Noir Diary: Witness in the City [‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’] (Édouard Molinaro, 1959)

Whilst the first two films in Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection were both interesting, enjoyable and well worth making time for, it is the third and final movie in the set which proved by far my favourite.

Édouard Molinaro is back at the helm, and Lino Ventura is back on the street, for ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ [‘Witness in the City’], in which a Boileau & Narcejac script (with an additional writing credit for none other than Le Dos au Mur’s Gérard Oury) reshuffles a few of the plot elements from Molinaro’s earlier film, honing them into a movie which sits on the cusp between being a distinctly superior programme picture and an out-and-out genre classic.

Proceedings certainly begin in alarming fashion, with the sight of a screaming woman being callously thrown from a speeding train. Composing himself after returning to his compartment, her killer (Jacques Berthier) pulls the emergency cord, and we cut straight to the courthouse, where a clearly disgusted judge is forced to dismiss the case against him due to a lack of evidence. (“Doubt… your closest collaborator,” the judge dryly remarks to the man’s lawyer, perhaps in homage to a certain Hitchcock movie featuring similar train-bound maleficence.)

On his way home, the liberated murderer is delayed by a minor road accident which leaves his car out of commission, forcing him to rely on taxis to complete his journey. Far greater trouble awaits him though back at his remote and luxurious home.

In the meantime, y’see, we’ve been presented to a succession of gloriously menacing, giallo-esque POV shots, depicting a looming, trench-coated fellow (soon revealed to be Ventura) breaking into Berthier’s house. Sabotaging his fusebox and leaving mementos of his late mistress meaningfully strewn around the rooms (photo in the picture frame, dress laid out on the bed), Ventura proceeds to lurk in the shadows, awaiting his intended victim’s return. Not a sight any wealthy playboy really wants to be confronted with after a hard day spent clearing himself of his mistress’s murder, needless to say.

Ventura’s character Monsieur Ancelin is, of course, the dead woman’s husband. And, if you’re at all familiar with his usual screen persona in this era, you’ll realise he’s not about to take any guff from Monsieur “honest guv, I didn’t push her, it was suicide, she couldn't live with her betrayal, she loved only you.”

Long story short, the confrontation between the two men is beautifully played out, shot in brooding, gothic horror-esque candlelight, with Berthier’s two-faced pleading crashing hopelessly against the rocks of Ventura’s immoveable, soul deadened cynicism. Once the former has been left swinging from the rafters, Anselm sweeps the joint to remove traces of his presence, before making a swift exit, and…. running head-first into Pierre (Franco Fabrizi), the driver of the radio taxi Berthier ordered a few minutes before his untimely demise! Oops.

As Pierre’s taxi screeches off, Ancelin scribbles down the registration number… and his hunt for the titular witness begins.

During the movie’s second act, our focus shifts to Pierre, his blossoming romance with switchboard operator Liliane (Sandra Milo), and the close-knit community based around the offices of the Radio Taxi company for which they both work.

In contrast to the character work in the two earlier films in the Kino set, the relationships here are simply and believably sketched out, and ultimately very endearing. There’s a real sense of the fleeting pleasures of day-to-day life and of the excitement of young love here, as passing details like couple’s brief clinch as they wait to board a crowded metro live long in the memory.

Another very nice touch is the scene in which Pierre uses his taxi’s radio to broadcast the sound of a group of drunken American soldiers singing ‘Red River Valley’ in the back seat of his cab through Liliane’s headset, prompting momentarily hilarity in the switchboard office. Indeed, the use of this song, whose indelible melody becomes a kind of totem for the lovers, proves extremely effective, adding a very poignant note once events take a darker turn later in the film.

Speaking of which, the implacable Ancelin - who has effectively become the film’s antagonist at this point - is of course lurking always in the lovers’ shadows. Ventura’s unmistakable features and elongated eyebrows lend him an almost Nosferatu-like quality here, as he silently stalks the city streets, trailing Pierre in a succession of stolen cars and seeking a way to put him out of commission before he can report what he’s seen to the police.

