Noir Diary # 13 / Thoughts on… Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

I.

Ever since I decided to start writing up my viewings of ‘40s/’50s Film Noir a couple of years ago, I’ve found myself bedevilled by the question of where, precisely, the boundaries of ‘noir’ lie. It’s an issue I’ve wrestled with to some extent in pretty much every one of these Noir Diary posts to date, and, with every critic, fan, reference book and blu-ray label on earth drawing their preferred demarcation line somewhere entirely different from all the others, it is not a debate which seems liable to be happily resolved any time soon.

In trying to find a workable way to define ‘noir’ therefore, my current thinking is that, though we may treat it as such for the sake of convenience, noir is not a genre, in the conventional sense of the term. In some ways, this is a pretty obvious point to make - after all, no one in the USA prior to about 1975 ever sat down and said “I’m gonna make a film noir” - but I think it bears repeating.

Instead, I believe noir can probably be best understood as an ineffable essence - a kind of aesthetic virus, if you will - which infects a wide swathe of cinema and literature to a greater or lesser degree. As irreducibly ‘noir’ as the canonical classics of the form may seem, it’s worth remembering that they all simultaneously belong to other genres as well. To the people who wrote and directed them, the 40s/50s films we now categorise as noir were gangster movies, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, murder mysteries, or, in this case, even a quote-unquote ‘women’s picture’.

The germ of what we now call ‘noir’ is something which crept into them from outside, changing and perverting the material it infected; eating away moral clarity, tilting camera set ups and dimming the lights like some celluloid Dutch elm disease. And, like everyone’s favourite virus here in the second decade of the 21st century, the effects of this bug were varied and unpredictable in the extreme.

Some films emerged so slathered in the thematics and visuals of noir than their root genre almost shrivels up and dies; for others, noir simply hangs in the background, barely perceptible, like some eerie seed of doubt. Then, there are movies in which the noir is spread unevenly - confined to certain scenes or sub-plots, or hitting full strength in some reels whilst completely disappearing from others. In spite of its storied position in the noir canon, ‘Mildred Pierce’ fits perfectly into this latter category.

II. 

Considered as a standalone short film, opening fifteen minutes of ‘Mildred Pierce’ are as vivid and intoxicating an invocation of the 1940s So-Cal noir aesthetic as has ever been conjured before the cameras.

Straight out of the opening credits, the sound of six gunshots is foleyed over an exterior shot of a luxurious yet lonely Malibu beach house with a shiny black sedan parked outside. Cut to the interior, where a man in formal dress spins to face the camera, clutching his chest. He just has time to gasp the name of the movie’s titular heroine(?) before he hits the floor, as inert as the remains of the chic standing lamp he pulled down with him.

Cut to a breath-taking crane-shot of (a studio recreation of) a rain-sodden Santa Monica seafront, water gleaming on the wooden boardwalk in the light of neon hoardings for bars and seafood restaurants as the unmistakable figure of Joan Crawford - looking like a Cossack officer in her wide-shouldered fur coat and hat - strides away from us toward the pier. 

As she stares at the black waves below, her contemplation is broken by the sound of a beat cop’s baton tapping on the iron railings. The first words spoken in the film if we discount the murder victim’s final utterance, the cop’s ensuing lines (“if you take a swim, I’ve gotta take a swim. Is that fair? Because you feel like killing yourself, I gotta get pneumonia?”) give us a brilliant example of the approach to dialogue which will remain consistent throughout the film. Most readily attributable to sole credited screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, these lines are simple and to the point, lacking the literary self-consciousness of many post-war noirs, but are nonetheless attention-grabbing, memorable and devoid of cliché. (1)

(It is only on repeat viewings that we might note that, a few years prior to this in the film’s chronology, Mildred’s beloved younger daughter did indeed die from pneumonia after “taking a swim”, instigating a fatal shift in her mother’s psychological make-up.)

Anyway, the cop’s well-chosen words seem to do the trick, turning Mildred (for of course it is she) away from her watery grave and pointing her in the direction of a loud, claustrophobic seafront bar, where she immediately falls in with the lecherous, fast-talking Wally Fay (Jack Carson), an old friend who seemingly owns the joint. Clearly an inveterate hustler, Wally is suspicious when Mildred - who, we are given to understand, has routinely rejected his crude advances since time immemorial - invites him back to her pad for a quiet drink.

Mildred is clearly in an unsettled state of mind, but, like every noir fall guy, Wally prides himself on keeping his eye on the prize, never looking a gift horse in the mouth, etc etc. So, before we know it, he’s propping up the sleek, chromium bar back at that accursed beach house, boastfully bantering to himself, as Mildred slips out, ostensibly to change, and locks the door behind her.

By the time he finds the corpse, it’s too late. Careening around the increasingly labyrinthine beach house, Wally ascends winding, disorientating flights of stairs, dense lattices of shadow thrown by the house’s baroque / art deco accoutrements hemming him in from all sides, as he too cries Mildred’s name.

Photography by Ernest Haller, whose CV includes ‘Gone With The Wind’, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and 183 other top-flight flicks, and art direction from Curtiz’s regular collaborator Anton Grot (also see: Doctor X), are, of course, fiendishly superb here, briefly bringing a touch of Orwellian nightmare sci-fi to proceedings.

Eventually making his exit by crashing through the French windows, Wally briefly staggers across the sand - inevitably reminding us of the unforgettable finale to Robert Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ a decade later - before he is frozen in the beam of a searchlight, trained on him from the road above by the cops Mildred presumably called.

Soon regaining his wise-cracking composure once he’s back amongst other men, he tells them, “you know, this is a pretty big night for you guys; yeah, lots of excitement - there’s a stiff in there”. “Izzat so? And I suppose you were running right down to the station to report it?” retorts the younger cop, who’s clearly got Wally’s number.

Amazing. Just amazing. Really, if you’re in search of the condensed essence of ‘noir’, it doesn’t get much better than that my friends.

The subsequent scenes, in which Mildred is picked up from the opulent mansion she apparently shares with her adult daughter and informed that her husband(!) has been murdered, are equally great. The limbo-like inertia of the police squad-room - where thick-necked cops sit around, smoking, eating sandwiches or desultorily typing up their nightly reports as Mildred is forced to sit amongst them in her Cossack finery, awaiting the attention of the investigating officer, is brilliantly conveyed. (“Would you like a paper, lady?” some toad-like brute asks her, as if the wife of a murder victim might want to catch up on the sports pages or something.)

As she is eventually ushered into the strangely inviting environs of the interrogation room (incongruously low-lit, as if by firelight) and disconcerted by the smooth, logical and ingratiating tone taken by the detective within (“even his more courteous, somewhat friendlier types gave one pause for concern,” begins the IMDB bio of actor Moroni Elson), we know we’re sliding headlong toward extended flashback territory, as Mildred is coerced into recounting her sorry tale.

Even as we cross that one off our “Film Noir signifiers” bingo card however, first-time viewers expecting to file this one alongside Double Indemnity and ‘The Big Sleep’ are liable to be taken aback by the extent to which the film takes a stylistic handbrake turn as soon as the fairy-dust of noir glamour disappears in the flash of a back-in-time dissolve, leaving us adrift in the flat, sit-com greyscale of the (then novel) surroundings of pre-fab suburbia, where a somewhat fresher-faced Mildred Pierce exchanges her furs for apron and oven gloves, thoroughly immersed in the drudgery of domestic routine.

III. 

When I first watched ‘Mildred Pierce’, around twenty years ago(!) at this point, I didn’t get it. I was in the process of discovering Film Noir for the first time via a Film Studies module I was taking in college, and as such, my expectations of the “genre” chiefly revolved around gun-toting gangsters, scummy tenement apartments, crumpled fedoras and weary P.I.s striking matches on their unshaven jaws.

By failing to deliver on these hallowed signifiers of the hard-boiled idiom, ‘Mildred..’ fell flat for my younger, dumber self. I mean, not only does it feature only a single murder, which we see in the opening minute, but it then has the audacity to follow the day-to-day travails of somebody’s freakin’ mother - and like, who’s got time for that, right?!

