We’re plowing ahead five years from last month’s pod subject but staying in the low – rent, “B” picture roots of film noir, with just a bit more polish, a little more class (because of a slightly larger budget). While last month’s Detour sticks with you, it’s because of its rough edges and the kick-in-the-gut noirness of the fated fall of the protagonist (as well as the hyper – meanness of the femme fatale --- Ann Savage indeed!). This month, we look at a film that has an incredible behind-the-camera crew, a great cast with many nice surprises, but also some tendrils that tie it to Detour --- it’s 1950’s Gun Crazy. The film also ushers in (or joins, depending on your view) the sub – genre of “youngstas on the run” noir, as also exemplified by Nicholas Ray’s 1948 work They Live By Night, 1949’s Knock On Any Door, Tomorrow Is Another Day in 1951, and continuing the sub-genre into neonoir with Badlands and the remake of They Live By Night, Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us. We’re privileged to see sharp writing, wonderful direction, a fabulous ten – minute bit of direct cinema, fine acting, but an inevitable, aching drive down the tracks to a waiting and remorseless fate.

Detour came out of Poverty Row Hollywood --- Gun Crazy was hard on its run – down heels. PRC barely fronted the money for Detour, and the King Brothers, Frank and Maurice, were only slightly more generous in working up Gun Crazy’s budget (courtesy of the aptly named King Brothers Productions --- which we’ll shorten to KBP). This was another Hollywood “B” picture with no delusions of grandeur --- it was going to play on the bottom of the bill or in the sticks. But for the money, KBP floated a film that was packed with talent --- talent admittedly somewhat over a monetary barrel, but talent, nonetheless. What did KBP get for their $400K and thirty days of shooting? 

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No producer or director of the 40s and 50s set out to make a film noir. They were simply trying to put together a film that would entertain and turn a profit, dammit! During the 40s and early 50s, TV was a non-entity or a new, expensive element in entertainment --- there was no competition for the 25 cents someone spent every week going to the movies. Consequently, the output of Hollywood was prodigious and many films noir, if not viewed through a modern lens, were simply “B” pictures, inexpensive work that was part of a double bill. The genre film noir encompasses many forms of 40s and 50s stories on its shadowed and fatalistic way… Melodramas. Crimers. Caper films. Heist movies. Police procedurals. Bad girl stories. Gangster films. Detective tales. Many of these films were inexpensive and thus, not worthy of notice or subtle categorization. They were “B”s. But some of the original and most impactful of the film noir genre were low-cost films imbued with the imagination, technical aptitude, and drive of their creators to transcend the double bill. They’re a credit to the people who worked to put forward the best story possible, regardless of the constraints of budget. Unsung heroes. 

So, we’re going to warm up the new season with a few of the under-funded “B” pictures that stood noir up on its legs and paved the way for more sumptuous, but no more impactful productions. We’re going to start with an orphan of Poverty Row filmmaking, from the fabulous Producers Releasing Corporation, fresh from the war, 1945’s Detour, directed by Edgar Ulmer and with a twosome at the top of the cast who made your hair curl with fatalism and dread. Noir enough for you? The tale begins in 1939 during the heyday of pulp magazines and their oeuvre, with a novel by Martin Goldsmith, titled Detour: An Extraordinary Tale. Indeed… 

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The A-bomb had contributed to this soft reign of terror. It had also fired a period of excitement and fertility in the neglected field of science fiction. Before WWII, sci-fi in film was widespread, with examples such as Lang’s hallmark Metropolis, Things To Come, the silent 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Lost World, and serials populated by Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. The war had shifted the focus, to combat and military films, propaganda, home-front boosterism, and escapism. The war also brought awareness of the application of science to conflict. Atomic power had brought an entirely new set of horrific sci-fi characters --- as embodied by Bela Lugosi, played by Martin Landau in the film Ed Wood: “Today it’s all giant bugs. Giant spiders, giant grasshoppers...” Increasingly, sci-fi enemies came from the outside, from other worlds loosening tremendous power upon the Earth, or beings from our world mutated and terribly changed by atomic power. Or sometimes, both. Aliens of all types were lurking every week at the Bijou in the 1950s. The Day The Earth Stood Still. The Thing From Another World, The War Of The Worlds. Some of these films were silly, and as characterized by Lugosi/Landau --- giant bugs. Some became classics, despite their pedigree, as in the film Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. The 1956 offering had an unlikely path to greatness, but it’s stood the test of time because of the themes that run through its bones.