From hereon in, the story ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ tells is entirely linear in its development, but the ambiguities created by the way our point of view shifts back and forth between Ancelin and his potential (and actual) victims make it kind of fascinating nonetheless.

By the film’s final act, Ventura’s character has mutated into an entirely different breed of expressionist monster - closer perhaps to Chaney’s hunchback or Lorre’s child killer in ‘M’ - as, hunted, bloodied and limping, he is run to ground by the combined forces of the (largely unseen) police, and the small army of radio-equipped taxi drivers upon whom the action largely concentrates.

Though no melodramatic flourishes are employed to jog our memory, it’s impossible not to recall here that the reign of terror Anselin has by this point inflicted upon the taxi-driving community was, ultimately, triggered by love - or at the very least, by a perceived masculine obligation to avenge the death of his beloved wife.

Whilst committing additional acts of violence purely in the name of self-preservation is never a good look for a revenger, we’re inclined to wonder by this point whether Anselim was always a remorseless psychopath, or whether the loss of his wife has simply pushed him over the edge, causing him to lash out at the world in some kind of grief-driven death-trip. This is a question which the film pointedly declines to address, leaving us unsure quite how to read this frightening and desperate character with whom we are to some extent encouraged to sympathise.

An additional level of bleakness is added to Anselin’s Harry Lime-esque plight through the fact that, whilst his crimes have all been committed against individuals whom we’ve spent some time with and grown to like, his eventual fate is entirely anonymised by the film.

There are no reassuring ‘job well done’ back-slaps or closing clinches for the ‘heroes’ here; indeed, the survivors’ lives are presumably left in pieces. Instead, the ‘villain’ of the piece is disposed of in a series of high angle long shots, taken down by an unseen army of cops behind a blinding circle of headlights, forcing us to reflect on the sad cycle of violence which has led him to this sorry fate.

The knack for visual storytelling Édouard Molinaro demonstrated in the opening sequence of ‘Le Dos au Mur’ reaches its full expression in ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’, and the way in which the film manages to wrangle a mass of logical/procedural detail without resorting to dry exposition is inspired. 

In fact, for a mid-century crime drama, it’s remarkable how little the screenplay relies on dialogue. Almost everything we need to know here is conveyed visually, and, once Anselin is on Pierre’s trail, the movie is almost all action (of one kind or another), keeping the characters perpetually in motion.

The fact that the film’s events all take place in or around cars naturally helps to maintain this sense of momentum, and the eventual series of chases and confrontations which comprise the final act are genuinely thrilling, allowing us to perhaps file this one alongside Don Siegel’s The Line-Up in the pre-history of car chases movies, even as the narrow alleyways and boulevards of Paris rarely allow the motors here to pick up much speed, keeping things more at a gear-grinding, ‘stalking and blocking’ kind of level.

Naturally, this concentration on exteriors means that the vast majority of the film is shot on location in the city, and the rain-sodden, night-for-night streets and avenues look absolutely beautiful, as they rightfully should, given that the legendary Henri Decaë (cameraman of choice for Melville, Truffaut and Louis Malle, amongst many others) was calling the shots as DP.

Alongside the swathes of inky shadow we’d reasonably expect, the diffused gleam of streetlamps, headlights and neon signage adds a hazy ‘endless night’ kind of feel to the film’s sprawling urban landscape, whilst the conclusion - staged at the historic Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park - incorporates a series of absolutely exquisite deep focus long shots, as Ventura stumbles to his doom through a nocturnal maze of empty gardens and attractions. (Some may feel Molinaro’s decision to intercut Anselin’s flight with close-ups of the park’s caged birds of prey is a bit heavy-handed, but this attention-grabbing directorial flourish actually works very well in context.)

Also noteworthy meanwhile is a great, sultry modern jazz score from saxophonist Barney Wilen, who had played with Miles Davis on his indelible score for Malle’s ‘Ascenseur pour L'échafaud’ a year earlier. This was presumably what inspired the decision to hire Wilen here, and if the material he and his group cooked up for ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ feels slightly more akin to the buttoned down, compositional approach to jazz that Johnny Dankworth was busy bringing to British crime films of this era, well… that’s certainly no bad thing.

