Random Paperbacks: Stranger in Town by Raoul D’Orque (Unique Books, 1967)

A rare example of a ‘60s U.S. sleaze paperback snagged in the wild here in the UK, I recently picked this up at Oxfam of all places, for a bargain price presumably reflective of the fact that the binding and spine are absolutely shot.

I mean, as if they actually expected anyone to read it! The cover art by Bill Alexander is the big draw here, and I’ll freely admit to staring at its warped, weirdo beauty for far longer than is healthy.

Though the artist’s intention was probably for our attention to be focused on the figure of the innocent (white-haired?) nymphet being assaulted by a jumpsuit-clad dominatrix immediately after stepping off the bus in the Big City, my focus instead keeps getting drawn back to the male figure on the left, with his Clint Eastwood scowl, jaunty neckerchief and fragile, elongated hands, clutching at the victim’s pasteboard suitcase.

Is he working in cahoots with the dominatrix, or has he just scuttled round the corner, drawn magnet-like by the opportunity to snatch some luggage? (“Yoink!”)

Either way, the demented cartoon world created by Alexander in this one mad vignette is sublime; the implicit idea that moral standards in America’s cities have collapsed to such an extent that a buxom, mid-western lass can’t even make it out of the bus station without getting clobbered by perverts and ripped off by rat-men… and the unspoken promise that, if you’re enough of a freak to be checking out a volume like this, you should probably find this prospect exciting, and hit the mean and sticky streets in search of flesh forthwith. Yowza!

I’ve always felt you could draw a direct line between this kind of sleaze paperback artwork, the more highly regarded/subversive fetish illustration which was its contemporary cousin, and the similarly ugly/beautiful atmosphere conjured up (albeit in more self-aware fashion) by ‘90s comic artists like Dan Clowes and Charles Burns - and indeed, clicking through to the above-linked ‘This is Horror’ story on Bill Alexander reveals that his long and varied career touched on all these areas, and plenty more besides.

A rare example of an African-American commercial artist, Alexander began his career in the ‘40s, illustrating the labels of 78rpm records by cats like Roy Milton (see some examples here), before helping to create “arguably the first black superhero strip”, ‘The Bronze Bomber’, which appeared in the Los Angeles Tribune from 1941-43. (Sadly, all artwork from this strip appears lost - for more detail, see the Wikipedia entry for Alexander’s contemporary Gene Bilbrew.)

After seeing service in WWII, Alexander seems to have moved on to paperback covers and S&M / fetish illustration through the ‘50s and ‘60s, including work for the legendary Irving Klaw, before achieving renown of a different order through his covers for the Eerie Publications line of horror comics in the 1970s - for more on which, I’ll refer you back to the This is Horror article, which is a great read.

As to the book itself, this appears to be the sole volume credited to the supremely named Raoul D’Orque -- and if I was ever looking for an alias to use for anonymously checking into hotels or making pornography, I think I just found it.

Rather than trying to provide a plot synopsis or similar, I’ll just hit you with this scan of the novel’s opening pages:

I realise coherence wasn’t a big concern for authors of single draft roughie sleaze books or their publishers, but still - there’s something fairly awe-inspiring about the idea that a manuscript which descends into gobbledegook within its third sentence can still go to print unaltered.

Just imagine the Burroughs-esque cut-up mayhem and made up words (‘matine’?) which might unfold across the following 150 pages, and shudder with misplaced ecstasy.

Oh, and - you see that ‘UB’ logo stuck in the middle of the above cover, like a sticker on an apple or something? That’s not actually a sticker on the book, it’s printed on. Someone must have artlessly slapped it onto Alexander’s original artwork whilst setting it out for printing.

This practice seems to have been standard operating procedure not only at Unique Books, but across all the associated imprints operated out of Buffalo, NY during the ‘60s by frequently indicted Times Square porno/sleaze entrepreneur Eddie Mishkin. (Also see: ‘After Hours’, ‘First Niter’, ‘Nitey Night’ etc, all of which used near-identical typography, and frequently featured the work of fetish-affiliated artists like Eric Stanton and the aforementioned Gene Bilbrew.)

I wonder, incidentally, whether Eddie Mishkin was any relation to Andy Milligan’s producer / nemesis William Mishkin, who was based out of nearby 42nd street, and frequently worked with other Mishkin brothers on assorted dubious enterprises? My sole reference on such matters, Jimmy McDonough’s essential Milligan biography The Ghastly One, ain’t telling, but either way, the spider’s web of subterranean cultural connections uncovered by my visit to Oxfam grows...

Noir Diary # 9: Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)

Before he went on to establish himself as one of the directors most closely associated with the ‘noir’ aesthetic via ‘The Killers’ (1946), ‘Criss-Cross’ (1948) and ‘Cry of the City’ (1949), German émigré Robert Siodmak’s first dip in dark waters of the retrospectively defined genre slipped out fairly quietly from Universal’s cash-strapped war-time production line in January 1944, lost in the shuffle to some extent, even as it managed to beat such first wave Film Noir landmarks as Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Preminger’s ‘Laura’ and Dmytryk’s ‘Murder, My Sweet’ to the screen by a few months.

Though ‘Phantom Lady’ stands as quintessential Film Noir in terms of its maniacal, pulpy tone, pungent urban atmospherics and brooding cinematography, it is nonetheless easy to see why it has been somewhat overlooked by critics and academics in comparison to those aforementioned, textbook-ready trendsetters. Despite the fact that its story originally emerged from the none-more-noir typewriter of Cornell Woolrich, this one is an odd duck in the line-up, to say the least.

With no femme fatale figure, no doomed ruminations on masculine guilt and no spectre of implacable fate hanging darkly over its characters, those who insist on defining the genre purely in terms of its story elements and underlying thematics will likely have a hard time explaining why ‘Phantom Lady’ even is noir, even as the film’s overall ‘feel’ screams it to the rafters.

In terms of its script in fact, this is really more of an audience-friendly mystery/suspense joint, despite traces of the characteristic pessimism underlying Woolrich’s plotting. In trying to account for this, we’re perhaps best to zero straight in on the contribution of associate producer Joan Harrison, a key collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock throughout the 1930s who followed him to Hollywood, overseeing the scripts for his early American films and gaining a coveted co-writing credit on several of them.

At this point in her career, Harrison had managed to negotiate her own contract as a producer for Universal, and ‘Phantom Lady’ became her first project in this capacity. Most sources seem to agree that it was Harrison was primarily responsible for adapting Woolrich’s book for the screen (despite the on-screen credit going to Bernard C. Schoenfeld), and if we view the film with the Hitchcock connection in mind, then, BINGO, everything falls into place.

Basically, ‘Phantom Lady’ splits protagonist duties between a sympathetic ‘wrong man’ (New York architect Scott Henderson, played by Alan Curtis) racing to prove himself innocent of his wife’s murder, and his loyal ‘girl Friday’ secretary (Carol ‘Kansas’ Richman, played by the striking Ella Raines), who continues sleuthing around trying to clear her boss’s name after he’s been sent down by the judge, going to increasingly extreme lengths to try to locate the titular “phantom lady” in whose company Henderson insists he spent the evening of the murder. Chief clue, or dare we say, ‘macguffin’: the ostentatious, one-of-a-kind hat the lady in question was wearing at the time.

