Jules Dassin | John Cromwell | Crane Wilbur | Edward Buzzell | George Amy | Frank McDonald | Lewis Milestone | Gordon Wiles
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Everything in Dassin's film is much more "ordinary" than in the Hathaway series, too. It is ordinary in two ways: the villain in the Dassin is not some superman or superorganization of crime, unlike most Hathaway school films. No, the villain is just some ordinary murderer. Secondly, the police are not shown as some extraordinary, high tech institution. The film focuses on a real group, the New York City police, but they are lacking in the military discipline, inhuman efficiency and high tech skills of the cops in the previous Hathaway school films. They are shown as a collection of shrewd, honest, but much more human people. The police tend to be married, and have functioning bonds with women. No one's closest relationship is with a partner. No one on the police seems to be deep in military discipline as a life style.
Shots in The Naked City include the mirrors and staircases so familiar in the films of Fritz Lang, and which spread from him to film noir as a whole. The villain's room at the end contains both a mirror, used for many shots, and a window through which we get a deep focus exterior of the New York streets. Even in interiors we see the city. Later, we get a shot straight down the staircase in the villain's building. Once on the streets, the shop windows are treated as "mirrors", so we see both what they contain, and the reflections of the street in the glass. Such reflection shots are popular in poetic documentary and city symphonies, from Dziga Vertov's The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) to Stan Brakhage's Wonder Ring (1955).
The Naked City has astonishing photography of New York City. Cinematographer William Daniels won an Oscar. The photography reaches its peak during the great climax on the Williamsburg bridge. This is in the semi-doc tradition of finales on great industrial or engineering structures.
The streets of New York virtually explode with life here. The finale is full of children playing, including the little girls skipping rope that used to be such a feature of American life.
There are thematic links back to the previous work. Here the hero is a cheap but smooth talking hustler: just like the Howard Duff character in the earlier film. And Night and the City takes place in the world of wrestling: another villain in The Naked City was a wrestler, and makes some pointed remarks about that profession, as well as essentially "wrestling" with one of the cops during a big struggle. Far and away the best scene in Night and the City is the impromptu wrestling match. The film comes astonishingly alive at this point, in a way it didn't before.
The Racket has been around for a long time. It started life as a play, then was made into a 1928 film, directed by Lewis Milestone. In the 1920's, it would have been considered a "gangster film"; here it is refurbished in the early 1950's as a "film noir". Both versions had Howard Hughes involved as a producer. The 1928 version starred a youthful Helen Hayes as the heroine. Milestone's films also are full of social protest. His The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) also centers on the intersection between business, corruption and civic power, with the lines between all of these institutions becoming deeply blurred.
The Racket has elements that anticipate Fritz Lang's later The Big Sleep (1953). Its embattled police hero going after powerful mobsters is similar to the later film. So is some of the violence in the picture. The character played by Lizabeth Scott, an underworld girl friend who later turns state's evidence, also anticipates Gloria Grahame's character in Lang's film.
Robert Ryan plays an out of control, violent gangster of the old school. His clothes are spectacular: he is completely uninhibited about flash, and is always dressed to the teeth. His dressing gown is one of the most elaborate in film history, and his later pin stripe suit is almost as dramatic. One wonders if men in the early 1950's really dressed this way, or if his clothes have been heightened for the movie screen. The film's costume designer, Michael Woulfe, made a major contribution to its ambiance.
The smooth mobster played by Don Porter is also well done in terms of clothes and accouterments. Porter's character is supposed to represent a new generation of organized crime in America, one that runs crime as a sophisticated, well organized business. The mob has disguised Porter as a business executive. He has a spectacular executive office, that looks like all the new command centers of the newly affluent 1950's corporate America. It has a huge wooden desk for Porter, elegant leather furniture, and is located high in an office building overlooking the city he "runs", to quote the film. Porter is always superbly well dressed, in a series of double breasted suits. He looks like an affluent businessman, suave and powerful. All his stationary states that he is the Chief Executive Officer of various respectable sounding corporations. While he always looks extraordinarily affluent, he never seems other than utterly respectable, a member of the upper middle class. Unlike Ryan, who looks like a mobster, Porter looks like a social leader, someone who represents the monied element in town. We have said that Porter is disguised as a businessman, but in fact, we never see any honest businessmen in the movie. Perhaps all the businesses in this city are as mob controlled as this one.