Returning to the film as a respectable, wage-earning adult however, greater life experience and (I would like to think) more mature tastes have allowed me to engage far more deeply with the tale being told during the - entirely noir-free - central hour of their movie’s run-time.

Admittedly, I’ve not been through a painful divorce, raised a hateful harridan of a daughter or gone into the restaurant business during the interim, but what can I say? I suppose I can now at least relate to such quintessentially ‘grown-up’ concerns, meaning that, when Mildred’s extended confession begins, I no longer tune out.

At 114 minutes, ‘Mildred Pierce’ is a long film for its era, and it packs a hell of a lot into that run-time. Full of ostensibly repetitious character encounters, melodramatic contrivances and mountains of detail concerning the titular heroine’s property deals, legal transactions and business plans, this material could, in clumsier hands, have become a colossal bore. Indeed, one suspects that it is only the prestige Curtiz was still enjoying a few years downstream from the success of ‘Casablanca’ that prevented Warner Bros from scything through the screenplay in no uncertain terms.

But, thank god, they didn’t. And at the risk of stating the obvious here, ‘Mildred Pierce’s final cut is a fast-moving, thoroughly engrossing, friction-free joy to sit through - an example of ‘40s Hollywood artistry raised to its absolute zenith.

Always a gifted director, Curtiz brings both a steady hand and an unparalleled mastery of visual storytelling to proceedings, whilst MacDougall’s writing is, as mentioned, exceptional. Haller, Grot, editor David Weisbart and composer Max Steiner are also all at the top of their game, and in front of the camera, Crawford is - of course - magnificent, whilst the rest of cast is packed out with carefully chosen, lesser-known players who inhabit their roles just perfectly.

Basically - this crew could have made a film about the history of Battenberg cake and it would have been worth watching, so seeing them take on an inspired adaptation of a second tier James M. Cain novel is just dandy, thank you very much.

IV. 

The nebulous concept of the ‘women’s picture’ represents a distinct category within studio era Hollywood filmmaking - one which, predictably enough, been largely overlooked by the male-dominated critical / Film Studies establishment.

Being just as in thrall to the whims of said establishment as anyone else, I’m not really sufficiently familiar with the form to judge how indicative ‘Mildred Pierce’ is of its overall conventions, but certainly one suspects that many (now largely forgotten) movies aimed at female audiences must surely have followed the same basic trajectory seen in the film’s central hour; a steadfast, hard working wife/mother overcomes the obstacles life throws at her, negotiates her relationships with men, fights her corner in assorted melodramatic conflicts and misunderstandings, and so forth.

The big difference of course is that, in the regular run of things, one supposes that these stories would most likely have ended with their heroine finding true (legally sanctioned) love, securing a bright future for herself and her children, etc etc…. which is where the shadow of our old friend ‘noir’ begins to creep in once again.

One of the masterstrokes of ‘Mildred Pierce’ is the complex characterisation of the three men who play a role in its heroine’s life. Though all of them are eventually found severely wanting on the scales of the film’s moral schema, they are all somewhat fascinating characters in their own right, and, crucially, none of them are portrayed as entirely irredeemable. This adds a note of moral ambiguity to proceedings which takes us beyond the realm of boilerplate melodrama, even as Mildred is weeping into her oven gloves in her suburban kitchen as first husband Bert (Bruce Bennett) walks out on her.

Openly conducting an affair with the oft-mentioned “Mrs Beiderhoff”, Bert Pierce is initially depicted as a cruel and gloomy sad-sack who refuses to acknowledge his own culpability for the failure of the couple’s marriage. But as the film goes on, and the machinations of the plotting become more complex, he emerges as something of a paragon of plain-spoken honesty, offering Mildred his heartfelt apologies and best wishes when she proves him wrong by achieving success on her own terms, and attempting - in a characteristically vague sort of way - to protect her from the sharks who are circling.

Significantly, Bert is also the only character in the movie who is not entirely fixated on making money. Unemployed when the flashback segment of the movie begins, he remains glum, dishevelled and content with with relatively lowly position in the economic hierarchy. Even after a brief bit of exposition informs us that he has eventually found work in (where else) the aerospace industry, he remains uninterested, it seems, in signing up to the crazed pursuit of the dollar which motivates the rest of the cast.

Framed more-or-less as Bert’s polar opposite meanwhile, the aforementioned Wally Fay is a ruthless opportunist, a loud-mouthed braggart and a shameless lecher who, as he repeatedly demonstrates, is willing to throw his business partners under a bus at a moment’s notice in pursuit of his own interests. But, despite all this, his fondness for Mildred seems genuine, he works hard to help make her business a success, and despite his boorish conduct, he never forces himself upon the female characters in the movie after they’ve rejected his overtly cartoonish advances.

Armoured against ethical doubts by the same spiel employed by carpet-baggers and capitalist ultras to this day (hey, it’s just good business, nothin’ personal, etc), against all the odds, we kind of end up liking the guy. There are even moments here when, fleetingly, Mildred and Wally seem to be operating as a pretty tight team - a kind of proto-power couple almost - until his roving eye for some amoral side deals inevitably gets the better of him.

Which just leaves the most fascinating gentleman of all, Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Gifted with a name worthy of an Iberian dragon-slayer, this fellow has sometimes been likened by critics to a gender-reversed femme fatale (homme fatale?), but personally I’m not sure that glove really fits.

In stark contrast to the raw sexual magnetism generally assigned to yr average ‘femme fatale’ in fact, the root of Monte’s seductive charms remains rather elusive. With his receding hairline, cleft chin and skinny build, Scott leaves us with the impression that Joan Crawford could probably break him over her knee and send his remains wafting away on the ocean breeze, leaving him a far weaker, more compromised, figure than the ‘black widows’ who routinely preyed upon the protagonists of male-orientated noir.

Given that Beragon is also stony broke - and everyone in the movie seems to know it - it is presumably only his intangible aura of old world, aristocratic glamour which keeps a steady stream of debutantes and wealthy widows heading back to his heavily-mortgaged beach house. (Though the script is reluctant to address Beragon’s promiscuity directly, references to his notoriety in the ‘society pages’ and a running gag about the multiple bathing costumes he keeps on hand for his many ‘sisters’ make the point clearly enough.)

And, in good time, we get a first-hand taste of his talents too, as, thanks to Curtiz’s proven talent for handling romantic material, the scene in which Monte eventually gets Mildred alone in his ‘lair’ zings with more of a sense of inter-personal chemistry and genuine human warmth than the rest of the movie put together… even as bad news and piled up IOUs combine to douse their passion more or less immediately.

Between them, these three fatally-flawed suitors then add up to far more than mere shooting gallery ducks for Crawford’s world-beating super-woman to knock down, allowing the film to chart a surprisingly complex (if resolutely cynical) cross-section of the relationships between the sexes in the competitive, hot-house environment of post-war America. (2)

As Mildred’s loyal right-hand-woman Ida (brilliantly played by a scene-stealing Eve Arden) remarks at one point as the pair raise a lunch-time glass of bourbon, effectively cutting the crap and compressing a fair share of the complex machinations of the film’s plotting into a single sentence: “to the men we’ve loved… the stinkers”.

V. 

Though the relentless fixation on acquiring wealth which triggers the bulk of the conflict within the script could lead some to label ‘Mildred Pierce’ an ‘anti-capitalist’ film, several factors - not least the movie’s refusal to elevate Bert Pierce to a higher plain for his prioritising of emotional honesty over material gain - suggest that a slightly different moral dynamic is actually at work here.

If anything, the film functions primarily as a kind of unabashed celebration of the Protestant Work Ethic, promoting hard graft as the engine through which the put-upon proletariat can improve themselves and take revenge upon their social ‘betters’; a theme which I assume must go all the way back to Cain’s source novel, as such messages were often close to the writer’s heart, in spite of the nihilistic air which defines his best-known material.

