Film Forno

Lewis Allen
An excellent film in all respects but Film Noir? I don’t know, they billed it as Gothic Noir but it’s like Merchant Ivory noir. Ray Milland is excellent as a talented cad, painter/thief no goodnik.He seduces the virginal widow of a missionary, Ann Todd,  gets her to commit unspeakable acts and thanks to the writing and Miss Todd’s acting you totally believe it.Art Direction and Cinematography are top notch, all the acting in the movie is good. Look for Leo G. Carroll as a tenacious detective. Lewis Allen does an excellent job directing.He was around New York when I lived there but he was producing films in his later years. I met with his representative, a sleepy gent whose name escapes me, about a script I had written but Mr. Allen said no thanks. Allen produced the successful adaptaion of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies directed by Peter Brook, he also produced Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. He directed Suddenly starring Frank Sinatra as an assassin out to hit the President, Sinatra pulled the film from circulation after he heard Lee Harvey Oswald had watched it a few days before the Kennedy assassination. Now that I’ve seen So Evil My Love I’ve got to say Bravo to his work as a director.

Well since I posted 2 items that featured beautiful women in spider webs, I might as well go all out and post this one too. I like these Inquisition through Time type films , the Mexican film The Brainac is another one. We have an extra special bonus of Mickey Hargitay in the starring role.

Jayne Mansfield’s ex-husband, he appeared with Jayne in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter after he quit acting he ran a plant/florist business in Hollywood. Also I heard he was a landlord and a nice guy. Altogether a solid example of mid 60’s Italian Horror. Oh yeah special effects by Carlo Rambaldi (E.T.s creator)

Thursday April 8th two Gothic Noirs unspool at the Egyptian, Lewis Allen’s So Evil My Love and Jacques Tourneur’s Experiment Perilous. The first pairs Ann Todd and Ray (Man With X-Ray Eyes) Milland while Perilous features the beautiful Hedy Lamarr.

Friday night John Brahm’s excellent, rare, psychological thriller The Locket is shown along with Richard Fleischer’s Bodyguard. The Locket stars Laraine Day and Bad Boy Bob Mitchum. Bodyguard features a script by Robert Altman and stars super psycho Lawrence Tierny. A tough double bill to beat! I’ll be there how about you?

Here, thanks to You Tube, you can watch the entire Horrors Of Spider Island. Beautiful models stranded on a tropical island where a spider bite mutates one of the men traveling with them, turning him into a love sick monster.

I went to see Cry Danger at the Film Noir fest Friday night. It’s a fun film notably for it’s incredible locations, great character actors, and snappy dialog. I had seen this film years ago on VHS rented from the now defunct Jerry’s Video. But it was transferred from a really bad dupey 16mm print and looked like crap. This version at the Cinematech was a real beaut, recently restored by the joint efforts of the Film Noir Foundation and UCLA.

The film starts off with a guy getting off a train at Union Station, he goes to a dive bar, then a trailer park on Bunker Hill with amazing views of L.A. City Hall! The best noir location of all time! A downtown crummy trailer park! You have to see it to believe it. Great characer actor Richard Erdman was at the screening as well as leading lady Rhonda Fleming ( she looked great!)

Richard Erdman

Help Me Rhonda!

They regaled the audience with tales of making this film, Erdman talked about Jay Adler who portrayed the sleazy owner of the trailer park, He said he was the nastiest, evil person he ever worked with, he said Adler was such a miscreant as a youth that his family sent him away to a military school which Adler promptly burned to the ground!

Dick Powell Shoves his 45 in Jay Adler’s face

The wife of screenwriter William Bowers was in attendance as well. Bowers was an excellent Noir writer, his dialog still brings laughs, intentional ones I might add. Eddie Muller revealed that Bowers wrote the excellent Pitfall , which contains some of the best noir dialog outside of Out Of The Past. For some reason Bowers didn’t get credit on Pitfall which is a real shame. Rhonda Fleming told a revealing story that later shed some light on the ending of the film. SPOILER ALERT! She said that during the shooting of the final scene she was stricken with appendicitis and had to leave before they finished shooting. The end of the film was odd, Dick Powell tells Fleming he loves her, she wants to run away with him. She tells him to pack his bags and they’ll go off together. He exits the trailer and tells the asshole cop outside to go in and arrest her. Now is this any way for a hero to act.? Remember the great scene at the end of The Maltese Falcon, when Bogie tells Mary Astor he loves her but he’s turning her over to the cops anyway. That was a great scene! I think Rhonda was in the hospital and they made up the scene where Dick Powell tells Regis Toomey to arrest her , so they could shoot an ending without Fleming , at least I hope so because the ending as is makes Dick Powell a scumbag of the highest order. UPDATE! I wrote to Rhonda Fleming and asked her about the end of the film, she was kind enough to write back and tell me that the end was filmed as written, oh well another theory up in smoke!