In a quote-unquote ‘true’ noir, this set-up would soon have veered toward the dark side of the street. If not murder, Henderson would sure as hell be guilty of something – a ruined shell of man, tormented by the shadow of his implied infidelities and marital cruelty, likely as not – whilst Richman, for her part, would almost certainly have been coded as having an affair with her boss before Mrs Henderson kicked the bucket, casting heavy shade on the purity of her own motives.

None of this is explored here however, as Raines’ character keeps her infatuation with blame-free nice guy Mr Henderson primly under wraps until it can be safely revealed in the final reel, and Harrison’s script instead keeps things determinedly light and linear, prioritising logical plot progression, casual wit and forward momentum over introspection or moral ambiguity.

In other words, it’s exactly the kind of story one could imagine her prepping for Hitch – a breezy, engrossing yarn in which a pair of relatable, good-natured characters race against time to solve an inscrutable, clue-laden mystery, leavened with just a touch of macabre ghoulishness (the film’s initially unseen antagonist is a rampant necktie strangler, predating ‘Frenzy’ by three decades).

Siodmak may well have had his own ideas on how best to approach this material, but for the most part, he serves his producer’s vision well here. As with many of the director’s later films, ‘Phantom Lady’ sets out its stall as an exercise in stylish, efficient movie-making, offering up a few dutch angles, deep focus shots and smooth, gliding camera moves to keep us on our toes, before unexpectedly transitioning into stretches of breathless, almost overpowering, gothic / expressionistic pulp beauty, realised with a mastery guaranteed to knock even the most jaded of cineastes off their straight-backed chairs.

The first of ‘Phantom Lady’s two real stand-out ‘bits’ is a narratively inconsequential sequence which see Raines’ character tailing a desultory bartender (a great turn from veteran character actor Andrew Tombes) as he travels home across the city after shutting up shop at 4am on the dot. A classic, leisurely paced pursuit sequence of the kind we’d go on to see time after time in later crime movies, these few short scenes become a tour de force for both DP Woody Bredell and the film’s production team, showcasing a shadow-haunted back-lot recreation of nocturnal New York whose atmospheric depth and level of detail is pretty jaw-dropping.

Like just about all Hollywood movies of this vintage, ‘Phantom Lady’s street scenes were entirely confined to a sound stage, judiciously enhanced by some theatrical backdrops and stunning matte effects, but when Raines creeps her way up the creaky stairs to an El-Train station in pursuit of Tombes, and as they stand huddled on opposite ends of the freezing platform, eyeballing each other suspiciously until the train shudders into view, it’s almost impossible to believe we’re not traversing the same location used so memorably by Friedkin in ‘The French Connection’ nearly three decades later.

And, when they step off the train a few short minutes later, the mainline hit of raw, set-bound visual poetry Siodmak gives us is just immense; the steam rising from the sidewalk, the bums playing dice on the corner, the hypnotic, ever-present flash of neon, all culminating in an economically staged, off-screen hit-and-run, rendered with just a screech of tyres on the soundtrack, and someone flinging Tombes’ hat back into frame! If this ain’t Film Noir, I don’t know what is.

Actually, the presentation – or lack thereof – of violence and death in ‘Phantom Lady’ is interestingly handled throughout. Although it essentially concerns the exploits of a serial killer, and includes a body count to rival that of any ‘40s thriller, the film maintains an almost obsequious adherence to the Production Code, pushing absolutely everything off-screen. Each time though, Siodmak (I’m assuming) manages to include some kind of gut-wrenching detail to help make these invisible events real and upsetting for the viewer; witness for instance the grief-stricken Curtis berating the off-screen ambulance crew for apparently dragging his wife’s hair across the floor(!) as they remove her corpse from his apartment; brutal.

The real highlight of the movie however is ten or so minutes we get to spend in the company of everyone’s favourite natural born loser, the one and only Elisha Cook Jr, who enjoys one of his best ever roles here, playing the keen-eyed drummer in the band at the theatrical revue Curtis and his “phantom lady” attended during their ill-fated night out together.

Functioning almost as a kind of stand-alone short film, and featuring a wilder, more exuberant visual style than much of the material that surrounds it, Cook’s sub-plot finds him absolutely not believing his luck when Raines, sexily dolled up in black as a ‘bandrat’, or whatever the appropriate ‘40s synonym for ‘groupie’ is, comes on to him as he clocks out from his theatre gig, as part of an unlikely ruse to try to pump him for information.

Playing a brasher, more confident character than he was usually allowed to, Cook initially seems to be flying about fifty feet high in some bout of pre-coital amphetamine fury here (“stick with me snooks, I’ll buy you a whole carload of hats,” he tells Raines at one point), and it’s an amazing thing to witness. As he leads her through the shadowed back streets to a darkened doorway, through which muffled music can be heard, we’re expecting of course to be ushered into some dingy nightclub or basement bar, but no - when the door swings open, to our surprise, the musicians are way up close, as is the back wall.

Yes, it’s an after-hours rehearsal room jam session, half a dozen amped up hep-cats wailing away, sound bouncing off the brick, with just a low table covered in half empty liquor bottles providing a focus in the centre, and it is likewise magnificent. Chaotically framed by Siodmak and beautifully shot by Bredell, it is one of the rawest and most intoxicating musical sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie of this vintage, all the more so once the performance reaches what I’ve read several reviewers straight-facedly describe as Cook’s “erotic drum solo” – but really, what else could you possibly call it?

With his eyes bulging from their sockets, his gap-toothed grin looking as if it’s about to consume the rest of his face, Cook frenziedly beats his pagan skins whilst leering at Raines like some Big Daddy Roth cartoon come to life – an astonishing outburst of full tilt craziness from an actor most of us will remember for so expertly portraying the walking embodiment of the word “pathetic” across five decades of American film.

It’s all the more remarkable in fact given that Cook is able to segue straight back into his more familiar ‘fall guy’ persona when, after Raines inevitably gives him the slip, he returns to his apartment to find the Mad Strangler (top-billed Franchot Tone, making his first appearance in the film) waiting in for him in the darkness, his sinister, serial killer monologue all prepared.

“Oh, how interesting a pair of hands can be,” Tone reflects, staring at his appropriately massive mitts as Cook cowers before him, that unique combination of pride and outright terror dancing across his face. “They can trick melody out of a piano keyboard, they can mold beauty out of a piece of common clay, they can bring life back to a dying child. Yes, a pair of hands can do inconceivable good. Yet the same pair of hands can do terrible evil. They can destroy, whip, torture, even kill. I wish I didn't have to use my hands to hurt another human being…”.

So long, Elisha, it’s been nice knowing you.