Thus Mildred becomes an almost Christ-like figure for those who strive to better themselves and their families through hard work - an avatar perhaps for the overlooked female labour force brought to the fore during WWII - whilst the scenes demonstrating the success of her restaurant chain convey the sheer exhilaration of post-war American prosperity better than anything else in the era’s movies; a seething world of polished chromium, gleaming glass, imitation leather and bubbling grease, every inch of space filled by voluminous, big-spending customers whose gigantic automobiles idle outside, ready to send them roaring off to the next fashionable destination, amid the not-yet-polluted air of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Meanwhile, true evil within the film’s moral schema is reserved for those refined, Luciferian layabouts - as represented by the tag team of Monte Beragon and Mildred’s spoiled elder daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) - who scrounge their living off the hard work of others whilst mocking the honest toil which underpins their wasteful, dissolute lifestyles.

Stretching right back across the Atlantic and down through the annals of antiquity, this particular class-based dynamic can be traced through the whole deathless lineage of Europe’s debauched aristocracy, from the fall of Rome to the French and Russian revolutions, to the gout-addled, rotten borough squires of British popular fiction (an archetype splendidly lampooned by Charles Laughton in ‘Jamaica Inn’ (1939)), and, more pertinently, the related lineage of ‘Jane Eyre’-derived gothic heartthrobs who were busy menacing and abusing their pure, proletarian maidens in vast swathes of the celluloid which followed in the wake of that rather more celebrated Hitchcock/Du Maurier joint, 1940’s ‘Rebecca’. (3)

It is in in imitation of this legion of sub-Byronic cads - along with a touch perhaps of the aristocratic affectations of the silent era Hollywood elite - that Monte Beragon was presumably moulded, and in this sense, ‘Mildred Pierce’ becomes less of an anti-capitalist parable and more of an all-American class war diatribe, in which evil and corruption ultimately derive, not from capital itself, but from snobbery and laziness, from refined manners, bohemian self-indulgence and any remaining hint of old world entitlement.

A very different prospect from the kind of native-born, inherently American, corruption routinely unpacked in the literary noir of Chandler and Hammett… but, having said that, the rot lurking at the heart of the American dream can certainly be seen elsewhere in the film - if not in the figure of the foreign-coded Monte, then certainly in that of his protégé, and the movie’s ultimate villain, Veda.

VI. 

If I suggested above that man trouble accounts for a fair share of Mildred’s woes, it is the remainder which ends up being both far more significant and far more uncomfortable, ultimately swinging the picture firmly in the direction of Film Noir - and for better or for worse, it’s a very female pile o’ trouble indeed.

In general, I try not to make a habit of hurling misogynist insults at the screen whilst watching films, but if you can get through the first half of ‘Mildred Pierce’ without yelling “you BITCH” in the general direction of Ann Blyth’s Veda, well, your olde world manners must be more refined than my own, let’s put it that way.

Arguably the most memorable character in a film packed full of memorable characters, Veda functions as a magnet for audience hatred right from the outset. A full-on, ‘Bad Seed’-level monster whilst playing younger in her earlier scenes, the toxic snobbery and insincerity which seems to have taken possession of her - traits not obviously inherited from either of her parents - seems so inexplicable, it almost pushes the movie in the direction of horror. (Certainly, it’s difficult to imagine that the producers of the aforementioned 1956 film didn’t have Veda in mind to some extent.)

Beyond mere vindictive, bad-kid nastiness though, there is something so perversely vile, so cruelly idiotic, about the idea of a child attacking her own mother for her perceived low class breeding (“..you never talk about your people, or where you came from, do you mother?”), that Crawford’s inchoate reaction to her daughter’s behaviour can’t help but mirror our own.

In a more conventional, more sentimental story, it would be easy to imagine Veda learning the error of her ways as she grows up, redeeming herself as time goes by and becoming less of a conceited, duplicitous cow as a result. But - thankfully - that’s not the film we’re watching here. The essence of ‘noir’ has sunk deep into the bones of ‘Mildred Pierce’.

And so, under the questionable tutelage of Monte Beragon and Wally Fay, the teenage Veda is soon a fully signed up apprentice femme fatale - a Phyllis Dietrichson or Cora Smith on training wheels, complete with a side-gig as a night club bawler (clearly the money mummy spent on all those music lessons didn’t go to waste) and the future of at least one promising young man already crushed beneath her wheels.

There is a sense here that we’re supposed to see Mildred’s parenting - spoiling her daughter with gifts and luxuries whilst failing to put the time aside to actually build a relationship with her - as being somehow responsible for Veda’s beastly conduct, but to be honest, this intended bromide on child-raising is one element of the screenplay which never quite lands, which is perhaps for the best.

Better by far I think to just see Veda as some Satanic anomaly - a force of nature capable of bringing down her indomitable mother the way no mere man ever could. And indeed, it is the warped, rather obsessional nature of this mother / daughter relationship which really steers the movie back toward darkest noir territory during its final act.

As has often been noted, once Veda has flown what’s left of the family coop, Mildred - perhaps still mourning the tragic loss of ‘good’ daughter Kay - dotes on her as if she were a lost lover rather than an errant daughter, going to what we in the audience recognise as absurd, self-destructive extremes to try to win back her tarnished “love”.

Things proceed to become outright queasy, as the sequences depicting the eventual reunion of mother and daughter are shot more like passionate love scenes than parent/child interactions. There is some freaky, co-dependant kind of shit going on between these two we realise, altogether too late, and the result is… pretty weird, to be honest, bringing the sense of intoxicating gothic perversity which has been lurking deep beneath the surface of his story gasping, finally to the surface.

In cultural / symbolic terms, the extent to which Veda dominates the action in ‘Mildred Pierce’s second half causes the film to sometimes plays more like a prequel / precursor to the full-blooded Film Noir tradition than a fully fledged example of it. Through no fault of her own (?), Joan Crawford’s paragon of hard-working American motherhood, pursuing the American dream for all it’s worth, has given birth to a witch the boys back in Salem never dreamed of, ready to scour the underbelly of her mother’s rotten dream, devouring its losers and rejects with a relentless cruelty.

As critics Molly Haskell and Robert Polito joke in the discussion included as an extra on Criterion’s blu-ray and DVD editions of ‘Mildred Pierce’, you just know, when the cops lead Veda away to the cells at the film’s conclusion, that she’ll be running that damn prison in a couple of weeks.

And as soon as she gets out, well… she’s gonna be heading straight for the nearest Robert Mithum or Fred McMurray, and the whole terrible cycle begins a-new; evil slouching toward Malibu to be born.

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(1) Although Ranald MacDougall takes the sole on-screen credit for ‘Mildred Pierce’s script, and I’ve assigned authorship to him in this post just to make everybody’s life a little easier, authorship of the screenplay is, as with most studio era movies, highly contested.

So - deep breath. First off, Warner Bros apparently commissioned no less than eight writers to produce treatments based on Cain’s novel (including an unused draft from William Faulkner), making it unlikely that everything except MacDougall’s effort went straight in the trash. Secondly, quoth IMDB trivia; “writer Catherine Turney [who wrote a number so Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis pictures at around this time] was credited on some release prints, but chose to have her name removed.” Thirdly, producer Jack Wald (who instigated the project) has taken credit for devising the opening sequence and the murder-based flashback structure. And finally, also from an anonymous posting on IMDB: “due to script problems, some of the film was improvised by the actors together with Michael Curtiz”! So in conclusion: who the hell knows who wrote this thing.

(I will at least say though that, if that last claim is to be believed, the cast must really have been improvising at the top of their game, because, as mentioned, the dialogue in ‘Mildred Pierce’ is consistently excellent, and seems (to my mind at least) to suggest the work of a single authorial voice.)