For my money, this all adds up to a nigh-on flawless example of a late ‘50s European crime film. Devoid of pretention or self-importance but still loaded with powerful imagery, ‘Un Témoin dans la Ville’ maintains an unsettling sense of moral greyscale amid its blinding headlights and sepulchral shadows, whilst its refusal to offer a conventional, reassuring resolution means that, like all the best noir, it is liable to haunt the darker corners of viewers’ memories for a long time to come.

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Though Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection pointedly fails to bear the legend ‘Volume # 1’, they are surely doing the lord’s work in bringing films like this one to an English-speaking audience on blu-ray, and we can only hope there are more such releases in the pipeline.

Noir Diary: Back to the Wall [‘Le Dos au Mur’] (Édouard Molinaro, 1958)

In stark contrast to Gilles Grangier’s no nonsense directorial approach on Le Rouge et Mis, director Édouard Molinaro begins ‘Le Dos au Mur’ [Literal translation: ‘Evidence in Concrete’, but more snappily retitled for English-speaking viewers as ‘Back to the Wall’] - the second film in Kino Lorber’s French Noir Collection - with an audacious, near wordless seventeen-minute sequence depicting a man (future writer/director Gérard Oury) breaking into a ground floor apartment and methodically cleaning/rearranging the scene of a murder, before managing to drag the carpet-wrapped corpse of the victim (Philippe Nicaud) to his car, driving it to a construction site and burying it beneath a layer of freshly laid cement.

A real tour de force of noir technique, perhaps reflecting the influence of ‘Rififi’s famed heist scene, this sequence boasts expressionistic, John Alton-esque photography from DP Robert Lefebvre, full of brightly illuminated details emerging from inky pools of darkness, fragments of light gleaming off glass and chrome and the rain-sodden headlight beams momentarily blinding us as they flash through the black void. (1)

In visual storytelling terms too, this is riveting stuff, with menacing low angles and rhythmic, Hitchcockian cutting cranking the tension, as Oury is forced to hide his nefarious activities from the attentions of sundry nocturnal witnesses.

It is only once our man’s unsavoury night’s work is over, and he is once again behind the wheel, cruising ‘Lost Highway’ style through the darkness, that - in true noir style - we drift into flashback, and the story proper gets underway.

Unfortunately, this involves the film’s visual style settling down into a far more conventional routine of set-bound chat and exposition, as we join Oury’s character - who it transpires is some kind of construction/cement magnate? - as he discovers that his much younger wife (Jeanne Moreau, fresh from ‘Ascenseur pour L’échafaud’ and already something of a crime/noir veteran by this point in her career) has been cheating on him with a feckless artist/under-employed actor type (Nicaud).

Given what we’ve already learned from the opening sequence, it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal that Oury does not take this news well.

Clearly veering more toward the James M. Cain-derived, murder/adultery strand of noir than the gangster/crime thread represented by ‘Le Rouge et Mis’, ‘Le Dos au Mur’s concentration on the travails of a desperate, obsessive (and ultimately doomed) central character also brings a strong Cornell Woolrich flavour to proceedings.

Pedants might wish to note that the film also features one of those flashback structures full of scenes which the character recalling the tale couldn’t possibly have witnessed first-hand, but… needless to say, I’m not going to split hairs over details like that, especially given that the plot, based on Frédéric Dard’s novel, actually proceeds to unfold into a rather ingenious scenario, one whose possibilities would have provided plenty of red meat for any contemporary Hollywood screenwriter to get their teeth into.

Rather than rushing straight into a campaign of vengeance after discovering his wife’s infidelity y’see, Oury’s character’s preferred course of action is to instead begin blackmailing the adulterous couple, setting himself up with a fake ID, dispatching the requisite anonymous letters, and claiming back the resultant dough (which Moreau has already finagled from his pocket using an increasingly strained series of excuses) from a post office box in another part of town.