Such is the ability of this film’s Woolrich-derived plotting to continually knock us off balance, twisting the story’s seemingly relentless linear through-line to pull the rug from under us, evoking a sense of ‘mystery’ that puts me in mind, not so much of Hitchcock, but of the weirder end of French crime fiction with which his influence cross-pollinated via the auspices of ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Les Diaboliques’ originators Boileau-Narcejac.

We can see this early on, immediately following Curtis’s evening out with the “phantom lady”. All we know of his character as this point is that he’s a seemingly carefree man-about-town who picked up a woman in a bar and took her to the theatre, but when he returns home to his cozy apartment, he, and we, are suddenly confronted with a coterie of almost surreally grotesque police detectives holding court in his living room, primed to give him a hard time. For a few moments, we’re completely disorientated, before being left to digest the news that a) this guy is married, and b) his wife is dead, all in a matter of seconds.

Subsequently, Woolrich’s touch can also perhaps be discerned in the way the film stretches the real world feasibility of its tale gossamer thin, to the point where we find ourselves almost prepared to believe there must be a supernatural explanation for the seemingly impossible (at the very least, Kafka-esque) series of events our unfortunate protagonist finds himself faced with.

Could this “phantom lady” have been an actual phantom, we’re momentarily inclined to wonder, as the police do the rounds of potential witnesses with a bedraggled Curtis in tow, only to hear a bartender and cab driver both confirm unequivocally that he was alone during his big night out. (The subsequent revelation that these witnesses have merely been bribed by the seemingly omniscient villain of the piece meanwhile snaps us back to reality with a sadistic glee that ‘Fantomas’ authors Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre would surely have appreciated.)

Some may find the more elaborate contrivances of ‘Phantom Lady’s script bit clunky, but approach it in the right frame of mind and Siodmak’s careful pacing and command of dramatic atmospherics will help ensure that the unlikely twists and revelations of the film’s second half hit home in an appropriately macabre, pulpy fashion.

Sadly however, the movie significantly loosens its grip on our collective throats during the final reel, wherein an emotionally weightless, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it conclusion to the drama is followed up by a pat happy ending which feels contrived and smug in the extreme, making us feel foolish for having been so engrossed in the action of the preceding 70 minutes.

If this sappy ending feels tagged on, well, that’s because it was. As with so many ‘40s studio productions, studio-mandated re-shoots were apparently inserted at the last minute before release – a decision which is reported to have enraged Joan Harrison to the extent that she resigned from her newly minted position at Universal on the spot, refusing to return to work for the studio for a number of years.

In truth, I don’t think there is any reason to believe that the film’s original ending would have been significantly darker or more ambiguous than the one we’ve been left with, but at the same time, I have little doubt that the footage signed off by Siodmak and Henderson would have at least sold us on the Hitchcock-ian happy ending a lot more successfully than the the studio’s bland and blundering amendments.

(As it is, you can almost pinpoint the moment when the original footage gives way to the reshoots – when Thomas Gomez’s detective character inexplicably barges through the door of the killer’s apartment to rescue Raines from his clutches would be my guess.)

For the most part however, ‘Phantom Lady’ is fantastically rewarding viewing – a resolutely hard-boiled, richly evocative and deeply eccentric production that does a pretty fair job of embodying everything I love about lower budget ‘40s Hollywood noir, whilst at the same time providing tons of uproarious, earthy fun.

True, there’s not a lot of psychological depth to explore here, and the tight-knit mystery plotting allows for precious little blurring of the tale’s rather arbitrary moral black & whites, but even if this rubs you up the wrong way, the nocturnal New York and Elisha Cook Jr sequences raise the movie to a whole other level – flat-out incredible films-within-films that cement ‘Phantom Lady’s status as essential viewing for all noir aficionados.

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Noir Diary # 8: Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959)

So here’s a question for you: when did Film Noir – in its original, American iteration - end?

Many fans and critics understandably regard Orson Welles’ masterful ‘Touch of Evil’ (released in April 1958) as the big full stop separating the genre’s core canon from the more self-conscious revivals and reinventions which began almost immediately after its demise, and indeed, the sight of Marlene Dietrich in her final screen role, striding off toward those looming Texas oil wells after delivering her concise final words on Welles’ Hank Quinlan, feels not only like the perfect epitaph for the noir world, but a darkly poetic kiss off for the Golden Age of Hollywood as a whole. Adios, indeed.

Nothing in culture is ever quite that neat and tidy though, and some filmmakers clearly missed the memo, leaving us with a few fascinating, transitional stragglers to try to awkwardly cram into noir’s core time-frame, Robert Wise’s ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ (released November 1959) foremost amongst them.

Before we begin discussing the film itself, a quick word on the title, as coined by William P. McGivern for his 1955 source novel. I’ve spoken before about how much I love the raw pulp poetry of these generic, one-size-fits-all crime story titles, and ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ is one of my absolute favourites in this regard. Hopefully I won’t need to elaborate too much on why that’s the case – it speaks for itself pretty well, although knowledge of the fact that one of the central characters is a compulsive gambler adds some helpful context.

Combine it with the poster image of a desperate-looking Harry Belafonte, raising his revolver toward the heavens with gritted teeth, and you’ll appreciate that the film has long been high on my “must watch” list, be it a noir, a modern crime film, or whatever else. It’s just a stunning word/image combo, irrespective of how you’d care to classify it.

In truth, most classic noirs from the mid/late ‘50s were to some extent aware of the genre/style they were working within, and in some cases, aware of the need to bend and reshape its conventions to reflect the uncertain socio-political realities of their era. By the end of the decade, making a film in black & white, in 4:3 academy ratio, was a conscious choice, rather than the default, for an American film. (In retrospect, it’s strange to reflect on the fact that such key late period noirs as ‘The Big Combo’ and ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ were actually shot widescreen.)

By keeping the action in ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ monochrome, confined to the tight limitations of a ‘square’ frame, Robert Wise and executive producer Belafonte seem to have been making a deliberate statement - we’re doing this one the old fashioned way. No fancy business, no bells n’ whistles – just a simple, blue collar crime flick with a minimal cast and a straight-forward, grab-the-money-and-run storyline.

This proposition is immediately confused however by the fact that ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’s credits sequence simultaneously takes a strikingly modernist stance, suggesting a film that’s setting out to get progressive in more ways than one. A veritable riot of animated, Saul Bass-esque text and kaleidoscopic, abstract imagery, the credits are cut to an impeccably sharp jazz score, composed by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet and recorded by an ensemble including such luminaries as Bill Evans and Milt Jackson.

Such stylistic choices may not raise too many eye-brows these days, but in the context of a ‘50s Hollywood crime film, they scream MOD as clearly as a Small Faces reunion in a Lambretta factory, immediately placing the film in the same envelope-pushing category as Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ or Preminger’s ‘The Man with The Golden Arm’.