(2) As an aside, it’s interesting to note that, despite it being filmed whilst WWII was still being fought, the script for ‘Mildred Pierce’ does not address the war, or its potential effect on the lives of the characters, in any way whatsoever. Instead, the film seems to take place during the kind of exciting economic ‘boom’ period we’d retrospectively tend to associate with the recovery of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s - a fact apparently not lost on Warner Bros, who seem to have deliberately delayed the film’s release until October 1945, when the war was safely in the rear view mirror.

(3) Seriously, it seems like you couldn’t hurl a brick in ‘40s Hollywood without hitting a few of these ‘Rebecca’-type gothic romance movies. Just off the top of my head, you’ve got ‘Dragonwyck’ (1946), ‘Secret Beyond The Door’ (1947), ‘The Spiral Staircase’ (1946), ‘Jane Eyre’ (1943), ‘My Name is Julia Ross’ (1945), ‘Gone to Earth’ (1951)…. and no doubt many others which I’ve not bothered to watch, as I don’t particularly seek these things out.

Noir Diary # 10: Storm Fear (Cornel Wilde, 1955)

The directorial debut of tormented-leading-man turned tough-guy-auteur Cornel Wilde, ‘Storm Fear’ (adapted from a book of the same name by the otherwise little-known Clinton Seeley) is to some extent a low rent, ‘50s riff on the old ‘Key Largo’ scenario, with added familial melodrama, and a rural, snowbound location reminiscent of Nicholas Ray & Ida Lupino’s ‘On Dangerous Ground’ (1953).

I’ll try to avoid delving too far into the horrendously convoluted inter-character plotting, but the basic gist here is that hard-luck bank robber Charlie Blake (Wilde) and his two surviving accomplices (Steven Hill and Lee Grant as a comically loathsome dead-beat criminal couple) drop in unexpectedly on the isolated homestead occupied by Charlie’s older brother Frank (Dan Duryea), a destitute, seemingly TB-afflicted writer, his wife and Charlie’s former lover Eizabeth (Wilde’s real life partner and frequent co-star Jean Wallace), and their sad-eyed twelve-year-old kid (David Stollery), who essentially becomes the film’s protagonist.

Naturally, the crooks are planning to hide out overnight following a botched heist which has left two men dead – Charlie has an infected bullet wound in his leg, thus allowing Wilde to foreground his masculine virility by playing the entire movie in various degrees of sweaty, gritted teeth pain – and naturally, they’re none too happy when a sudden blizzard appears to leave them stuck with the family for the duration, as the municipal snow-ploughs and police dragnet move ever closer.

For the first half of the movie, it’s hot and cold running melodrama, as the six characters, each with their own grievances and personal agendas, bounce off each other on the cramped sets representing the Blake homestead. There is plenty of self-justifying, chest-beating (and generally poorly composed) speechifying, much hissed unpacking of family secrets, some waving around of guns, and a great deal of exhausted, futile grappling between the men.

The most surprising aspect of the drama arises from the fact that, whilst we might naturally be expected to sympathise with the family being subjected to this home invasion scenario, the meek, semi-incapacitated father figure is actually portrayed as a bit of a dick. It’s interesting to see Duryea – who made his name playing sneering heels in ‘40s noirs (see ‘Scarlet Street’, ‘Black Angel’, ‘Criss Cross’ etc) – essaying a slightly different kind of flawed male here, as the spiteful, emasculated patriarch. (Ten years earlier, he would have been in Hill’s role for sure).

Acting coldly toward his wife and ‘son’ even before the intruders arrive, it’s later revealed that Frank shot the kid’s beloved dog simply because it was a gift from brother Charlie(!), whilst Wilde’s raw, alpha male charisma and affectation of paternal warmth meanwhile draws the sad-lad-in-search-of-a-dad toward him with a kind of irresistible, magnetic pull, even as he realises that his ‘uncle’ is clearly no good and a bad ‘un, who’s probably gonna get everybody killed, more than likely.

Hill and Grant meanwhile proceed to stir the pot, doing what hoodlums and low status nogoodniks have done throughout movie history, mixing genuine menace with just being really annoying. (As in much of Wilde’s later work, there’s a kind of puritanical sub-text running through the film suggesting that people who drink alcohol, smoke or get up late in the morning are inherently no damn good.)

One particularly cringe-worthy, seemingly improvised bit sees Grant’s Edna seemingly auditioning for Claire Trevor’s Oscar-winning part in the aforementioned ‘Key Largo’, singing along to the radio and reflecting on her long-gone days as a showgirl, in lieu of her character being given anything else to do, whilst Hill’s Benjie simply succeeds in being spectacularly dislikeable as the comically venal, simple-minded thug of the piece.

Meanwhile, Wallace, never the most gifted of actresses to be perfectly honest, dutifully tries to get on with her life of frontier wife drudgery whilst being bothered and harangued by no less than five needy males (if we count belatedly heroic handyman Dennis Weaver), her facial expressions running the gamut from ‘pained’ to ‘offended’ and back again with tedious regularity.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could handle ninety solid minutes of this, but thankfully things open up a bit in the second half of the picture, as the crooks set out to make their getaway, traipsing across the forbidding mountain pass which separates them from the nearest highway, wearing gigantic wicker ‘snow shoes’ and forcing the kid to accompany them as a kind of local tracker, showing them the way.

This kind of rugged, ‘survival against the odds’ stuff went on to become Wilde’s bread and butter in his later directorial career (which included such highlights as ‘The Naked Prey’ (1965) and ‘No Blade of Grass’ (1970)), and indeed, he manages to build quite a gritty and exciting little wilderness survival drama here, despite some all-too-obvious budgetary constraints, which sometimes give the impression that the desperate trekkers are merely schlepping their way up a single hillside behind the house. (Most of the exterior close-ups meanwhile seem to have been shot back at the studio with painted backdrops, which certainly doesn’t help.)

Nonetheless, things turn pretty nasty pretty quickly here, leading us to the film’s most purely nihilistic noir moment, as Charlie takes the decision to callously abandon Edna, who has broken her ankle after being pushed down a ravine by the thuggish Benjie. Throwing her share of the loot after her before they move on, her accomplices leave the now useless bank notes strewn around her prone, mink coat-clad body as she pleads for help. Pretty dark stuff, especially as Charlie drags the tearful kid off by the arm, immediately babbling away as he tries to rationalise his inhumane behaviour.

In fact, Charlie’s desperate attempts to try to justify his actions to his law-abiding family members make for probably the most consistently compelling aspect of the film’s scripting. “There was nothing else we could do”, “someone will find her, she’ll be ok”, “I never shot anybody,” he keeps repeating to himself, painfully aware that no one is buying it, and that the line separating his self-image of tarnished nobility from Benjie’s openly villainous, sewer-rat approach to life is wearing increasingly thin as their situation deteriorates.

In making ‘Storm Fear’, Wilde seems to have called in some fairly heavy favours. The photography of Paramount veteran Joseph LaShelle (‘Laura’ (1944), ‘Where The Sidewalk Ends’ (1950)) is impressive, if never stylised or expressionistic in the manner of his more classic noirs, and the equally effective musical score is provided by no less a personage than Elmer Bernstein, with both of these gentlemen’s contributions helping smooth the rough edges of Wilde’s characteristically workmanlike, point-and-shoot compositions and decidedly blunt approach to directing actors.

As with most of Wilde’s later productions, ‘Storm Fear’ is an interesting watch despite its flaws, and has the potential to linger long in the mind… if not necessarily always for the right reasons. The material is far too contrived and over the top for us to really take it seriously, but as usual, Wilde’s approach is too gruelling, sincerely intended and emotionally enervated for us to enjoy the unsavoury proceedings as mere pulp escapism either.

Further filtered through the director’s own strange set of bug-bears, vanities and recurring obsessions, the blatantly unsatisfactory ‘happy’ ending tacked onto the story’s bleakly inconclusive conclusion simply leaves us feeling… I don’t know… exhausted, and a bit seedy, perhaps? And what could possibly be a more ‘noir’ state of mind than that, I suppose.

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For such a low budget and generally un-beloved production, this movie sure ended up with a lot of different poster artwork.