As you might imagine, this instigates an extended game of cat and mouse between the two parties, as, amongst other things, Oury hires a sublimely shifty private detective to gather more evidence against his targets, whilst the couple in turn engage the services of some underworld heavies to track down their blackmailer, whilst both sides attempt to gain the confidence of a barmaid in the drinking hole where Nicaud and Moreau often meet.

All of which adds up to a hell of a lot of plot to wade through here, so it’s just as well that it’s all pretty engaging, fun stuff. Really though, by far the most interesting factor in play at this point is the twisted and desperate motivations behind Oury’s decision to pursue his blackmail scheme in the first place.

Driven on by a toxic combination of vengeance and crippling fear of loneliness, he not only seeks to destroy Moreau and Nicaud’s relationship through the pressures created by his financial demands, he also wants Moreau to then return to him and voluntarily confess the errors of her ways, if you can believe that - sheer desperation blinding him to the realisation of what a nightmare this artificial extension of their long dead relationship would prove, even in the unlikely event it could be achieved.

Unfortunately, it is again the lack of development of the supporting characters which proves a stumbling block for this otherwise intriguing yarn. I must confess, Moreau is a star whose appeal has always been rather lost on me, and the script gives her precious little to work with here.

I mean, we might assume that her character is a woman who has married for wealth and convenience, only to seek solace in the arms of a younger and more exciting partner when she tires of her cold fish husband - but this is just a projection on our part as viewers. Nothing in the film actually bothers to communicate this to us, leaving the errant wife’s motivation, back story and emotional life a mystery.

Likewise, Nicaud’s character also feels like an empty vessel; imbued with no real character traits beyond being shiftless and a bit lazy, he certainly doesn’t convince as the kind of passionate lover capable to tearing a wealthy and glamourous woman away from the security of her marriage, and as a result, the scenes the couple share together fail to develop much in the way of either chemistry or, crucially, audience sympathy.

Conventional movie morality would tend to suggest we should kind-of, sort-of end up on their side, in preference to the scheming, tyrannical husband, but… in this case, it’s honestly difficult to care.

Sadly then, we’re left with a bit of a one-sided love triangle, but thankfully Oury’s extraordinary performance alone proves strong enough to hold it together, maniacal intelligence and emotional desolation battling behind his eyes as he glowers, simmers and broods his way through the film, at times almost contorting his lanky frame like a physical manifestation of the tangled mess he’s created for himself - the ‘hanged man’ per excellence.

It’s fitting therefore that, as a member of that hallowed sub-category of noirs which effectively begin with their endings (paging both Mildred Pierce and Walter Neff), ‘Le Dos au Mur’ dwells heavily on that most noir of themes - man’s inability to escape his fate. In fact, it even verges into Poe-derived gothic territory to a certain extent, as a restaging of the ever-popular ‘bricked up wall’ ending, clearly inspired by either ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ or ‘The Black Cat’, ends up accidentally prefiguring Roger Corman’s adultery-enhanced fusion of both those stories in his 1962 anthology ‘Tales of Terror’. Who’d have thunk it!

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(1) Exploitation fans might be interested to learn that although Robert Lefebvre was already a veteran of the French film industry by this point, having worked as a DP since the early 1930s, he actually ended his long career working on a series of erotic / sex films during the ‘70s, including Max Pécas’ ‘Je Suis Une Nymphomane’ (1971) and Radley Metzger’s ‘The Image’ (1975).

Noir Diary: Speaking of Murder [‘Le Rouge et Mis’] (Gilles Grangier, 1957)

 To those of us in the English-speaking world, it can sometimes feel as if France’s contribution to the culture surrounding mid-century crime/noir cinema remains an obscure and mysterious prospect. Such a conclusion begins to seem increasingly misguided though, the longer one spends scanning shelves and considering the matter.