Once the story itself gets underway however, the approach is defiantly old school. Our setting is Upper Manhattan, and our characters exist in a world of cramped tenement apartments, down-at-heel bars and ill-lit back offices, with only the occasional bit of early morning location shooting in central park allowing them a breather. None of them are exactly what you’d call professional criminals, but they’ve all had their run-ins with the criminal underworld, skirting its perimeters like losers and misfits have since time immemorial - and when we join them, they’re each sufficiently desperate to take the plunge full time.

An ex-cop who got nailed on corruption charges at some point in the past, Burke (perennial ‘cop actor’ Ed Begley, whom we last encountered on the blog playing an unlikely Dr Henry Armitage in AIP’s The Dunwich Horror) now finds himself living in reduced circumstances in a pokey one-room office/apartment, trying to figure out a way to improve his lot and avenge himself against his former colleagues in the process.

The net result of Burke’s figurin’ is what he considers a fool-proof plan to turn over a bank in a small upstate industrial town, making use of an unguarded side door and a regular 6pm coffee delivery to swipe the entirety of the local factory’s weekly payroll whilst the doddering old clerks are busy counting it. Why, it’ll be like taking candy from a a baby etc etc, but naturally he still needs a couple of guys to help him out with the job. For obvious reasons, he can’t call on the services of any professional crooks, but… he’s got the number of a couple of schmucks who just might fit the bill.

Say hello then to Earl Slater (Robert Ryan), a middle-aged WWII vet with crippling anger management issues and an inability to hold down a legit job, who’s just served a stretch in the slammer for accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, and also to Johnny Ingram (Belafonte), a wild-living nightclub musician whose addiction to gambling has led him to a separation from his wife and child and left him heavily in debt to a local mobster.

Initially, both Slater and Ingram turn down Burke’s proposition cold after he invites them to his ‘office’ for a quiet chat. But, as their own individual circumstances deteriorate further over the coming days, they both feel they have no other choice but to slink back and reluctantly declare themselves ‘in’.

For a clearly delighted Burke, the game is on, but although the robbery he has in mind is one of the simplest in crime fiction history, this wouldn’t be a heist movie if inter-personal conflict didn’t threaten to bring down the whole operation before it’s even begun, and this is certainly telegraphed loud and clear in ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’.

Both Slater and Ingram are inexperienced, unpredictable and hate each other’s guts. Burke however is so enthused by the prospect of pulling off his big job that he turns a blind eye to this obvious problem, putting the plan into action with a bare minimum of preparation. What could possibly go wrong…?

So far then, we have a quintessential hard-boiled crime yarn – exactly the kind of solid, low budget programmer which could have emerged from RKO or Warners ten or fifteen years earlier. What sets ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ apart however, justifying the film’s painfully hip opening credits, explaining Belafonte’s interest in the material and shifting the action definitively toward the milieu of the late ‘50s, is the reason why Slater and Ingram hate each other’s guts.

As you will no doubt have observed, Harry Belafonte is black, which means that Johnny Ingram is also black. Earl Slater meanwhile is a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying racist, who has only consented to work with “a coloured boy” on the job with extreme reluctance. (Ryan voices Slater with a thick, southern twang that speaks of an ugly Confederate upbringing before war and/or marriage (we presume) eventually washed him up on the shores of the Hudson.) So, you can see where this train is headed.

For all that film noir may have purported to expose the ugly underbelly of American life during the the ‘40s and earlier ‘50s, issues of racial prejudice and inequality were rarely, if ever, allowed to intrude upon the genre’s exposure of an ugly white underbelly. Whilst I’m sure there must be exceptions, off the top of my head I find it difficult to come up with any examples of pre-1955 noir in which black characters play a larger role in the narrative than that of servants, sidekicks or one-scene-wonder bit players.

(Admittedly, noir did sometimes touch upon the travails of immigrants or ethnic minorities [see ‘Cry of the City’ (1948) or Thieves’ Highway (1949) for instance], but these stories tended to concern Italian, Irish or variously European characters; all groups which modern American viewers will no doubt consider as having been fully integrated into a more monolithic demographic of undifferentiated whiteness.)

Meanwhile, the only noirs I can think of in which racism features as a plot point are other self-aware, late period examples of the genre, made by directors known for their liberal / humane beliefs, and falling comfortably within a post-Civil Rights Movement timeframe.

(Specifically, I’m thinking here of Captain Quinlan’s victimisation of his town’s Mexican populace in the aforementioned ‘Touch of Evil’ – a brilliant depiction of the kind of ‘soft’/oblique racism that has made such a regrettable comeback in 21st century political discourse, incidentally - and Timothy Carey’s memorably nasty use of a racist insult to dismiss an over-attentive parking attendant in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Killing’ (1956).)

Abraham Polonsky’s script for ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ however is consistently, and unapologetically, preoccupied with issues of race, as is made clear from the film’s very first scene, which finds Slater jovially employing a racist epithet to refer to a little girl who bumps into him on the street as he approaches Burke’s office.

In throwing together a black man and a southern racist and ostensibly forcing them to work together, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ has sometimes found itself labelled as the hard-boiled crime genre’s answer to Stanley Kramer’s ‘The Defiant Ones’ (1958) – a label presumably applied by writers who have never actually seen the film, given that, in true noir tradition, it actually presents nothing less than a cruel, pessimistic reversal of Kramer’s ode to mutual respect and co-operation.

Here, our two central characters embody the masculine traditions of their respective cultures at their craven, self-destructive worst; right from the outset, there is ZERO prospect of Ingram and Slater coming together and settling their differences. When these men have been so twisted and chewed up by the socio-political dead-ends they were born into that they can’t respect themselves, Polonsky’s characteristically schematic script seems to be asking us, what chance could they possibly have of learning to respect each other?

(Still blacklisted on account of the socialist beliefs he articulated so clearly in his pre-HUAC one-two punch of ‘Body & Soul (1947) and ‘Force of Evil’ (1948), Polonsky pulled off a neat irony by using the name of a genuine black writer, John O. Killens, as his ‘beard’ on the ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ script.)

Structurally, the film’s pacing is deliberately uneven, with the first hour taking the form of a long, leisurely slow-burn, as we follow Ingram and Slater through their respective daily routines and dilemmas in the days leading up to the robbery, sticking so closely to the characters that we soon feel as if we know their lives inside out.

Once they leave the city and head upstate to carry out the robbery however, the pacing tightens up considerably, Robert Wise flexing his well-oiled ‘thriller’ muscles as the shit quickly, inevitably, and fatally hits the fan, from the worst possible combination of angles.

At this point, we have no expectation that Slater and Ingram will manage to cooperate for more than a matter of seconds before they’re at each other’s throats, and indeed this turns out to be the case. If the conclusion, which sees Ryan and Belafonte blasting away at each other whilst almost literally dancing on top of a powder keg, seems fairly heavy-handed in allegorical terms, the breathless fatalism of the film’s crazed, maniacal final minutes still stuns.

It is during the long, slow build up which precedes all this however that the film’s most compelling drama is really played out; as in his earlier scripts, Polonsky’s systematic demarcation of the social and financial pressures which have driven the film’s characters into a corner is both detailed and exhaustive.