Cromwell's film noirs tend to deal with civic corruption. The villains in them are not merely gangs, unlike the other semi-docs. They are gangs that have usurped civic power. The fight against them is also a fight against corrupt authority. There is an element of social protest in these films. Cromwell's historical drama, Son of Fury (1942), also deals in similar themes, even though it takes place in 18th Century England: here wicked aristocrat George Sanders has cheated poor Tyrone Power.
By contrast, the police station is a warren of turning corridors. Rooms open into other rooms. There are no clear lines of sight, and finding one's way around in this maze must be a challenge. It has little view of the outside world, and seems like a chthonic burrow compared to Porter's command tower. While everything in Porter's office is brand new, up to date, and redolent of the 1950's affluence of corporate America, the police station is a relic survivor of earlier times.
One scene shows Mitchum's introduction to his men, just after being transferred there as the new Captain of the precinct. The uniformed men are lined up with military precision, just as in such contemporary war movies as Twelve O'Clock High (1949). However, the corridors of the police station are too short to contain them all in one straight line, so they are bent 90 degrees around a corner in their lineup. It is a vivid visual metaphor for the limitations civic corruption places on honest cop Mitchum. Just as he has to cope with the confining precinct building in his attempt to run his squad, so too does he have to cope with corrupt superiors in city government who do not want the mob investigated.
The mini-documentaries in the film are far and away its best parts. The film opens with an extended documentary about the city and the prison. This has interest as a time capsule of another era. Both the warden and the prisoners talk directly to the camera, telling their real life stories. This reminds one of the opening of Phil Karlson's Phenix City Story (1955), a film to which Crane Wilbur contributed as a scriptwriter, although that film's opening documentary sequence is much longer, as well as more clearly delimited from the fiction film that follows it.
After the prison break halfway through the movie, there is another brief, interesting documentary look at the town.
Finally, one episode later shows the funicular near the city, reminding one of the industrial finales of many semi-docs - although it surprisingly turns out not to be the actual finale of the picture, breaking all semi-documentary tradition.
The film has some similarities to Tear Gas Squad (1940). Both of these early films have plenty of exciting adventure. Both have a major raid on a gang hideout as a big climactic scene. Both are about very young officers, on early cases. Both initially do things that cause their superior officers to disapprove of them. Both then make an extra, heroic effort, and manage to bring in the bad guys after all. The issues they face are simpler than those of such noir era films as T-Men (1947). The biggest problem either one could have is not doing a good job. Once they succeed with their arrests, everything is fine. By contrast, the hero of T-Men has to watch his partner be murdered before his eyes; he is almost killed himself. Pleasing authority figures is not the key issue in his world. One of the later scenes in The Get-Away does have a noir like moral complexity, when the hero's boss pits him against the heroine.
Is The Get-Away a film noir? Should it can be considered as a very late gangster film instead? While the criminals here form a gang, they do not rule a city the way the early 1930's gangsters of Little Caesar and Public Enemy did. Instead, they are a gang of thieves who hide out in obscurity, only coming out in public to commit their crimes. This is closer to the role of gangs of crooks in film noir.
In addition, there are some noir like elements. The hero is dressed to the teeth in the sharp suits of the 1940's; so are the other detectives. These are some of the best dressed figures in any crime film. This sort of urban polish strongly recalls film noir, which takes place in an urban paradise. Such urban scenes as the dance hall where the finale occurs also have a noir like feel. Many key scenes take place at night. The personal involvement of the hero with the gang leader's sister also involves a noir like intensity of feeling.
When one thinks of crusading newspapermen in the movies, the name of Wayne Morris does not immediately spring to mind. Morris specialized in roles where his young man was essentially a big, playful, overgrown kid. He was always a nice guy, a bit of a rough neck, and full of goofy, good-natured boyish charm. The film makers have done everything to tailor this role for Morris. They have tried both to preserve his on-screen personality, and to make him believable as a reporter. His boyish enthusiasm is now directed to his reporting job: he can't wait to jump on a story, follow up a lead, accompany an arrest, or phone in a hot breaking story. He does all this as if he were a kid with a new set of toys. Such enthusiasm fits in with Warner Brothers' gung-ho approach to melodrama, as well. Morris is also frequently shown with a typewriter or a camera, and his boss on the paper expresses admiration and total support for him. Movie editors tended to be gruff and condemnatory, at least to traditional screen reporters like Pat O'Brien or Lee Tracy, but here the filmmakers clearly thought his boss' approval might help give Morris credibility as a reporter.