After all, Jules Dassin’s ‘Rififi’ (1955) and the films of Jean-Pierre Melville are universally revered touchstones of the genre. Classics like Jacques Becker’s ‘Touchez pas ou Grisbi’ (1954) and ‘Le Trou’ (1960), and Henri Decoin‘s ‘Razzia sur la Chnouf’, (1955), are all available on nice, sub-titled editions, as of course are arthouse/nouvelle vague-affiliated genre entries such as Truffaut’s ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ (1960) and Louis Malle’s ‘Ascenseur pour L'échafaud’ (1958). Claude Sautet’s heart-rending ‘Classe Tous Risques’ (1960) starring Lino Ventura has received a release from the BFI, and I bet your local library can still dig up a DVD of Julien Duvivier’s ground-breaking ‘Pépé le Moko’ (1937) upon request.

Nonetheless though - what unites the films listed above is their quote-unquote “importance”. All are critically acclaimed, top tier productions which - despite their intermittent brutality and nihilism - remain thoroughly respectable. They’re all great movies, no question, but, taken in isolation, can they really furnish us with a full picture of the wider culture from which they emerged?

It’s as if we’ve been given access to the Gallic equivalents of Double Indemnity, ‘Laura’, ‘White Heat’ and ‘Touch of Evil’…. but where are the Parisian analogues of ‘Raw Deal’, of The Big Combo, or of Framed..? Were the stars and directors we know from their more celebrated pictures also battling it out week by week in scuzzier, run-of-the-mill programme pictures? And if so, can we watch them please?

Such are the questions I was hoping Kino Lorber’s inaugural French Noir Collection - gathering three late ‘50s examples of the form from the Gaumont archives which I don’t believe have previously been granted much international exposure - would begin to address. Long story short: it doesn’t disappoint.

Straight out of the gate, Gilles Grangier’s ‘Le Rouge et Mis’ (1957) opens with a sight sure to warm the heart of any French crime enthusiast, as genre heavyweights Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura lead a four-man gang carrying out a stick up job on a street corner bank in a quiet Parisian suburb.

The film’s recurrent theme of violence erupting from placid, everyday surroundings is disturbingly foreshadowed as Ventura, scowling intently in regulation trench-coat, briefly turns his tommy-gun in the direction of a cowering mother and her children who have inadvertently wandered into the midst of the robbery. Pausing, Ventura’s character ‘La Gitan’ (‘The Gypsy’) seems to be thinking it over, before he comes to his senses and ducks into the getaway car - demonstrating a sense of restraint which he will increasingly abandon as the movie progresses.

Rather inadequately retitled as ‘Speaking of Murder’ for English-speaking audiences (wouldn’t something closer to the literal ‘The Red is Lit’, or ‘The Red Light Is On’ have worked better?), Grangier’s film has the particular ice-cold, proletarian atmosphere which defines so many post-war French crime movies down pat.

Certainly, there’s little of the smoky glamour and lethargic ennui which defined some of Gabin’s other films in the genre be found here. Instead, he and his gang conduct their day-to-day from remote lock-up garages, chrome-countered street corner bars and shabby rural outbuildings. Mirroring the atmosphere of dour alienation later perfected by Jean-Pierre Melville (who had directed his first crime film a year earlier), the gang members are squinty-eyed hard cases who’d rather lose a limb than express emotion in front of their colleagues. Everywhere looks absolutely freezing.

Despite this though, Grangier dials back the nihilism considerably here, humanising his crooks, and (with the help of his fine cast) making their interplay rather fascinating. Admittedly, ‘La Gitan’ is indeed the remorseless, taciturn psycho which our initial encounter with him suggested, but ‘Sailor’ (Jean Bérard) provides rather rather more reluctant muscle, whilst Gabin (‘The Blond’) provides a rather more paternal presence, labouring under the strain of keeping the outfit together whilst also affecting the appearance of a legitimate businessman. The fly in the ointment meanwhile is Fredo, ‘L’American’ (Paul Frankeur), the gang’s fixer, a slimy chancer Ventura doesn’t trust as far as he can throw him, but whom Gabin - much to his later chagrin - insists is legit.