A forerunner of the kind of battle-scarred, emasculated males who would stalk their way through cinema of the post-Vietnam era, Earl Slater is tormented by his inability to earn an honest living, and feels humiliated by the fact that his younger wife (a fairly thankless role for the great Shelley Winters) is effectively ‘keeping’ him, having just won a promotion in her uptown office job.

Earl’s only outlets are drink and violence, and when – in one of the film’s best scenes – he finds himself combining the two by clobbering a feckless young solider in a neighbourhood bar, we feel as if he signs on for Burke’s robbery scheme more just to keep himself busy before depression and idleness land him back in prison than anything else.

Few American actors have been able to convey a sense of disappointment and self-disgust quite as convincingly, or with as much subtlety, as Robert Ryan, and his performance here is one of his very best (which is saying something), managing to almost wordlessly draw out the sympathetic, human side of what by any yardstick is a singularly dislikeable, wrong-headed character.

Belafonte’s character meanwhile is equally pathetic in his own way, functioning as a case study in how the proud rebellion of an urban, black male can so easily be detourned into futile self-destruction. In a key scene, Ingram mocks his wife (Kim Hamilton) for hosting the “ofay” attendees of a local PTA meeting at her apartment, sneering at what he sees as her attempts at social climbing, and the accompanying dilution of her black identity.

Whites can’t be trusted, seems to be his essential point; they’ll never share their shit with us, the only thing we can do is smash through and take it in the only way we can [for which read: crime and associated pursuits]. In this, Ingram is restating an already age-old argument which continued to echo through black American culture in the coming decades, from the startlingly heartfelt monologue delivered by Antonio Fargas as Pam Grier’s brother in Jack Hill’s ‘Foxy Brown’ (1974), to Paul Benjamin’s similar justification for the robbery he’s carried out in Barry Shear’s brilliant ‘Across 110th Street’ (1972), right through to the self-image projected by Ice T, N.W.A. and host of other gangsta-inclined MCs in the ‘90s and beyond.

The irony here of course is that Ingram’s attempts to battle the white system lead him straight into all the pitfalls The Man has left in wait for him. Certainly, this defiant hipster’s track record at the point at which we meet him offers little to be proud of – a debilitating gambling addiction, unpayable debts owed to an Italian mobster, estrangement from his family, and a tendency to work out his frustrations by getting drunk and clowning around on stage, humiliating his fellow musicians and potentially earning him the bums-rush from the one decent gig his talent actually has brought him. In his own way, he’s just as much of a hopeless loser as his opposite number, the stubborn bigot and convicted killer Slater.

Interestingly, in both of these parallel character studies, it is the example provided by women that seems to offer the only glimmer of hope in a story which – no spoiler here, I’m assuming – leaves its troubled male characters unredeemed, unrewarded and stone-cold dead.

Within the schema of Polonsky’s script, Winters’ character seems to represent the potential of an upwardly mobile female workforce, whilst Ingram’s wife’s presumed attempts to build a better life for her children through education and racial integration are contrasted with her husband’s selfish and immature attempts at rebellion.

Even noir fan favourite Gloria Grahame (‘The Big Heat’, ‘In a Lonely Place’ etc), who makes the best of an enjoyable though narratively irrelevant cameo as a neighbour with whom Ryan enjoys an extra-marital tryst, seems to present an unusually positive portrayal of female sexual independence, highlighting the pointed absence from this story of the traditional “femme fatale” figure, ready to soak up male guilt like a sponge.

All in all, this makes for a surprisingly strong line-up of progressive female role models for a ‘50s crime movie, and, though underwritten, these characters all seem designed to provide an optimistic counterpoint to what is otherwise a relentlessly bleak tale of doomed masculinity oozing toward the plug-hole.

We may have focused more on Polonsky’s input thus far, but, if you’ve kept reading up to this point, chances are you’ll be equally aware of Robert Wise’s formidable talents. One of those directors who seems doomed to be perpetually under-appreciated, condemned to “journeyman” rather than “auteur” status, Wise was one of the most articulate technicians of cinematic language to arise from Hollywood’s golden era, and his contributions to the noir canon in particular were exceptional. (1949’s ‘The Set-Up’, also starring Robert Ryan, would definitely find a place on my All Time Top 10 Noirs list, should I ever bother to make one.)

Suffice to say, Wise (who completed ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ shortly before getting to work on ‘West Side Story’) is at the top of his game here, whilst Joseph Brun’s photography is sharp and stark as it gets - probably veering closer to the ‘realist’ as opposed to ‘expressionist’ end of the noir spectrum, but certainly not lacking in style – the set-bound scenes in particular have all the angular shadows, venetian blinds and confining vertical lines a film studies class could ask for. Dede Allen also deserves a shout-out too for her impactful editing, which in turn is perfectly matched by the rhythms of Lewis’s flawlessly cool score.

For all that it stands out as a superior piece of film artistry however, and in spite of the exhaustive length at which I appear to have written about it, I must confess that, at times, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ still somehow left me cold. Like ‘Force of Evil’ [which I wrote about as part of this post] before it, it’s a film I appreciated more than loved.

Though Polonsky’s script here lacks that earlier film’s indigestible, Brechtian dialogue (thank god), something about the systematic, almost bullet-pointed, way in which he defines his characters based upon their social and economic circumstances threatens to leave them lacking individual agency, curiously drained of some essential spark of humanity. Fine performances from the cast can always help to mitigate this of course, and god knows, Polonksy’s work certainly offers actors more to chew on than most Hollywood screenwriters, but another thing that didn’t quite work for me here, sad to say, is Harry Belafonte.

Don’t get me wrong here, I have great regard for Belafonte as an actor and human being, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that he’s not quite right for the part of Ingram, despite of the fact that he provided the main impetus for actually getting this film off the ground.

(‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ was shot independently for Belafonte’s HarBel production company after he personally acquired the rights to the book, and he retains an executive producer credit.)

It’s not that his performance is bad as such – indeed, he emphasises the essential gentleness and fragility of character extremely well, and portrays his blind fear very effectively. From a modern perspective though at least, Belafonte seems too squeaky clean, too polite, too eloquent to really convince as a young Harlem hipster with a gambling habit and a grudge against the white world.

In fairness though, what now seems like miscasting here was not necessarily the fault of either Belafonte or his collaborators. Lest we forget, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ dates from an era in which merely putting a black actor centre stage in a straight drama was considered extremely daring.

Belafonte, like Sidney Poitier, may seem to project a mannered, rather quaint screen presence to us these days, but we must remember that as a fully-fledged black movie star during the ‘50s, he was stepping up to fill a space that previously didn’t even exist. Things would change immeasurably over the next few decades, of course, but it’s 1959 here folks, and realistically, getting a guy who was anything other than well-scrubbed with a nice smile in for this part was just NOT going to happen.