Costume designer Milo Anderson, always a specialist in making male stars glamorous, has given Morris a ton of sharp suits. They are always quite dressy, being double-breasted or pin striped or both. They give Morris a bit more of a grown up or responsible look than he sometimes had in films, without sacrificing glamour. Morris usually keeps his hat on, the standard movie shorthand for "reporter" in that era. Morris never appears in a tux, even when the mobsters on the gambling ship are decked out in them. He always sticks to his suit and hat, clothes that are the professional requirements for a reporter. Anderson has not stinted: Morris seems to change his suit every few minutes for each new scene.
George Amy was a top editor at Warner Brothers who occasionally got a chance to direct. Terry Morse was also an editor who occasionally directed; clearly, editors had a chance for this sort of job opportunity at Warner Brothers.
Just as The Street With No Name took us inside the FBI, so does Comanche Creek give an inside view of the National Detective Agency, a fictitious private detective group located in Kansas. Both organizations are depicted as being full of trained, highly competent professionals, who have great espirit de corps. At the headquarters, agents of both organizations wear sharp, elegant suits. In the field, they dress like their surrounding environments: here the agents are in cowboy garb.
In both films, the undercover hero is assigned a second agent to watch over him, trail him, and to attempt to protect him from bad guys. This second agent is a major character in both works. He is also the ancestor of the Uncle Mike character in the 1980's TV series Wiseguy. In all three works, this agent uses the highest tech media of the day to stay in contact with the head office of the agency, functioning as the hero's life line to the home office. There are also pre-arranged ways for this guardian agent and the hero to surreptitiously communicate with each other. These have their ingenuity as well. In Comanche Creek these hero-guardian agent scenes also have their high tech flavor, and are some of the best scenes in the movie. I think such guardian characters fascinate us, because most of us would like to have someone looking after us. It's a big and frightening world, and some help from a guardian person would be very welcome. Also, they represent caring about other people and goodness. These guardian agents are the human equivalent of guardian angels.
Other elements that recall Street: a detailed narration, apparently by Reed Hadley, although I have been unable to confirm this through credits. Hadley was the authoritative sounding narrator of Street and other 1940's semi-docs. The narration starts right at the beginning of the film, and is full of facts about dates and places. This is similar to the fact-oriented narrators of the semi-docs.
Gunfight at Comanche Creek was written by Edward Bernds. Bernds was a prolific writer and director of low budget comedy films, including many of the Three Stooges' best shorts, such as Micro-Phonies (1945). Most of the plot ideas I've discussed above seem to be more a product of Bernds' script than McDonald's direction.
In one way this film is NOT like the earlier semi-docs: those were shot on real locations, and showed real institutions. This film's agency is fictitious, and there are no "real" locations to shoot. It is just as fictional as any other Western.
In the tradition of 1950's Westerns, this film has a beautiful color design. There are aqua railings, red walls, green tables, and vividly colored costumes, such as the bright blue satin dress worn by the heroine, and the aqua vest and green aprons worn by the croupiers. Virtually every wall and every piece of decor is painted some earth-tone like but intense color. These tones often have some bright color added to achieve maximum vividness: a gray wall will have a shade of blue mixed in it; bricks will be bright yellow. 1950's Westerns tried to take their viewers into a world that was a sea of bright color. Apparently, people tended to accept this, at least in the name of escapism. Many of today's Hollywood films seem so desaturated and colorless, by contrast.
In another way, the film seems ultra-modern, and very much part of the mid 1960's. The agency reminds one of the good guy spy organizations of the period, and the agents of James Bond. This is reinforced by having Audie Murphy's character being a great success with women, and having him being introduced in the film in bed with a woman. This is much more like James Bond than traditional Western heroes.
Because we first see the agents in sharp suits, when they later appear in cowboy clothes, the cowboy outfits seem more like costumes the agents are wearing for their undercover work, than expressions of their natural status as Western heroes. This is especially true of the guardian agent (played by Jan Merlin). The gray suit he wears at the opening seems like his natural garb. His cowboy clothes, which are a beautifully coordinated series of golds and light browns and yellows, seems like a disguise he is wearing. The cowboy costume is a little too fancy to be considered as authentic wear. He stands out from the crowds of people he meets out West. It is like he is wearing a special outfit, one designed to make him radiate color and light. The fact that he is playing an angel figure seems underscored by the luminous nature of his outfit.
The suits that the agents all wear back at agency headquarters are all color coordinated, in various shades of gray. They too seem like something the agents are wearing for deliberate effect. It makes them all look part of a team, as if they were a sports team all wearing identical clothes. The guys seem conscious of the effect they are creating, as if they are trying to look as sharp as possible. The suits seem oddly modern, very close to something that could be worn by contemporary, 1960's men on the street. They convey the sense that the detective agency is part of modern times. Together with its spy like features, this gives the agency a feel of something out of the 1960's. When the agents subsequently put on their cowboy clothes and go out West, the feel is as if they have stepped back into an earlier era of time.
