of Jusu's ambitious and intimate addition to the canon of Black vampire literature, at least it's a jewel. The painterly cinematography by Daisy Zhou favors the skin-sculpting saturation of bronzes and blues, bisexual lighting and the flat grey days of a sleepless city as real as the vampires in its streets. The score by Omar Ferrer makes spare use of pensive piano and buzzy glitches of bass, the intrusive high frequencies of a day-walker's heightened senses. As dreamy and documentary as the narrative can feel at the same time, it is never less than grounded by the unapologetically moment-to-moment reality of the hunger and love of Valentina. I discovered it on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched even more handily on YouTube and Vimeo. In the absence of its full-length version, I shall just have to commit myself to the hardship of watching the director's feature debut Nanny (2022), no stranger itself to fantastical slants on motherhood. "Open the door for Mommy." This knowledge brought to you by my believing backers at Patreon.

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.