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Last month, we waltzed through mid – 19th Century Italy. Today, we jump forward a half – century --- royalty continues its decline, the middle – class and powerful industrial leaders are ascendant in Europe. It’s a new century and the dawn of a new, perhaps golden era. But is it? Where still a force, European royalty is having its last hurrah in controlling lands far beyond their borders through vicious policies of imperialism. A minor Prince in Germany (who calls himself the German language derivation of Caesar) is going to overstep his bounds and plunge Europe and some of the rest of the world into a butcher’s shop of a conflict, known airily as WWI. As a result, the world further shunts royalty into the wastebin of history. But the desire for power, for rule over lands beyond your own borders? That remains. The eyes that lust after it, the hands that seek to grasp it, change from supposedly holy royal hands to an unholy alliance between politicians and industrial and financial might. And the world again sends its military off to slaughter one another. 

We saw the seeds of the downfall of royalty during the unification of Italy in Luchino Visconti’s film, The Leopard. This month, we follow two men from very different backgrounds who emerge from a unified Italy. They face the fallout of WWI and the rise of cooperation between autocracy and industrial might that forms fascism. Another decorated Italian director, Bernardo Bertolucci, mounted an ambitious film to follow their path and that of Italy as a five – hour epic, 1900. The film, which debuted in 1976, not only portrayed another turning point for Italy and the world but was a significant change for Bertolucci as he moved away from a scandalous and dark part of his career. But this is just a light story travelling over decades --- nothing to teach the US and the world in 2025…

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Visconti has been seen in this season as the director of the searing, accusatory film of the interdependence of the industrial class with the Nazis in Germany, The Damned. But where did this European industrial class arise, when Europe was still saddled with an immense set of royalty that began with kings and queens and spread its fingers into every aspect of the lives in their respective nations or nation-states until almost 1920? How was the transfer of power and wealth from the royals to a burgeoning middle- and then upper-class of technocrats, industrialists and traders brought about? How did this unweighting of the royals and shift in power to common but now wealthy families buckle civil society under the strain? In the 1963 film, The Leopard, Visconti examines the shift in the sand in the quiet, almost dispassionate gaze of a Sicilian nobleman, who sees his royal station being slowly eroded by the forces of politics, but also by the forces of economics, as wealth passes from hands supposedly blessed by a lineage from God into the more clever, adept hands of a new line. 

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As with Django, Corbucci wrote the film with his brother Bruno, as well as Vittoriano Petrilli and Mario Amendola. He’d been deeply influenced by the recent assassinations of Che Guevara, Cuban revolutionary who had tried to spark a Communist overthrow of Bolivia, and the US’ Malcolm X, a one-time Nation of Islam leader converted to the Muslim faith and killed at a speaking engagement. As the end of the 60s approached, Corbucci felt that the era of progressive political action was dwindling, to be overtaken by fierce reactionary elements. The earlier activism seemed to him to be hurled backward in progress and time. As Alex Cox noted about Corbucci’s thoughts, “You could only take on the powerful and the wicked for a short while, it seemed, before they crushed you.” Corbucci set the film’s action in 1899 Utah just prior to the Great Blizzard, the winter scenes reflecting his feelings of pessimism, depression, and disgust. Another influence --- famed Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni had secretly wished to play a role in a Spaghetti but felt his poor English would interfere --- he suggested to Corbucci to pen a film of a mute protagonist. Corbucci adapted the idea into the film sans Marcello --- it would become the second Mud and Blood work, 1968’s The Great Silence, a word play on the bleakness of the winter setting and the mute anti-hero. 

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There’s a small set of seasons that lurk after the best of winter, but before spring is in the air. You’re emerging from the wonders of a White Christmas (TM) --- those beautiful, light, star-filled dustings of a snowfall, so picturesque. Then slogging into the wet, deep, and ongoing snowfalls that you shovel every day. And then --- worse! --- the melting of that semi-season into the wet, drippy, soggy next phase --- the season of mud. Both the slogging snow and mud seasons are drags on the spirit for those who live through them --- they possess an endless feel of oppression. Contrast this with the blazing sun and hot desert environments of, well, Westerns. Even in the most desperate of Western films, the atmosphere is usually sunny, with vistas of mesas and rock formations as far as the eye can see. Think John Ford Westerns as a prime example. It’s as if the West is centered in Monument Valley, Arizona --- everything farther west is California, and everything eastward is St. Louis. And 98% of American Westerns follow suit…

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Last season we walked through an admittedly unscientific list of the greatest character actors in recent memory --- all men and mostly known for roles as so-called bad men. But we made the promise to rebalance the favor in this season --- so here it is --- an honor roll that by definition only women fill; the femmes fatale. The direct translation is the fatal women, but above all, a female character played in predominately film noir. Part of the atmosphere, darkness, nihilism, and hopelessness of that genre is amplified by the woman who lead the protagonist (you really can’t call them heroes, the scenario being so nihilistic) by the nose, often unwittingly, into the situations that lead to their downfall. Using their beauty, their cunning, their duplicity to maneuver the gee we’re following into doing their bidding --- knocking off a bank to live large for a time, knocking off a husband who’s grown tiresome. And leaving the protagonist to face the music or holding the bag as she slips away. Thus, the understood translation of the femme fatale as a deadly or lethal woman. 