With all this good heist movie stuff already in play, I confess I was slightly disappointed that much of the remainder of the film concentrates instead on Gabin’s relationship with his much younger brother Pierre (Marcel Bozzuffi, later of ‘The French Connection’), a feckless kid who’s just got out of the joint on bail, but insists on skipping town to hook up with his girlfriend Hélène (Annie Girardot).

Regrettably, Hélène is characterised here in strictly one-dimensional terms, as a greedy, black-hearted bitch who cuckolds naïve Pierre at every possible opportunity, mocking him behind his back and earning the contempt of his far cannier big brother in process. Meanwhile of course, the cops are hovering, keen to pull Pierre in for breaking his bail conditions and hoping they can persuade him to spill the beans on his brother’s outfit to avoid heading back to the slammer.

The scenes between Gabin, Bozzuffi and their elderly mother (Gina Licloz) convey a great deal of warmth, establishing their strained and unconventional family dynamic rather nicely, but beyond that, it’s a shame that the film’s story eventually takes a rather melodramatic turn, incorporating a series of door-slamming familial confrontations, and culminating in a would-be tragic denouement hinging on the consequences of an easily resolved misunderstanding.

It’s difficult to credit that this rather bathetic bit of plotting came from the pen of Auguste Le Breton (whose novels provided the inspiration for about half of the calssics I listed in this review’s opening paragraphs), but… many a slip betwixt page and screen, I suppose.

For the most part, Grangier’s direction here is plain and unobtrusive, devoid of the stylistic flourishes we usually associate with noir, but, perhaps for that very reason, the film’s intermittent scenes of bloodthirsty violence stand out. In particular, a bungled armoured car heist followed by a vehicular chase and massacre midway through the movie really makes an impression, framing outbursts of chaotic carnage against a bleak, uninhabited rural backdrop, whilst the climactic confrontation between Gabin and Ventura (you knew it was coming) achieves an impressive level of intensity.

If ‘Le Rouge et Mis’ can be seen then as a rock-solid exemplar of French crime cinema, its routine story-telling elevated by a seedy atmosphere and an exceptional cast, the second film in Kino’s French Noir set proves a far more unconventional and off-beat proposition… as we shall discover in a few days.

Noir Diary # 17: Framed (Richard Wallace, 1947)

 

The very definition of an efficient, tightly plotted b-noir, 1947’s ‘Framed’ begins with a perfect visual metaphor for what’s to follow, as protagonist Mike Lambert (Glenn Ford) literally crashes into the small town in which the action takes place behind the wheel of an out-of-control truck with no functioning brakes.

The platonic ideal of a doomed film noir patsy, Lambert is an unkempt, down-on-his-luck drifter (an unemployed mining engineer, so he claims), who accepted the driving gig offered to him by an unscrupulous trucking company purely as a means to get himself to the next town along the trail. After painfully extracting his fee from said trucking firm’s local rep, he deposits it directly into the hat of the argumentative man whose fender he damaged in the process of bringing his death-trap of a vehicle to a halt, and heads straight for the nearest bar to see if he can scare up some credit.

Within the insalubrious environs of the La Paloma Cafe, we soon come to understand how Lambert has ended up in such dire straits. Clearly he’s one of those guys whose thirst for liquor is matched only by his inability to handle its effects, and, after a few shots of rot-gut, we find him trying to hock his gold watch to the barkeep for stake money to join the 24/7 crap game taking place upstairs, only to be saved from further humiliation when the crooked local fuzz waltz in to pick him up on a spurious dangerous driving charge finagled by the trucking company.

In spite of this world championship level display of loserdom however, archly mannered waitress Paula (Janis Carter) appears inexplicably enamoured of the new arrival; so much so that it is she who steps in to cover the fine Lambert is ordered to pay after a jerry-rigged court appearance, before also shelling out to provide the hotel room in which he sleeps off the effects of his subsequent drinking binge.