The next year the TV series The Wild, Wild West would create a similar fusion of James Bond and the Western. Nearly all aspects of popular media in the mid-1960's were strongly influenced by the spy craze.
TCM showed restored versions of Two Arabian Knights (1927) and The Racket (1928) last night. Both are directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by the Aviator himself, Howard Hughes. These are legendary silent films, famed as early Oscar winners or nominees, but utterly unavailable to the public till now. Unfortunately, both have serious problems, and are a big disappointment.
Two Arabian Knights is a much better movie, stylistically speaking. In fact, the first half is a thoroughly enjoyable comic romp, and I was making plans to hail it as a lost silent classic. Then the second half kicks in, with the boys making it to the Middle East, and every ugly anti-Arab stereotype you've ever seen flooding the film. Thus the film has similar problems as The Conquering Power (Rex Ingram), whose first half is a high powered romantic drama, with Rudolph Valentino at his best, but whose second half degenerates into racist stereotypes.
For that matter, The Racket faithfully preserves the nasty Jewish shyster lawyer of the play, although he plays a much smaller role in terms of screen time than the Middle Eastern caricatures in Two Arabian Knights. Not every pair of filmmakers could manage to be anti-Arab and anti-Jewish in just three hours of running time, but Milestone and Hughes can. Yuchh!
There is a lot of good comedy in the first half of Two Arabian Knights. It is one of those films about a pair of battling-but-best-friend soldiers, one from an aristocratic background (here Philadelphia's main line), the other a brawling roughneck of a Sergeant. What Price Glory is the archetype. William Boyd & Louis Wolheim did a good job with these two guys. This first half also has the only mise-en-scene from Milestone I've ever been able to enjoy.
The Racket utterly fails as an adaptation of Bartlett Cormack's play. This 1927 stage hit came in the wake of Broadway (1926), the classic stage play that is the ur-Gangster work. Cormack's work is not as good - it suffers from racist slurs of every type - but it also has a lot of dramatic power. The play is a duel between an honest but ruthless and above-the-law police captain, and a monstrous gangster (inspired by Al Capone). Both of these ferocious men are essentially sub-human, anti-democratic forces, and their duel reaches hurricane level in the play.
Milestone's film has an opening half-hour that has little to do with the play, and which takes place in lavish locations all over Chicago. "Best" scene: a huge gangster battle-turned-riot on the street, one of the most violent scenes in silent film history. It is unpleasant as most of Milestone is, but it it is certainly something else.
After the first 30 minutes, we reach the play itself, essentially a one-set work in a police station. Biggest mistake in the adaptation: making the police captain and the gangster to be sweet buddies, just like the Two Arabian Knights! This makes no sense at all. The gangster here is actually played by lovable lug Louis Wolheim again, who was the Sgt in Two Arabian Knights. And the police captain is played by likable leading man Thomas Meighan, veteran of De Mille.
On stage:
A friend told me in 1971 his theory about Howard Hughes: In many of Hughes' films, a man is accidentally killed by his best friend - this being Hughes' deepest fear and emotional obsession. It sure happens in The Racket, with Meighan's police captain causing best buddy gangster Wolheim's death. Very strange!
He was Production Designer on classic films like Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) and A Scandal in Paris (Douglas Sirk, 1946).
The Gangster suffers from obvious troubles of plausibility. The gangster protagonist seems to be without a gang. He has no henchmen or organization. Although he is supposed to be head of all the protection rackets in a tough Eastern resort city, he is utterly without muscle or guns. Because of this, a rival gang run by Sheldon Leonard has no trouble in taking over his turf. Actually, little kids could take over his turf: he has no gang to protect it. So all the stuff in the film about his character flaws leading to his downfall is completely nonsensical.
Many shots show a pleasing sense of composition. The director is good at weaving in elements of the background architecture in his compositions. One striking shot shows the hero framed against the striped roof.
The opening of the film shows the camera tracking out from a painting in the hero's apartment. This tracking shot is repeated several times in the film, like a refrain. It seems to be suggesting something about the hero's psyche. It shows both what seems to be a Goya painting, representing his inner demons and turmoil, and the flashy apartment that is his "reward" for his gangster activities. The apartment and his suits are what he cares for most. He is completely materialistic.