It’s Back! The Film Noir Festival starts this Friday April 2nd at The Egyptian Theater in Hollywood U.S.A.! First up Cry Danger starring Dick Powell and shot on location in 50’s L.A. James Ellroy eat your heart out! Here’s the trailer.

Followed by Tight Spot Phil (The Phenix City Story, 99 River Street) Karlson directs Ginger Rogers and Eddie G Robinson. What a cast! Rhonda Fleming is supposed to appear live so get tickets now!

Here thanks to You Tube you can watch Siodmak’e File On Thelma Jordan featuring a great performance by Barbara Stanwyck. Wendell Corey is perfectly cast as well. Another Siodmak study of domestic tribulation in the Land Of Noir.

One of the things that strikes you about Siodmak’s great film Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers is the storytelling. It’s brilliant. Fracturing a narrative and reassembling it is much more interesting then just relating events in a linear flow, at least to me. The film I’m reminded of most by Siodmak’s approach is Orson Welles Citizen Kane which was released 5 years earlier in 1941. Kane had a tremendous effect on the filmmaking community, it was like a bomb of creative freedom, influencing generations of filmmakers. I’m sure it blew Siodmak’s head off and he shows it’s influence in several ways. First off both films start with the death of their main character. In The Killers this opening scene is all that’s based on Hemingway’s short story. The rest of the narrative was invented by the screenwriters. (Including an uncredited John Huston according to an interview with Siodmak). This was Hemingway’s favorite film adaption of any of his works and he would screen the film at the drop of a hat for guests down in Cuba.

Cold Open

The opening is sensational, no credits, no fade in, just cut wham! to a POV driving down a rural road at night. What a way to start a film, Dynamic! Then we get the credit sequence as we see the two killers (William Conrad and Charles McGraw) walking up to a little diner.

The Killers

An innocent American small town, like a Norman Rockwell painting and two cold as ice killers cruising it’s quiet streets. Talk about a study in contrast, a very Hitchcockian element, showing pure evil in the midst of picture postcard setting.

Small Town Mayhem

Then we get another Kane simile, the story is taken over by an insurance investigator. In Kane it’s an investigative reporter that leads us from one story to another.

Who’s That Knocking At My Door?

It’s Death!

The cast is excellent, Burt Lancaster’s first starring role and an early outing for Ava Gardner. They both never looked better and the sexual tension smoulders between them like molten lava. But Burt falls in love and that’s his undoing. There’s a two shot of Burt and Ava with a light burning between them, Siodmak is shining the love light on our star crossed lovers.

This Little Light Of Mine, I’m gonna Let It Shine

This reminded me of a similar shot in Christmas Holiday showing the love of Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly. Actually there is another parallel with Christmas Holiday, when Burt is in jail, his cellmate gives an astronomy lecture, they look out their cell window and what do they see but the exact same glass painted clouds parting reveling a star on high that was used at the end of Christmas Holiday! Check it out it’s the same.

The Same Glass Painting From Christmas Holiday

It has an emotional effect on Burt, he starts thinking about his lost love Ava and asks his cellie to look her up when he gets out. Burt is put in harm’s way by a chance meeting, very similar to what happened to Robert Mitchum in 1947’s Out Of The Past. In both films our protagonists wishing to hide out and start a new life are working at out of the way gas stations when Fate steps in and has a figure from their respective murky pasts show up at the station and recognize them.

Burt AKA The Swede is Spotted

Check The Oil!

Albert “Dr Cyclops” Dekker. He died under very Mysterious Circumstances

It’s a study in extending tension here in The Killers. Albert Dekker ( he of the bald dome and thick glasses in Dr. Cyclops) shows up at the bucolic service station and seems to relish torturing subservient attendant Burt, making him check the oil and wash the windshield all the while giving him the fisheye. Another tour de force sequence is the robbery of the hat factory, all done in one take and brilliantly so. The camera tracks and cranes in a virtuoso series of moves that conveys tension, excitement and execution wonderfully. I noticed that you can see the cameraman on the crane reflected in the window of a departing truck but you barely notice it because the film is working so well. I bring this up to make a point as Fellini said the magician must show the card up his sleeve to make the illusion more complete.

Presto! Crane in The Window

There is a great boxing scene in the film that’s as good as any boxing sequence, it’s like a Whitman’s sampler of Cinematic treats.

A Great Fight Sequence!