Though movie fans may have had a lot of good reasons to mourn the passing of the era of dark, monochrome glamour of which ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ represents perhaps the very last gasp, by presenting viewers with a provocative amalgam of the American movie’s past, present and future, the film simultaneously succeeds in drawing our attention to at least a few reasons for dancing on the Golden Age’s grave, marking it out as both a key transitional moment in the history of the American crime film, and a uniquely progressive and provocative addition to the noir canon.

Noir Diary # 4: Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947)

Maybe it’s just me, but ‘Kiss of Death’ strikes me as an overly dramatic title for this meat n’ potatoes crime/gangster melodrama, made for Fox by western specialist Henry Hathaway.

True, Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) plants some big kisses on his kids and his second wife (Coleen Gray) in the second half of the movie, and ok, he’s a reformed felon in deep trouble at the time, but his affections certainly never smack of death, and that aside, there are no femme fatales or doomed dames here, no sexual undertones or any funny business like that – just crooks and cops in their off-the-peg duds, chatting in offices and cell blocks, taking care of the day to day. Solid stuff, and no damned kissing.

Am I being too literal here? Didn’t pulp crime writers basically just pick these titles out of a (big, black) hat, more often than not? Well, regardless, I’d probably have called the picture “Confessions of a Stoolie”, or hey, how about “Nicky Soprano”? [It’s been done – Ed.]

Well no matter, ‘Kiss of Death’ it is, and it begins with a nice bit of post-modern humour - the image of a revolver placed atop a movie screenplay (marked “shooting script”), as an unseen hand begins to turn the pages, and the credits are presented in the form of typed script notations.

This self-awareness is immediately jettisoned however once we get into the film itself, which opens with Nick Bianco and a few of his cronies pulling off a Christmas Eve heist at a Manhattan jewellery store (located inside the Chrysler Building, no less). Although Mature gives the impression of being a pretty thorough-going, black-clad bad-ass at this point, voiceover narration (read, rather hesitantly, by Gray) foregrounds Bianco as a sympathetic figure, informing us that he’s been searching for a straight job for over a year, but that his criminal record has got him the bum’s rush every time, forcing him into this act of desperation to buy some Christmas gifts for his family.

A sweat-drenched journey down to the lobby in a crowded elevator establishes the film’s strongest suit – tension! – before a desperate flight from the cops leaves Bianco writhing in the gutter with a bullet in his leg. “The same thing happened to his father twenty years earlier; he died with a police bullet in him,” Gray’s voiceover flatly informs us. A pretty great opening, all in all.

Bianco keeps his stone-faced front up all the way to Sing-Sing, repeatedly telling obsequious Assistant D.A. Brian Donlevy “no deal” when the latter offers Nick a plea bargain in return for fingering his accomplices, manipulatively appealing to the felon’s recently acquired status as a father and aspirant decent guy. In the process of telling Donlevy to shove it, Bianco inadvertently gains the admiration of his cellmate, a twitchy young gangland psychopath, the perfectly named Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), but… more on him later.

After several years in the joint, things change for Bianco when he learns – via a fellow inmate and a scan of a newspaper obituaries column in the prison library, rather unfeasibly – that his wife has committed suicide. Stuck her head in the gas oven, no less, leaving the kids bound for the orphanage. Harsh.

Bianco had entrusted his family’s wellbeing to one of his partners on the robbery job. Evidently, that didn’t quite work out, so before you know it, Nick is back up-town, singing for Donlevy.

Out on parole as a result of his vengeful snitching, Nick is soon making time with Gray (the nice gal who used to live downstairs and babysat the kids) and, after tying the knot of course, the couple reclaim his two adorable moppets from the nuns. But, inevitably, ol’ Brian is soon on the phone again, asking Nick to set up and testify against another old pal of his – young Tommy Udo. One ‘not guilty’ verdict later, and you can probably see where this train is heading.

Behind the camera, ‘Kiss of Death’s credits are a dictionary definition of “solid”. Master script doctors Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer sure as hell knew how to write a three act genre movie (there are a few clunky lines and abrupt time transitions, but hey), and Henry Hathaway sure as hell knew how to direct one.

There are a few striking compositions, and the film is attractively photographed by Norbert Brodine, making effective (but rarely showy) use of real world locations – an element which doesn’t seem terribly noteworthy today, but proved a game-changing novelty for noir/crime films in the immediate post-war period.

Aside from a few looming shadows and dark hats in the final act however, there’s not much of that wild, expressionistic stuff that usually gets us noir fans excited. Even this early in noir’s “second wave”, realism was clearly already the big word, jarring somewhat with the film’s more baroque characters and theatrical performance styles - a disjuncture Hathaway and Brodine attempt to correct by allowing the atmosphere to become slightly more fantastical as the story progresses.

Likewise, there is little of the kind of moral ambiguity, all-consuming corruption and doomed inevitability that defines the noir sensibility to be found in ‘Kiss of Death’. Straight-down-the-line, good vs evil melodrama is more the dominant flavour here, with the Production Code-friendly, family values moralism championed by Donlevy’s character baked into the heart of the film, rather than sprinkled on top as an after-thought.

There is a cloying sense of paternalism for instance to the scene in which the prison governor compliments Bianco for his neat hand-writing, whilst a guard opines that “he’s not a bad guy”, and in the way that Nick timidly proceeds to follow the Assistant D.A.’s orders, hanging his head like a naughty child who knows he’s done bad and wants to make good.

When Mature tells Donlevy, “your side of the fence is almost as dirty as mine”, the older man comes back with, “yeah, but we only hurt the bad guys” – a questionable assertion which Hathaway is content to leave largely unchallenged, even after the D.A. proves himself to be pretty ineffectual when it comes to protecting his star witness’s loved ones from harm.

In front the camera meanwhile… well, I know that Victor Mature took a lot of stick over the years for his supposed lack of thespian talent and willingness to cruise on his good looks, but I’ve always had soft spot for him. Sure, he doesn’t exactly have much range, but how many capital letter Movie Stars really do? More important than that, he has brooding screen presence to die for, and does that lethargic, heavy-lidded drawlin’ thing just as well as Mitchum. He did great work as the tormented, alcoholic Doc Holliday in Ford’s ‘My Darling Clementine’, and as the crusading cop in Robert Siodmak’s ‘Cry of the City’, to name but two.

In ‘Kiss of Death’ though, well, I begin to see what his critics were getting at. Nick Bianco anchors this film front to back, and would likely have proved a challenging gig for any actor, with the script requiring him to transform in quick succession from a tight-lipped criminal operator to a grief-stricken jailbird, and from a craven, self-loathing stool pigeon to a defiant and proud family man. Mature might nail the first of these aspects pretty well, maybe the second, but beyond that, he struggles.

His conduct in the family scenes feels weird and overbearing, whilst the scene in which he reports back to the cops on Tommy Udo’s activities is deeply unconvincing; he sounds more like a concerned movie star recounting a conversation he overheard outside a nightclub than an insider from the criminal underworld breaking a lifetime’s silence.