Pre-War Thrills: The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)

A title card at the very start of Tod Browning’s ‘The Unknown’ informs us that, “this is a story they tell in Madrid… it’s a story they say is true”. I have no idea whether or not the genesis of ‘The Unknown’ actually lay in such folkloric roots (somehow I doubt it), but it wouldn’t seem an unreasonable assumption, given that, over ninety years later, the story Browning and Waldemar Young concocted here remains one of the most extraordinary tales ever put on screen. (1)

This is the kind of perfectly formed yarn – rich in unfeasibly circular dramatic ironies and almost unbearably bleak melodrama - that one could easily imagine enthralling audiences in pretty much any era or context, whether presented through the lips of some soused storyteller in a disreputable Castilian bar, dramatised for the Elizabethan stage… or indeed adapted into a motion picture.

Even if you’ve never seen ‘The Unknown’, if you’ve been reading around the subject of old movies or horror films for a few years, you probably will have encountered some writer or other gleefully summarising the film’s storyline, and thought to yourself, “wow, that sounds like one crazy movie, I should definitely track it down”, or words to that effect.

Indeed, such is the ingenuity of ‘The Unknown’s scenario that it is practically impossible to write about the film without immediately lapsing into ‘plot synopsis’ mode. Whilst I normally try to avoid this in my reviews, hearing the story of this one recounted never fails to make me happy, so in this case I’m more than happy to follow suit. (Perhaps I should have added “some chancer writing about movies on the internet” to my list above?)

So, settle in folks - it’s story time. (If you’d rather not have the plot details of a near century old movie spoiled for you, please skip to the end of the italics below.)

Alonzo (Lon Chaney Sr.) is an armless gypsy knife thrower employed by Zanzi’s Travelling Circus. As part of his act – memorably portrayed in the film’s opening scene – Alonzo uses his feet to hurl knives and fire bullets at the circus owner’s beautiful daughter Nanon (a twenty-one year old Joan Crawford). As is traditional, Nanon is tied to a wooden wheel for this performance, and Alonzo lets his projectiles pass so close to her body that that her dress is cut off, leaving her exposed in a delightful flapper-era bathing costume.

As it transpires, Alonzo is desperately in love with Nanon, making his feelings so plain that her father, Zanzi, is inspired to viciously beat him, insisting that he does not wish to see his daughter subject to the amorous intentions of a ‘freak’.

Nanon herself however sees things a little differently. Opening her heart to Alonzo, she confesses that, “..all my life men have tried to put their beastly hands on me... to paw over me. I have grown so that I shrink with fear when any man even touches me.”

As a result of this implied abuse in early life, Nanon has developed a pathological fear of men’s arms, and as such feels herself condemned to a life of loneliness. When Malabar (Norman Kerry), the circus’s lovably hapless strongman, tries to woo her (encouraged by Alonzo’s duplicitous, faux-brotherly advice), she flees from his muscular embrace as if he were a grotesque monster, subsequently weeping for her inability to accept his love.

“You are the only man I can come to without fear,” Nanon tells Alonzo, and, armed with this knowledge, you’d think our hero’s chances for romance would be looking pretty good… but unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as that.

You see, Alonzo does actually still have his arms, and furthermore, they’re still attached to him too. He keeps them hidden, tied across his torso in a constrictive leather corset - a deception he has devised in order to distract attention from his former (or perhaps continuing?) life as a thief, gangster and (so it is implied) a serial strangler. (2)

Alonzo’s only genuine physical deformity in fact is a vestigial second thumb on his left hand – an additional digit that would no doubt have brought a swift end to his strangling career, were it not for his armless disguise.

As Alonzo’s loyal dwarf servant Cojo (John George) points out to his master, the moment Nanon embraces him, she will feel the shape of his arms and learn his dark secret – a possibility rendered all the more disastrous by the fact that Alonzo has by this point throttled her father to death in order to stop him standing between them. (3)

As a result of this rash action, the circus has been forced to shut down by its deceased owner’s creditors, and, more pertinently, the police are leaving no stone unturned in their hunt for the mysterious killer with an extra thumb. (To add an extra frisson to the murder scene, poor Nanon actually sees the mutated fingers that put an end to her father through a caravan window, missing a fatal glimpse of Alonzo’s face by mere seconds.)

So, it’s quite a pickle for old Alonzo. He determines however that, whatever happens, he cannot live without Nanon’s love, and so resolves to take drastic action. Never a man to do things by half measures, he tracks down a crooked surgeon whom he had previously met through his contacts in the criminal underworld. By threatening to expose the doctor’s nefarious activities, Alonzo persuades him to carry out a fairly extreme form of elective surgery, the nature of which you can probably guess.

Whilst Alonzo is busy recuperating from this (no doubt pretty traumatic) operation however, Nanon and Malabor are left kicking their heels in the town in which the circus made its last stop, where the strongman is making plans for a spectacular new stage act.

In Alonzo’s absence, Nanon feels herself increasingly drawn to the blandly good-natured Malabar, to the extent that she eventually overcomes her revulsion toward his arms and succumbs to his naively chivalrous advances.

Falling head over heels, the couple vow to marry as soon as possible, but agree to put off the big day until their good friend Alonzo – whom they respectively regard as a protector and a kind of benevolent uncle figure, unaware of his inner torment – has returned from wherever he’s gone to, in order that he may share their happiness by witnessing their union.

[Dramatic pause.]

So yes -- you’d perhaps be forgiven for not feeling much sympathy for Alonzo up to this point, but… Jesus Christ, surely no one deserves a fate like this, even if it’s largely the result of his own cracked decision-making and generally nefarious behaviour. How many characters can you think of - outside perhaps of the realm of some particularly obscure and blood-thirsty ancient mythology – who have been driven to cut off their arms in the name of love, only to find themselves cuckolded?

As you might well have expected, the reunion between Alonzo and his friends is far from a happy one, and the lengths Browning goes to to draw out his protagonist’s gradual realisation of the awful truth still stands as one of cinema’s most excruciating demonstrations of emotional sadism.

But, I’ll leave my plot synopsising there for the moment, merely noting that, in case you were wondering how a story like this could possibly end, well… as it happens, Malabor’s new stage act involves him testing his strength by harnessing his arms to two horses galloping in opposite directions on mechanical treadmills. What would happen if something went wrong with the treadmills, Alonzo asks him. Why, my arms would be torn from their sockets, he cheerily responds. It’s all just too beautiful.

For those who have taken the time to approach Tod Browning’s work from an auteurist perspective, ‘The Unknown’ can’t help but stand out as something of a Rosetta Stone in his surviving catalogue, despite the truncated fifty minute run time of the surviving print.

With its lovingly realised circus milieu, its fascination with physical deformity, its bottomless reserves of melodramatic perversity and its deployment of enough overlapping layers of castration anxiety to give a convention of Freudians a collective migraine, this is about as thorough an exploration of what are generally considered the director’s ‘key themes’ as could possibly be wished for. (4)

Browning may never have been much celebrated as a cinematic stylist, but the surviving cut of ‘The Unknown’ is nonetheless a model of narrative efficiency, hitting each and every beat it needs to to tell this story well, with the director’s talent for ensuring his imagery hits hard when it needs to in full effect throughout.

As you’d expect given his background and recurrent interest in such subject matter, Browning has a wonderful feel for the romanticism of the gypsy travelling show setting (in particular, the male characters all look really f-ing cool in their wardrobe of paisley bandanas, gaucho riding gear, hoop earrings and wide black hats), and the mixture of set and matte painting that creates the opening establishing shot of the circus exterior is a very impressive bit of work (blink and you’ll miss it).

Elsewhere, the extremely high ceilinged, brightly lit operating theatre set makes for a striking contrast to the sawdust-floored rural environs of the rest of the picture, momentarily recalling the kind of sinister, modernist interiors filmmakers like Fritz Lang were cooking up on the other side of the Atlantic, and the staging of Malabar's big stage act during the finale is absolutely extraordinary.