Another Kane connection occurs when Edmund O’Brien is hiding out in the rooming house Burt was killed in. O’Brien is laying in wait for one of the gang, Dum Dum, he listen’s through the door as Dum Dum rents the room and then begins tearing it apart looking for a clue to the whereabouts of the missing heist money. We only see O’Brien listenening but the scene is fraught with tension. It plays just like a radio play, unseen just heard.

Edmund (D.O.A.) O’Brien listens to a scene played out on the other side of the door

This was a technique Welles excelled in, a natural extension of his years spent in radio. Check out the amazing scene in Touch Of Evil in the suspect’s love nest apartment when Welles and Heston argue as Joseph Calleia searches for and fids evidence off screen. Sheer Genius. The final note of the Kane symphony is the similarity of Ava Gardner’s and Albert Dekker’s palatial mansion to Kane’s Xanadu. The magnificent staircase is the hallmark of both locations.

Xanadu II

The Killers is a masterpiece, a great work of Art diguised as a piece of genre entertainment. True Creativity expresses itself no matter what the subject or format.

Here’s a chance to see a rare gem, John Brahm’s great psychological noir The Locket will be projected in all it’s sparkling 35mm luscious B&W glory on Friday April 9th at 7:30 pm at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, U.S.A. Hats off to Eddie Mueller and Alan K. Rode the Mavens OF Mayhem, Nabobs of Noir, Czars of Crime and High Priests of the Heist . I saw an interview with Robert Mitchum where he talked about this film. Mitchum said he was shooting two films simultaneously, he’d fly to a location in the morning, act all day in Pursued then fly back to the studio and work on The Locket all night long. He said he didn’t get any sleep for a month.

This is a great film similar in subject to Hitchcock’s Marnie but to me The Locket is the better of the two. Go check it out for yourself and make your own comparison.

See The Three Faces Of Siodmak!

Here is a link to an article on our director of the month, Robert Siodmak. Click Me! I guess Universal was trying to make a celebrity director out of him like Alfred Hitchcock but maybe it was too soon after WWII for Americans to get behind a filmmaker with a German accent.

See The Famous Phonetic Jacket!

The idiotic “Shoot the match and prove you didn’t kill my wife” Scene, although it looks like a cigarette, which is what’s written in the script but was changed to a match during filming, probably re-infuriating Raymond Chandler!

I got the published screenplay to Raymond Chandler’s The Blue Dahlia. It has an introduction by the producer John Houseman. Houseman tells the story of Chandler needing to get drunk to finish the film after a secret meeting with the head of production who offered R.C. a $5000 bonus to get the script done. Houseman claims that Chandler was blocked, that George Marshall had shot almost all the pages written, 93 or so, and that the attempted bribe by the studio head had so insulted and enraged Chandler that he wanted to quit. But rather than let a fellow veteran of the English public school system down, Chandler heroically opted to sacrafice his health by consuming vast quantities of alcohol which he assured Houseman would enable him to finish. Now there are a few points worth mentioning, the script was almost complete, Chandler had begun work on The Blue Dahlia as a novel, and we know from his correspondence that he had an ending in mind all along, that Buzz (William Bendix) the steel plate in the head veteran was the killer. The Navy objected to this most strenuously and Paramount agreed to change the ending. Houseman does not mention this fact in his introduction. So this is what I think happened, Chandler finished the script as he planned, with Buzz as the killer, the Navy objected, Chandler was called in to a meeting with the studio head, Mr. Head told Raymond to change his ending and offered him $5000 to make it go down easier. Chandler flipped out, he hated the movie business and couldn’t stand anyone telling him what to write. Chandler went to Houseman and threatened to quit. Then R.C. went home and thought it over, “I’ll write their crap ending but on my terms. ” He made his list of demands, he got to work at home, drunk, with round-the clock secretaries he could chase around, and limos waiting at his beck and call and a doctor on call to take care of him. He had to anesthetize himself to write that idiotic scene where Buzz shoots a match in Johnny’s hand to show he wasn’t the killer and then the captain tricks Dad the house detective into giving himself away. Oh Brother! I think Chandler hated that character,( the house dick) he has all the abuse in the movie heaped on him. Houseman acts as if this was the great ending Chandler came up with at the last minute, that Chandler didn’t have an ending in mind at all which we now know is untrue. So that’s my take on why old R.C. needed to get loaded to finish the script. Another point was revealed in Houseman’s intro. During a fight scene a heavy oak table fell on Don Costello’s toe and broke it. Director George Marshall staged the rest of the scene so Costello didn’t have to walk around, he fights Alan Ladd but on the floor. It was brilliant! A great example of taking an accident that could have shut down production and making something better out of it. Marshall really rose to the challenge and elevated the scene creatively. Bravo! More Myth and Magic in the Land Of Make Believe!