Mature does manage to retain our sympathy throughout however, and he can get convincingly cool n’ tough when needed, so I won’t shame his memory by uttering the names of a few of his contemporaries who could have aced this role in his place… let’s just suggest that he was an actor who hit a lot harder in “one note” kind of parts, and leave it at that.

Speaking of “one note” parts meanwhile, most critics seem agreed on the fact that it is Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo who steals this movie. Indeed, Widmark – who made his big screen debut here after a few years slugging it out in theatre-land – even received a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his trouble… and how I wish we still lived in a world where The Academy was willing to award a nod to this kind of berserkly cartoon-ish over-acting once in a while.

Basically, Widmark’s approach here is to take the kind of “sneering, psychotic punk” character first defined by James Cagney in ‘The Public Enemy’, and to crank the dial up to eleven. As a portrayal of full spectrum, eye-popping, lip curling (literally - he curls that lip good), subtlety-free villainy, Widmark pretty much knocks it out of the park here, and I don’t think anyone’s quite found it yet, over seven decades later. (Having said that, it’s certainly no surprise to discover that Nicholas Cage took on the role in Barbet Schroeder’s 1995 remake.)

Merely looking at Tommy Udo’s face is enough to conjure up images of bullet wounds being probed with pen knives, abandoned syringes and chorus girls with smashed up faces, along with a metallic smell of cologne and formaldehyde – and that’s even before he starts laughing like a hyena. He’s like some killer, mutant animal that has emerged fully-formed from the ugly tensions of the artificial urban environment, his cherubic features rendered grotesque by the sadistic impulses that lurk beneath.

At various points, Udo reminded me both of Richard Attenborough’s Pinky in ‘Brighton Rock’ and Ronald Lacey’s sadistic Nazi in ‘Raiders of The Lost Ark’ – which should give you some idea of where this freak stands in the canon of OTT cinematic villainy.

In ‘Kiss of Death’s most notorious scene, Udo ties up a wheelchair-bound elderly lady (the mother of a fellow underworld fink) with electrical cord and pushes her down a flight of stairs to her death. A shockingly violent moment that succeeds in upping the ante on the similar exclamation points of perverse brutality that became a trademark of Warner Bros’ ‘30s gangster films, this admirably tasteless attention-grabber also serves a vital narrative function in establishing beyond doubt the kind of threat Tommy Udo poses to Nick Bianco’s family.

Indeed, it is the reality of this threat that helps to make the film’s final act - in which everything goes a bit ‘Cape Fear’ once Udo is acquitted and back on the street – into by far its most compelling section. Hathaway may not exactly be the most stylistically extravagant of filmmakers, but as Bianco waits, and waits, for Udo to make his move, the director wrangles the slow-burning suspense and apprehension of the scenario beautifully. There are looming, empty shadows, bead-of-sweat close-ups, nocturnal door creaks, passing headlights and lots and lots of clock-watching. Endangered innocents, helpless heroes and long, pregnant silences. Old tricks, but they work like a charm.

By the time our hero and villain finally square off, we’re deep into a psycho gangster dream world (and back on the studio lot), hanging tough in a Mafioso seafood joint after midnight whilst gunmen in a sedan with black window blinds lurk outside. Lugosi and Karloff meanwhile wish they could have come up with some jive as genuinely chilling as the threats Udo issues to Bianco whilst ironically acting out the part of his “big pal” through sneering, clenched teeth: “yeah, it’s all gonna be fun, fun, fun for us from now on. Just you, and me… and your wife … and your kids. Kids like to have fun.”

In the end, this superb build-up is slightly undermined by a muffed ending, in which a perfectly respectable downbeat / tragic conclusion is ruined by a last minute attempt to “fix” it with a closing voiceover narration that must have left the entire audience filing out into the lobby scratching their heads in confusion… but you’ve just got to learn to live with this stuff in old Hollywood crime pictures, I suppose. Here in the home video era, I’ll simply advise viewers to mute the sound for the final ten seconds, and everything should work out nicely.

At the risk of repeating myself, ‘Kiss of Death’ isn’t exactly what I'd deem definitive film noir, hampered as it is by plodding melodrama and some deeply square, self-satisfied moralising, but as a more straightforward crime / suspense movie, it does the business.

Tommy Udo at least has become something of a key gangster movie archetype (in a horrible instance of life imitating art, the notorious NYC mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo is reported to have used the character as an early role model), and the scenes involving Widmark crackle with a malign energy that makes the film essential viewing, irrespective of its flaws.

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Check out these great European poster designs:

Bloody NEL: Croc by David James (1977)

Chapter Fourteen

Officer Glenn Stapleton entered the precinct arrest and booking room with a black rubber boot filled with a badly mangled human foot and lower leg wrapped in his jacket. He had been ok riding across town with the grisly thing in the trunk of his car, but the sweat had popped out on his forehead when he carried it into the station, and now his stomach was doing flipflops, threatening at any moment to send him into dry heaves. Last night’s party wasn’t helping his situation much either, and he vowed, like he had many times before, not to do it again.

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Speaking of monsters, here’s an absolute whopper from New English Library’s glory days of posy-‘Jaws’ monsterism. Just look at that damned thing! Magnificent. (Tragically, an artwork credit once again eludes me.)

Given that this is a reprint of an American novel clearly modelled on the success of ‘Jaws’, I can’t get over the sheer gall of declaring it to be “in the tradition of ‘Night of the Crabs’”, given that NEL first published the latter book - by Shropshire-based author and rarely acknowledged BITR hero Guy N. Smith – in 1976, the same year that Belmont Tower released ‘Croc’ in the U.S. I mean, I don’t have the actual months of publication to hand, but that “tradition” must have taken root pretty damn quickly on both sides of the Atlantic, I suppose..?

Recent Horror Viewing # 1: The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983)

For no particular reason, I began 2019 by revisiting two arty, New York-set vampire films, both of which faced accusations of insufferable pretention upon their initial release.

Abel Ferrara’s ‘The Addiction’ (1995) was staple viewing for me back in my student days, on recorded-off-TV VHS, and, returning to it for the first time in nearly two decades, it certainly still has its moments (on a purely visual level, it’s great). As much as I generally love Ferrara’s work though, I confess that I now found the film’s sophomoric philosophical musings and confused religious / literary symbolism to be, well… insufferably pretentious, to be honest.

Tony Scott’s ‘The Hunger’, on the other hand, I recall watching on TV way back when and dismissing as insufferably pretentious. I’ve not really given it much thought since to be honest, but, returning to it last month with my critical faculties properly engaged, it actually impressed me a great deal.

True, Scott’s self-conscious, commercial / music video inspired directorial style is so overbearing that at times it obscures comprehension of the linear narrative (a cardinal sin in American cinema, then as now), but whilst it’s probably fair to label the film “style over content”, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any content. On the contrary, ‘The Hunger’s clipped, ecumenical narrative – extracted by screenwriters Ivan Davis and Michael Thomas from its unlikely origins in a novel by future UFO abduction kingpin Whitley Strieber - delivers a singularly affecting variation on the usual vampire mythos.