Anyone thinking that Paula’s efforts might be motivated by philanthropy, pity or good old fashioned lust however would be well advised to consult this movie’s title. Before you know it, our hero’s new guardian angel has quit her job at the bar, and is on the phone to arrange a meet-up with the smarmy vice-president of the local bank (Steve Price, played by Barry Sullivan), letting him know that she’s found exactly the right guy for their purposes. Same height as Price, same build, and no annoying friends or family to get in the way. Oddly, they’re not too concerned about his facial features… I wonder why?

Before we get the full dope on the ugly fate our hero is being measured up for however, ‘Framed’ takes an unexpected detour into B. Traven territory, as Lambert - suddenly determined to try to make something of himself - heads for the local Assaying Office. For the benefit of readers not based in the South-Western U.S.A. in the early 20th century, this was apparently a place to which would-be mining prospectors could bring samples of stuff they’d dug up, to get its mineral content analysed, and happily, Lambert’s visit happens to coincide with that of a garrulous fellow (Jeff Cunningham, played by Edgar Buchanan) who has just received confirmation that he’s struck a life-changing haul of silver up in them-there-hills.

Better still, when Lambert offers his services as an engineer for the forthcoming mining operation, Cunningham recognises him as the guy who paid him back for damage to his car the previous afternoon, clapping him on the shoulders and declaring him an HONEST MAN. So, hands are shaken, a partnership is born, and the new best buddies retire to nearby café (one which actually serves food, unlike the La Paloma) for a slap-up breakfast and some serious mining talk.

The only snag is, to finance the outfit, Cunningham will need to get a loan from the local bank, but don’t worry, it’s such a sure thing that…. ah. You see where this going. Forewarned by Paula, vice-president Steve turns Cunningham down flat, leaving the disgruntled prospector with no choice but to leave town to drum up some dough elsewhere, leaving Lambert to cool his heels… and to head straight back into the arms of one of the most robotically psychotic femme fatales ‘50s noir had to offer. Some guy just can’t get a break, huh?

Ben Maddow’s script for ‘Framed’ may not be high art, but it’s certainly high craft. A frustrated poet and documentarian before he turned to screenwriting to make a buck, Maddow cheerily lifts a few ideas from then-recent hits (Double Indemnity, ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’, and the previous year’s ‘Gilda’, also starring Ford), but he nonetheless gives us one of those great, watertight yarns in which every detail pays off, every character trait serves a purpose, and in which the overriding theme of the piece remains consistent, without ever getting heavy-handed about it.

In the synopsis above, I’ve casually referred to Mike Lambert as the film’s ‘hero’, and, despite his chronic lack of gumption, that descriptor remains more accurate than was often the case in the realm of noir. For all his faults, Lambert is indeed a scrupulously honest man, trying to ply an honest trade, only to find the combined forces of state and capital (the police and judiciary, banks, employers, the idle rich, even disgruntled suburbanites in one case) lined up against him, working in cahoots to keep him penniless, homeless, and preferably consigned to a wooden casket ASAP, all as part of their venal, corrupt daily routine.

(With an outlook like this, it’s no surprise to learn that Maddow found himself blacklisted post-haste once the dark fog of HUAC descended upon Hollywood, his official screen credits drying up shortly after he earned an Oscar nomination for his similarly themed work on John Huston’s classic ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ (1950).)

The great ‘nearly man’ of 40s/50s household name leading men, Glenn Ford also does fine work here, dialling down the charisma he exuded to varying degrees in other roles to effectively portray a guy who is only one or two rungs up the ladder from the Elisha Cook Jrs of this world -- a stone loser, but one whose side-eye glances convey a sly, calculating self-awareness rather than mere blubbering self-pity, letting us know he’s possessed of just enough grit and smarts to overcome the forces rallied against him… if only he could stay away from the bottle, and the crap table - and most importantly, from Janis Carter.