She crops up in most noirs, not with a voiceover as the protagonist is sometimes granted, but a part of all those noir flashbacks in which the gee traces what went wrong, and just as likely to be seen in a dark room with the shades casting shadows like prison bars across her lovely face --- portents of the future. She has a magnetic presence and deadly agency --- she walks out of the sunlight into a dark bar, or appears at a party on someone else’s arm, or walks down the stairs flashing a honey of an anklet. She hooks the gee with a glance, a look, or by sidling up to him to entice him to buy her a drink. It starts innocently, but then it goes wrong, so very wrong. Inevitably, her feelings for the guy are false, or dropped like a handkerchief, to allow her to drift again, with the money, with her freedom, off to entice and hypnotize another protagonist. As we had seven character actors last season, we have a Magnificent Seven of femmes fatale from the classic era of noir to savor, compare, and contrast. And we’ll delve into some of the sweep of their cinematic craft outside of the noir genre --- no one trick pony these ladies…

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Well, Noirvember may be over, but our journey into my made-up sub-genre, atomic noir, is not. It’s a cheery continuation for the holiday season. At least the next film has some humor in it, as opposed to the sadism in November’s Kiss Me Deadly… Thanks for those memories Mickey Spillane! This month: released in 1984 by Universal, it’s Repo Man, directed by Alex Cox on a shoestring budget of $1.5M, resulting in lasting indy fame and approbation. If you look it up on Wikipedia, they label it as science fiction black comedy. Oh, but it’s so much more! So, I’m slapping on my own label of atomic/punk/noir. But, yeah, there is a science fiction twist, and it does have some stealthy humor. 

 Why continue in this vein? Well, last month, we looked at the horror of mid-50s America, with its hide-under-the-bed fear of commies and pinkos, plus it’s palpable fear of the A-bomb. That whole scene blew open with the rise of white guy rock n’ roll, Kennedy kicking Nixon’s ass (well, by a slim margin), the rise of the counterculture, and the narrow atomic war escape of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the clock ticking toward Armageddon nearly struck midnight. Whew! People woke up, man! But then, that was blown away by Johnson’s failure in Vietnam, the US actually losing a war, resulting in Nixon slithering into the White House for two terms (but now, the guy looks like an amateur), ending with the national nightmare of Watergate. Backlash to the Democrats and Jimmy Carter. But public trust had evaporated. Justice and higher ideals went out the window. People were tired --- they didn’t believe in much at the dawn of the 80s. Except maybe in going to B-school, working on Wall Street, and having a home in the Hamptons, with a pool and jet ski. Who rode in on a white horse to burnish this turn towards Mammon? Why, Ronald Reagan. Or, as Doc Brown memorably put it in Back To The Future --- “The actor?” 

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It would still prove to be the American Century, but now it was overshadowed by the threat of the atom’s power. Air raid shelters were built in public buildings. Families dug and poured concrete in their backyards to construct personal bomb shelters. Food was stocked, with water, batteries, Bibles, bunk beds and lawn chairs. The US government produced films on how to survive an atomic war, and what our duties as citizens were in that event. Don’t believe me? Find the documentary The Atomic Café and decide what the government and military were trying to sell us. I was one of the millions of kids who learned to survive (perhaps?) an atomic blast by ducking and covering under my desk at school. At least survive the initial blast. The radiation was a different story. It was all responsible for an underlying uneasiness at all times, a subtle terror. 

This coupled perfectly with the feelings of unseen threat and malaise that film noir captured. The style or genre was at the end of its first and classic cycle in the US by the mid 50s and the height of anti-Communist and atomic fear. But it had a final entry that pulled it all together with a director and cast that was little equaled, then or now --- Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Kiss Me Deadly, a classic film noir and fundamental influence on the French New Wave and auteurs such as Godard and Truffaut, as well as extending into the modern era, as we shall see next month. Distributed by United Artists, it had a winding path to excellence, but it’s now widely acknowledged as a mainstay of noir, stuffed with talent.

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