Presenting a considerably more mature and downbeat take on the subject than horror movies generally dare to hit us with, ‘The Hunger’ largely bypasses the familiar analogues of drug addiction, sexual desire and class conflict, instead using the prism of vampirism to explore issues of aging, mortality and marital fidelity. So, not exactly an easy sell for the youth-orientated horror market, any more than it was for my young self when I watched it on TV all those years ago.

As the film progresses, we gather that Catherine Deneuve’s character – currently named ‘Miriam Blaylock’ – has been walking the earth as an immortal since the time of the Pharaohs. Through flashback, we learn that her husband John (David Bowie) has been sharing her vampiric life with her since some point in the 18th century. Now however, John is dying – his body is suddenly aging at an accelerating rate, adding years, then decades, to his appearance each day.

We are never offered any explanation as to why this is happening - just as we are so often denied an explanation when our loved ones suddenly leave us in real life - but we know that it is not the first time it has happened. Like some gothic mad scientist, Miriam keeps a darkened room in the attic of her Manhattan mansion house, full of dusty old coffins containing the remnants of her former lovers. They are not dead though, to be clear – their spirits, being technically immortal, live on, feeling their mortal bodies decay alongside the wood that surrounds them, and hearing Miriam muttering about how much she still loves them, when she occasionally deigns to visit.

Because, that’s the most terrible thing of all, really. Miriam isn’t some femme fatale or heartless monster, seducing men and women for the sake of her own pleasure and callously abandoning them to this fate-worse-than-death. Seemingly afflicted with an almost childlike need to share her life with someone (and, no doubt, a terrible fear of loneliness), she falls for each of her partners with the earnest devotion of a first love, promising them a life of eternal happiness together. As she tells John, each time, she hopes that this aging thing won’t happen, or that she’ll at least be allowed a little bit longer than last time before it takes hold – but, sooner or later, they always succumb.

I mean… my god. In a sense, it’s just as well Scott goes so completely overboard with the film’s visuals, simply because they help to distract from the fact that this is just about the most comprehensively depressing story I’ve ever seen played out in the realm of fantastic cinema.

If you were feeling generous, you could perhaps argue that the director’s oneiric palette of diffuse blue and golden lighting, drifting smoke and billowing curtains (yes, there are pigeons), together with the film’s languorous, narcotic pacing and jagged, dissociative editing patterns, all serve to reflect the heightened sensory perceptions experienced by the vampire characters.

A stretch perhaps, but, whichever way you choose to look at it, Scott’s approach certainly succeeds in lending ‘The Hunger’ a “European feel”, in keeping with the personas of its French and British stars, allowing it to veer closer to the ‘bande dessinée’ aesthetic embraced by French cinema in the 1980s or, slightly closer to home, the narcoleptic fever dreams of Harry Kumel’s ‘Daughters of Darkness’ or Jess Franco’s Doriana Gray, than to anything one might reasonably have expected of a 1983 American studio movie.

The film’s notoriously disorientating opening sequence – in which footage of Bauhaus performing ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ on a fenced off nightclub stage is aggressively intercut with shrieking, test lab monkeys and a bloodily erotic vampire feeding frenzy – is an example of strobe-blasted New Wave psychedelia as uncompromising as anything found in Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky, setting the tone for a movie in which it feels as if functional exposition has been ditched at every turn in favour of diversions into shamelessly indulgent audio-visual reverie.

I mean, I’m not really sure why we later need to see Bowie’s character descend to some kind of cavernous subterranean ballroom to attack and then pointedly not drink the blood of some guy who appears to be developing an interpretive rollerskating routine to the accompaniment of Iggy Pop’s exquisitely sinister ‘Fun Time’ (Bowie’s suggestion for the soundtrack, no doubt), but, all is forgiven when we notice that the Ankh-shaped dagger slashes the victim’s throat at the exact moment Iggy drawls, “last night I was down in the lab / with Dracula and his crew”. (For a film that famously never deigns to use the word ‘vampire’, ‘The Hunger’ certainly makes up for it with the winks and nods in its musical selections.)(1)

In fact, now that I come to think about it, I like the way that the film begins to establish a musical counterpoint each of the different time periods within which the characters originate. Whilst the frantic art-rock of Bauhaus and Iggy becomes associated with contemporary New York and the grim scientific enquiry of Susan Sarandon’s sleep deprivation experiments, the Blaylock’s home life is soundtracked by the austere classical music (a Schubert piano trio) that they play alongside their teenage neighbour. Providing some of the film’s calmest and most beautiful moments, these musical recitals must represent the good ol’ days for Bowie’s 200-year-old European gentleman.

(It’s a shame I think that the film fails to complete the full circle in this regard, as I would have loved to have heard Deneuve bust out with some long, lost refrain from the ancient banks of the Nile or something – perhaps during her tryst with Sarandon in the final act?)

Beyond all of ‘The Hunger’s elegiac, urban gothic grandeur though, what really makes it work for me I think is the basic, unavoidable humanity of its characters. Though John and Miriam may play the part of lofty, aesthete immortals (a necessary coping mechanism perhaps when one needs to regularly feast upon human blood), when the chips are down, they are just as hopeless and confused as the rest of us.

The sequence of events that leads them to cross paths with Sarandon’s character – seeing a doctor with some crazy ideas interviewed on TV, buying her book and badgering her for an appointment at her clinic – mirrors a pattern of desperation familiar to any number of couples trying to find a magical escape from a terminal diagnosis, as, in a sense, does Miriam’s pathological need to immediately find a new partner to ease her loneliness, forcing herself to forget the awful fate she will eventually end up consigning them to.

True, few of us keep our decaying former partners locked in coffins in the attic, or drink our neighbours’ blood in an effort to regain our youth, but the emotional trajectories being played out within this hyper-stylised world feel painfully authentic.

It’s curious to reflect that, had the late Tony Scott left the film industry immediately after directing ‘The Hunger’, he might be remembered today as some daring, wildcard auteur, rather than, well… let’s just summon the image of a grinning Tom Cruise striding towards us in a bomber jacket whilst Kenny Loggins plays and leave it at that, shall we? [Shudder.]

In fact, with thirty plus years hindsight, ‘The Hunger’ stands out as one of those totally inexplicable one-offs that causes film fans to stop and wonder where the hell it’s evident artistry originated from. I mean, you’ve got a notoriously tasteless director, a trashy doorstop horror source novel, a not-insubstantial Hollywood budget and a studio demanding results. I don’t want to sound like too much of a snob here, but the question needs to be asked: what went right?

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(1) Going totally off-topic for a while, I’ve always been fascinated by that particular lyric in ‘Fun Time’. It’s just such a weird non-sequitur. Was Iggy making a coded reference to some druggy associates of his in Berlin’s underground scene, or was he just responding to the track’s sinister vibe by dredging up some garbled references to Universal horror movies? Who knows…