This weeks episode finds the Ellroy Boys talking about classic film noir, In a Lonely Place in addition to Dario Argento's Tenebrae. The first film, arguably auteur Nicholas Ray’s best movie, is a deeply personal excavation of Hollywood’s dark heart that follows a brilliant, cynical, and self-important screenwriter, both charismatic and possibly homicidal. It’s Ray’s most important film and Humphrey Bogart’s character appears to be playing a version of the director. It’s a sad & strange movie about loss and the self-destructive psyche of a troubled and violent man, whose gifts as an artist are inseparable from his sadistic streak. His nature keeps him in a lonely place and seems to suggest that this purgatorial state is one he’s doomed to live in. It’s a sad drunk of a movie that is more of a hyper-masculine maudlin melodrama than a film noir in my opinion, one that is deeply intertwined with the ego & self-pity of its director. Paired with it, is perhaps, Dario Argento’s best giallo, Tenebrae, a splashy, vibrant, & blood soaked self-referential horror/thriller about a crime novelist going to Rome to promote his latest book. Upon arriving, a series of brutal murders begin, each exactly alike the killings described in the writer's latest work. The title of film may be a reference to Tenebrism, a painting technique, in which an artist keeps part of the canvas completely black, so as to strongly illuminate other elements of the drawing. This is different from Chiaroscuro, which refers to a kind of shading that gives figures in a picture a three dimensional quality. Interestingly, Tenebrae is a bright, bright film, and one of Argento’s bloodiest and most lurid. If there’s one thing that explicitly sets the film apart from Ray’s picture, it’s that Argento, while a serious artist, does not take himself as seriously as Ray, and while In a Lonely Place feels very seriously self-conscious about its own artistry, Tenebrae knows its limits as a genre film and embraces its own pulp sensibility in a way that elevates its overall quality. Its Grand Guginol filtered through Italian Vogue & it has no delusions of being anything else. Regardless, both films are exciting & worth investigating. Furthermore, we discuss Bogart, video nasties, where Ellroy intersects with gialli, Gloria Graham marrying both the director & his son, the insufferable self-important auteur, the french, and of course Nicholas Ray, his influence, career & the cult of film students he tormented toward the end of his career.