Complete with the sight of a scantily-clad Crawford standing atop a podium, gleefully whipping the seemingly gigantic white horses (directly recalling Alonzo's earlier confession that “it was just something in [my heart] that stung like the lash of a whip” as he struggles to explain his extreme reaction to discovering she and Malabar are lovers), I think this would remain unrivalled as a deranged spectacle of implied S&M until Alejandro Jodorowsky took elements of this story to even wilder extremes in ‘Santa Sangre’ (1989).

There are a few eccentric stylistic choices elsewhere (the curious decision to shoot several scenes through what looks like sackcloth is often mentioned), but for the most part, the remainder of the film is very plainly presented. I’m pretty sure the camera remains static throughout, and likewise, the editing of the narrative is strictly linear in its presentation, with master shots, two shots, shot/reverse shots etc all handled strictly by the book.

Nonetheless though, this grounded/fixed perspective allows Browning’s close ups and tableaux to achieve an intensely vivid pictorial quality that is often captivating. Like good paintings, these shots carry within them a depth of feeling that heightens the film's emotional power immensely.

Such is the ingenuity of the story Browning and his collaborators have devised here, I’m tempted to say it would have been difficult for them to go wrong however they chose to frame the action, but perhaps even more crucial to the success ‘The Unknown’ is its casting.

Had merely adequate performers been cast in its central roles, it is likely ‘The Unknown’ would never have risen above the level of a particularly bizarre theatrical melodrama, forgotten by all but a handful of silent/pre-code era archivists and fanatics. With Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford on hand however, it’s a whole different story… and not merely on account of their (contemporary or subsequent) fame either.

Crawford’s performance, it must be said, is excellent. Such is the strength of her presence on screen that it feel entirely believable that a man of Alonzo’s wide and bitter experience should become obsessed with Nanon, even as her damaged, brittle mannerisms simultaneously provide a surprisingly raw portrayal of an abused/victimised woman for this era of cinema; “Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!” she exclaims in impotent fury after Malabar initially tries to embrace her.

And, speaking of Malabar, even Norman Kerry acquits himself well here, despite initially seeming lined up to be a complete waste of space. Blank-eyed, empty-headed and perpetually grinning, he provides a complete contrast to the ancient, deep red claret of Alonzo’s uniquely troubled character, making us feel our anti-hero’s humiliation all the more keenly once he discovers he has lost out in love to the human equivalent of an unflavoured biscuit.

Mainly though, we need to talk about Lon Chaney.

It may have become a bit of a truism to point out that silent film acting is a different beast from sound acting, but rarely has that point been more clearly demonstrated than by Chaney’s performance in ‘The Unknown’.

In a sound context, his facial gymnastics and heavily made up features would have been regarded as intolerably OTT, but, denied a voice, it is through these kind of gestures that silent characters gain live – and all the more so when they’re even denied the use of their arms for most of the picture. The way that Chaney methodically builds Alonzo up as a character, entirely through his facial tics and eye movements, his mode of dress, his sudden shivers and lunges, is absolutely remarkable. (5)

The figure of the “sympathetic monster” would of course go on to become a cornerstone of American horror cinema as it developed through the rest of the 20th century, but in ‘The Unknown’ Chaney delivers a very different, and considerably more challenging, recipient of our sympathies from the kind of sad-eyed, agency-fee automatons derived from the lineage of Conrad Veidt’s Cesare, Paul Wegener’s Golem and, eventually, Karloff’s monster and it’s descendants.

Unlike those critters, Alonzo is unambiguously a villain – one who neither seeks nor receives any pardon for his maleficence. A criminal, liar and murderer, he cheats, deceives and manipulates everyone he meets through the course of the film, including the woman he professes to love. He upturns the foundations of the essentially benign world in which the drama begins, brings doom upon his own head with admirable efficiency, and basically behaves in the most tyrannical manner imaginable. And yet…

Scanning reviews online, I have often seen ‘The Unknown’ described as a “classical tragedy”, but in reality Alonzo represents something closer to the opposite of a conventional tragic hero. Rather than noble character with one fatal flaw, Chaney presents Alonzo as a tangled mass of flaws and neuroses, from behind which a redeeming spirit of nobility somehow still shines, daring us, for want of a better word, to feel love for him, as well as pity.

It is possible that Vincent Van Gogh’s infamous sacrifice of his ear may to some extent have distantly inspired the story of ‘The Unknown’, and I would go so far as to say that Chaney imbues Alonzo with what I can only describe as an ‘artistic’ sensibility. We don’t doubt for a second the sincerity of Alonzo’s love for Nanon, even as we recognise that his ability to differentiate reality from fantasy hangs by the very thinnest of threads.

Rather than just an intimidating heavy, he serves as a rich, over-powering presence in the lives of the younger characters, giving generously of himself, in spite of the self-interested machinations cloud his honesty. He may, we swiftly learn, be more or less insane, but his is not the kind of insanity that can easily be written off, and his companionship with both Nanon and Cojo (even with Malabar) is seen to be real and compassionate, even as his conduct is shaded by a strain of misanthropy that we feel is birthed more from bitter experience than from mere ingrained nastiness. (“You are wise, Nanon”, he says early on the film when Crawford confesses her hatred of men’s touch, “always fear them, always hate them.”)

Chaney’s big moment of course is Alonzo’s post-amputation reunion with Nanon and Malabar. This takes place - where else - on the stage of a theatre, and, as noted, is handled by Browning as a scene of excruciating emotional torture, extended well beyond the point of audience discomfort.

Shock, frustration, sorrow, rage, menace, terror, hysteria, despair, self-hatred and all-out howling madness - all of these are powerfully felt as they shift, meld and mutate across Alonzo’s visage in what amounts to a harrowing tour de force of silent emotional devastation. It may seem melodramatic to speak of seeing a man's heart smashed into a million pieces live on screen, but you'll feel pretty sure you know what that looks like after watching Chaney here.

In fact, the only rationale I can think of for this film being named ‘The Unknown’ relates to the unimaginable combinations of errant emotions that Chaney manages to dredge up here, verging into states of being that remain entirely nameless, and concluding only when he works himself up to the point of seizure.

“I'm all right now,” an inter-title assigned to Alonzo reads just a few a few moments later, as he regains his composure, his mask back in place and his plan of vengeance already taking shape.

Before watching ‘The Unknown’, I’d always assumed Chaney’s “man of a thousand faces” legend was coined in reference to the effects he achieved with his famous make up box, but, from watching his performance here, it’s clear he could cycle through those faces live in front of the camera with the ease of a martial arts star demonstrating his/her training moves. It is an incredible sight to behold – perhaps the very zenith of a form of acting that would be rendered obsolete mere months after this film’s release.

I had been all set to herald Alonzo as the progenitor of his own lineage of doomed, sociopathic anti-heroes within horror cinema, but, to be honest, I can think of very few characters within the genre who actually lived up to the example Chaney sets here. Peter Lorre’s Dr Gogol in Mad Love perhaps comes closest, with Karloff’s Imhotep in ‘The Mummy’, Price’s Phibes and Usher, and perhaps an unusually affecting mad scientist turn here and there all lurking distantly in the background – but really, Alonzo the Armless stands alone.

We will never really know how Chaney might have adapted to the coming of sound, but, as far as America’s silent cinema goes, he remains a performer without peer, and ‘The Unknown’ is perhaps his strongest surviving vehicle. An unforgettable viewing experience, it is not so much ‘haunting’ in the genteel sense of the ghosts more commonly encountered in the era’s mystery stories, but a raw, emotional wound of a picture that lodges itself in your mind and refuses to leave you be, like a scab you just can’t help but scratch.

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(1) Browning and Young respectively take credit for “story” and “scenario”, whatever that’s supposed to mean, in addition to which we should also mention Joseph Farnham, whose work on the text for film’s inter-titles is wonderful. We should note at this point that various online sources claim that ‘The Unknown’ was adapted without credit from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1915 novel ‘K’. As I can’t find a detailed plot synopsis of the novel though, and certainly can’t be bothered to track down a copy and read it, I’ll have to refrain from further comment on this for the time being.

(2)If the precise details of Alonzo’s criminal career remain frustratingly vague, this seems to be due to the fact that no less than fourteen minutes of footage, reportedly dealing largely with this subject, have been excised from all surviving prints of ‘The Unknown’, and are now – tragically - assumed lost.)

(3) Browning’s notorious ‘Freaks’ (1932) - which, as you will have surmised, directly rehashes a few key plot elements from ‘The Unknown’ – may be similarly personal, and similarly memorable, but for my money the earlier film is by far the greater achievement. (More on this perhaps when I get around to reviewing ‘Freaks at some point in the future.)

(4) If you’re thinking that actor John George looks a bit familiar, that’s probably due to the fact that he appeared in upwards of two hundred Hollywood productions prior to his death in 1968, and, as was so sadly often the case for dwarf actors, suffered the indignity of going uncredited in almost all of them. Such is the range of his filmography, chances are you must have seen him in something over the years, although oddly enough he apparently didn’t appear in ‘Freaks’, which you’d think would have been a shoe-in given his work for Browning here.

(5) I was originally going to take some time here to lavish further praise upon Chaney for his astonishing dedication to this role vis-a-vis learning to drink wine, smoke cigarettes, wipe his eyes with a handkerchief and throw knives, all using his feet. I have read elsewhere however that at least some of these accomplishments were doubled for Chaney by Paul Desmuke – a genuine armless man apparently famed for his performances on the violin.

Although we ostensibly see Chaney perform out these actions in single shots with his face clearly visible, after watching the film again I can’t rule out the possibility that some of them may have been cleverly faked – eg, with Desmuke concealed beneath a table, or just out of frame, extending his legs upward toward Chaney’s face.

Given that there is almost certainly no one left alive who can give us a definitive answer either way though, I didn’t want to clog up the main text of the review with such conjecture. Naturally I’d love to believe that it was Chaney himself getting busy with his feet (as if the performance he gives with the rest of his body wasn’t impressive enough), but… who knows.

A Woman After A Killer Butterfly (Kim Ki-Young, 1978)

Watching Kim Ki-Young’s 1978 film ‘Woman After A Killer Butterfly’* for the first time is likely to be a fairly strange experience for any viewer. But for those of us watching it ‘blind’, as it were – with no prior knowledge of the director’s work, or of his place within Korean cinema – it’s gonna be a real a real doozy. An 8.5 on the weirdo richter scale, call-the-WTF-police, high level freakiness jamboree. You know the deal, I’m sure.

You also know, presumably, that nine times out of ten when the shadier end of international horror/fantasy cinema throws up what appears to audiences in the English-speaking world to be an A grade piece of mind-blowing bafflement, such impressions can be primarily attributed to cultural differences, general ignorance on our part and a failure to appreciate the limitations and conventions within which these marginal filmmakers were working. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I hasten to add – it’s just the way things are, all part of the fun as we stumble our way through uncharted cinematic territory.

What is far more interesting however is that one time out of ten when things get strange in a way that is genuinely unaccountable, and what we’ve got here is a case in point. Because rather than the unhinged, culture clash style weirdness one tends to associate with Asian movies, ‘Killer Butterfly’ is an intelligent, self-aware, extremely well made and internationally informed film that just happens to be… completely inexplicable.



My reason for bringing all this up is simply that what with the film (and several other of Kim Ki-Young’s key works) suddenly being available to view on Youtube courtesy of the Korean Film Archive, it seems likely that ‘Killer Butterfly’ will sooner or later be turning up alongside ‘Mystics in Bali’ and ‘Housu’ on somebody’s list of ‘Top Ten Crazy-Ass Loony Asian Horror Films That You Gotta See’ or somesuch - an inclusion that even the slimmest amount of research (and that’s all I’ve done, needless to say) would reveal as both undeserved and deeply inappropriate.

First off, ‘Killer Butterfly’ isn’t really a horror film. With its wealth of grotesque gothic imagery and supernatural happenings, it could easily be mistaken for one, but no... it's true intentions lie somewhere else entirely. At a push, you could maybe claim it as a ‘fantasy’ film, but again, none of the elements we’d associate with such a tag are really catered for. Although Kim Ki-Young certainly delights in playing with genre elements, at the end of the day ‘UNCLASSIFIABLE’ is the only drawer you’re really gonna be able to file a film like this in. But more on that later.


Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Kim Ki-Young’s background and career is about as far removed from that of yr average regional lo-fi horror maniac as it’s possible to get.

Spending time in Japan after WWII, he became a devotee of American and European cinema, and gained his first experience of film-making producing newsreels for the US army during the Korean War, after which he was in on the ground-floor of South Korea’s own national cinema, shooting his first features (including the country’s first film with synchronised sound) on equipment he’d requisitioned from the Americans. Working solidly through the late ‘50s on neo-realist style films and social melodramas, he could very much claim to be one of the founding fathers of his country’s film industry, and proceeded to follow the path of an independent minded auteur/arthouse filmmaker as closely as circumstances allowed. Critical plaudits and relative financial success in South Korea ensued, and it was only after his international ‘breakthrough’ film – 1960’s ‘The Housemaid’ – that controversy began enter the picture.

Apparently, ‘The Housemaid’s outbursts of expressionism and Bunuel-esque subversive turmoil marked a shocking departure from the strain of optimistic realism that had until then predominated in Korean cinema, and, following the film’s success, the director pushed further toward what is described as his ‘mature style’ during the ‘60s – a style that his reassuringly informative Wikipedia page describes as being characterised by “..gothic excess, surrealism, horror, perversions and sexuality”. Our kinda guy, in other words!


When the Korean film industry (along with most other national film industries) hit the ropes during the ‘70s, Kim began to produce his films independently, with the financial assistance of his wife (a successful dentist) allowing him more freedom than ever before to indulge his eccentric tastes, resulting in a series of ambitious films that, despite a sizeable cult following and a surprising level of box office success, seem to have been met with what I can only assume was a sense of bafflement and indignation from the rest of the Korean film industry – at least if the near complete absence of this venerable and prolific director from the country’s annual ‘Blue Dragon’ and ‘PaekSang’ awards ceremonies, and the corresponding low profile of his films overseas, is anything to go by.

Returning to ‘Killer Butterfly’ with this background in mind, it all begins to make a bit more… well, not sense exactly, but its existence becomes more understandable, let’s put it that way.

As Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! observed when he reviewed the film a few months back, the only way to successfully convey the alien logic of ;Killer Butterfly' is via straight plot description. Normally I’d prefer to avoid such synopsis-heavy reviewing, but sometimes (as with Alabama’s Ghost, for example) I’m afraid it’s the only way to go. So, if you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin.


Young-gul (Kim Chung-chul) is a nervous young medical student, who is enjoying a day out in the countryside pursuing his favourite hobby, catching butterflies. As he spikes one of his specimens with a syringe, a well-dressed woman approaches him and begins haranguing him for his cruel treatment of the creatures. “When it comes to death, people are no different, it’s just as trivial” she argues, rejecting Young-gul’s assertion that the death of a human is “much more noble” than that of an insect. The two apparently agree to disagree, and the woman offers Young-gul a cup of juice, which he accepts. Only when it is too late does she reveal that the juice is in fact poisoned, explaining that she had come to this remote place to die, but didn’t want to enter the afterlife alone.

Freaking out as he collapses into a coma, Young-gul subsequently awakes in hospital, where a rather slack police inspector informs him that the woman did indeed die, throws him her butterfly pendant as a memento, and lets him go free. Arriving home (he seems to live in a squalid mountainside shack, somewhat reminiscent of the one where all that crazy shit goes down in the second ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ film), Young-gul finds himself plunged into a deep depression by the incident, and, feeling there is a now “poison in his soul”, decides to kill himself.


Young-gul’s suicide is interrupted however by an elderly travelling bookseller, who repeatedly barges his way into the shack, proffering copies of a book extolling the virtue of ‘strength of will’, a creed which the man insists can inspire one to immortality. Enraged by this cackling weirdo upsetting his solemn date with death, Young-gul eventually stabs the man with a kitchen knife, but, mortally wounded, he continues to jabber on, even as his blood drains away and his heart stops beating. Tiring of the now undead man’s continuous diatribe and the smell of his decomposing body, Young-gul sets out to bury him, and, when he returns from his shallow grave still preaching the virtues of willpower, to burn him. Following his cremation, the old man returns yet again as a walking, talking skeleton, who beats Young-gul with his bony arms, laughing at him and mocking his desire to die. A gust of wind enters the shack and reduces the skeleton to ash, but the old man’s disembodied voice raves on, proclaiming that his spirit will live on forever, as his essence drifts off on the winds.


Apparently impressed enough to take the old man’s advice for the moment, Young-gul puts his suicide on hold and returns to college, where a buddy of his convinces him to help out with a unique money-making scheme. Visiting a complex of caves, they break off from the guided tour and sneak out with the bones of an ancient skeleton, that Young-gul’s friend has arranged to sell to Dr. Lee, a prominent archaeologist, for a healthy profit. Left alone to assemble to skeleton in his shack, Young-gul is… well I was going to say astounded, but actually he seems to take it in his stride… when the skeleton regrows its flesh, assuming the shape of a beautiful, pale-skinned woman, who explains that she had fled into the caves 2,000 years ago, using Shamanic magic to keep her spirit in limbo until ‘the right man’ – that presumably being Young-gul – stumbled across her bones and resurrected her.


Unfortunately, if Young-gul’s ancient bride is to retain her corporeal form, the Shaman’s spell decrees that she must eat a raw human liver within ten days, or else return to a sack of inanimate bones. Refusing to hunt down a liver for her, Young-gul tells her she’ll have to find one herself, leaving her complaining of her unquenchable hunger as she eyes up the liver of her prospective husband…

How will this unsettling drama play out? Well we won’t find out quite yet, because some men have arrived at the shack, carrying a large piece of industrial machinery. “What’s that?”, the 2000 year old woman asks. “It’s a pastry machine!”, Young-Gul replies. “I thought we could use it to make some money on the side”.

Aaand, that’s where we’re going to have to leave our extended plot synopsis for the moment. So far, I’ve only covered about the opening forty minutes of ‘Killer Butterfly’s two hour run time, but… the pastry machine. It’s too much. You’ll just have to watch it for yourself and find out.

Actually, in a certain sense, this kind of high weirdness, that makes the film so noteworthy for jerks like me, kind of works against its overall artistic success in some ways. I mean, in essence, ‘Killer Butterfly’ is sort of a classical tragedy that tries to tackle weighty cosmic issues of life and death and rebirth etc. But after watching it, all I could think was, jesus christ… the pastry machine.



Anyway, after this apex of grand strangeness is over and done with, the film finally breaks away from the random, episodic anti-narrative that has prevailed thus far, and settles down (in a manner of speaking) into merely an intense gothic melodrama with a sub-plot about a secret society who dress up as butterflies to desecrate graves and send severed heads to a renowned archaeologist (or something).

In brief, Young-gul shrugs off the 2,000 year old woman caper, and takes up a job as assistant to the aforementioned Dr. Lee, moving into his richly appointed home and becoming involved with his equally death and butterfly obsessed daughter Kyungmi (Kim Ja-ok), with the pair’s chaste and tempestuous non-relationship proceeding to dominate the remainder of the film.



Whilst the preceding scenes have been characterised by an unmistakable strain of knockabout black humour, from hereon in things become more tricky to interpret, as the film strikes an uneven balance between metaphysical earnestness and grotesque genre parody that often becomes quite offputting.

Is Kim Ki-Young genuinely trying to make some grand, Jodorowsky-style Point about life and death, being and nothingness here? The intensity with which he treats these scenes in which characters yammer on and on about the solace of death and when and why they intend to put an end to their bleak existence, and the commitment of Ka-ok and Chung-chul’s startling performances as the doomed un-couple, certainly suggests as much, recalling the uncompromising emo-turmoil of heavy hitters like Zulawski’s ‘The Devil’ (1973) and Sion Sono’s ‘Love Exposure’ (2008).

But at the same time, this stuff is just ploughed through over and over, raised to such an absurdly heightened pitch of melodramatic silliness, it simply CANNOT be taken seriously, often verging onto some epic pastiche of the brand of melodrama that holds a central place in Korean film & TV. As noted, Kim Ja-ok’s performance is astonishing, but her character’s hand-wringing, self-obsessed Young Werther style angst soon becomes absolutely interminable, as does Young-gul’s impotent terror of the world around him, and Dr. Lee’s laughably overblown macho dedication to his daughter. And meanwhile, the whole far more interesting (to me at least) business of the butterfly-masked graverobbing cult remains sadly unexplored.

There IS undoubtedly a strong element of absurdist comedy running through the film - in contrast to the later reels, the whole 2000 year old woman section is both hilarious and strangely touching, and the film’s ‘horror’ bits have a great Evil Dead/Sammo Hung slapstick feel to them. But as things get more overwrought, the script’s uneasy blend of parody and pathos makes it very difficult to really get an angle on where Kim Ki-Young is coming from with all this stuff, emotionally speaking.



Where he’s coming from visually speaking is at least a lot clearer, as ‘Killer Butterfly’ gleefully draws on recognisible horror imagery throughout, with skulls and skeletons and candelabras and gothic hoo-hah infesting just about every frame, as the film rambles back and forth across the boundaries of life and death. It’s difficult to ascertain whether or not the influence of European horror is deliberate, but as fans of such things will no doubt have already noticed from the screengrabs accompanying this review, ‘Killer Butterfly’s dense, hyper-real colour scheme certainly has a lot in common with the more imaginative gialli, and the brooding fantasias and unnatural light sources of Mario Bava’s early/mid ‘60s work in particular.

Very much unlike a horror film however is ‘Killer Butterfly’s unhurried, leisurely pace, as the film strays freely from any kind of narrative tension with the freedom that becomes a filmmaker unchained from commercial necessity, as wholly tangential scenes – a beach party, a visit to the hospital – are transformed by Kim Ki-Young into outlandish tone poems of sumptuous colour and texture that are a joy to behold, even when the action on-screen becomes repetitive or incomprehensible. In fact, as the film progresses, this uniquely expressive approach to cinematography (which doesn’t exactly make for easy viewing on youtube, it must be said) seems to reflect the story’s obsessive concern with the battle between life and death, as bright patches of vivid, burning colour are consumed amid an ocean of impenetrable, inky blackness – an idea that is arguably conveyed far more powerfully through the visuals than it is through much of the script.



A horribly glib comparison perhaps, but after looking over Kim Ki-Young’s CV and watching a few of his films, I can’t help but think that discovering his work is a bit like stumbling across the Korean David Lynch. Clearly both are hugely talented and ambitious filmmakers who can command a strong popular following (Kim was apparently awarded the nick-name ‘Mr. Monster’ by his fans) and could easily sit at the forefront of their respective national industries, were it not for their insistence on producing films that many critics deem maddeningly eccentric and excessive – bulbous, overbearing, upsetting and impossible works, but never less than wholly original, with a strong streak of untamed genius always running wild.

With this in mind, perhaps the best way for us Westerners to explain the singularity of something like ‘Killer Butterfly’ is to say that watching it is a bit like taking someone who’s largely ignorant of American cinema and beginning their education by showing them ‘Lost Highway’ or ‘Mulholland Drive’ – an overwhelming and disorienting experience to say the least, but, given the chance, who amongst us wouldn’t want to dive straight in and savour the madness?


*Some sources go for the simpler English title of ‘Killer Butterfly’, whilst the film’s own subtitles identify it as ‘Chasing the Butterfly of Death’, and English text on the Korean poster states ‘Woman With Butterfly Tattoo’. So make of that what you will.