Though she never scaled the same career heights as her co-star, Carter (whose other genre credits include ‘Night Editor’ (1946) and the notorious ‘The Woman on Pier 13’ aka ‘I Married a Communist’ (1949)) is equally memorable here, creating a character who ranks second only to Lizabeth Scott in ‘Too Late For Tears’ (1949) in noir’s pantheon of cold-blooded female predators.

When Sullivan’s character met her two years ago, Paula was modelling “someone else’s furs”; now she has to make do ugly, lace n’ polka-dot small town finery, but not for much longer. A dead-eyed, remorselessly amoral dame straight out of a philandering studio mogul’s worst nightmares, she’s clearly capable of leaving any of the men who dote upon her to perish in a flaming car wreck at a moment’s notice, just to gain an extra percentage point on the purloined dough which sits awaiting her in that numbered safe deposit box back in town.

There is kind of a performative, self-aware aspect to the behaviour of both lead characters in ‘Framed’ - a feeling that Mike and Paula simply complying with the expectations of their archetypes, if you will, unable to break free from the roles they’ve been assigned within Maddow’s rat-trap of a script. Some viewers might see as a weakness of the film, but personally I really enjoyed the weird, fateful quality it brought to proceedings.

Paula is so obviously ice cold and insincere in her interactions with Lambert and Price, it’s difficult to believe that either of them could believe her rote “I’m crazy about you / let’s run away together” jive for a second. Indeed, Lambert appears suspicious of her motives right from the get-go, but nonetheless, he still keeps trudging straight back to the horrible, chintzy bungalow she rents on the outskirts of town, accepting her stream of lies, rationalisations and half-hearted declarations of devotion with heavy-lidded resignation, like some cut price, off-brand version of Robert Mitchum’s storm-tossed fatalism in the same year’s ‘Out of the Past’.

Though ‘Framed’ has none of the high-falutin’ dreaminess we associate with such top tier noirs, Wallace’s direction is punchy and efficient in the best tradition of Columbia crime pictures, relying on fast cutting and simple visual storytelling to get its point across, whilst the film is further elevated by fine supporting performances from Sullivan, whose smarmy bank exec contains a finger of the same juice which would later fuel Fred McMurray’s character in Billy Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’ (1960), and Edgar Buchanan, who essentially plays the movie’s dishevelled, proletarian conscience, offering Lambert a fleeting glimpse of friendship, hard work and proper, American Dream-type redemption.

The work of Director of Photography Burnett Guffey was not generally as showy as that of his more celebrated competitors in the chiaroscuro racket, and with the best will in the world, this picture’s small town / daylight setting and familiarly drab Columbia interior sets offer little scope for expressionist grandeur.

Nonetheless though, Howe’s steady hand ensures that the movie always looks at least pretty good, employing the steady hand which led some wag to describe him as the “little black dress” of noir photographers to transcend the penny-pinching production design, using mirrors, blinds and jagged, asymmetric shapes to keep things interesting, whilst a few brief nocturnal street scenes evoke the kind of sleek, inky smooth menace he would go on to employ so beautifully on career highlights like ‘The Reckless Moment’ (1949) and ‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950). (1)

If anything in ‘Framed’ cuts against the grain of noir expectation, it’s probably the film’s ending, which - whilst straining here to avoid spoilers - does not proceed in the direction which the hard-boiled nihilist crowd might have wished, let’s put it that way. As much as such a conclusion sounds bad on paper however, in practice it’s handled here with an elegance and open-ended emotional ambiguity which actually works rather beautifully, leaving open the possibility that good ol’ Mike Lambert - now weighted down by an extra layer of cynicism and soul-sickening regret - might be back soon, trying hawk that damned gold watch in some seedy bar ‘round the corner from your place, next week, next year, or on into eternity.

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(1) I need to credit Imogen Sara Smith’s excellent audio commentary on the Indicator blu-ray release of ‘Framed’ for hepping me to that quote about Guffey, but I don’t remember who she attributed it to, and google hasn’t helped me put a name to it, so… answers on a postcard etc.

Noir Diary # 16: The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)

 Even before he achieved card-carrying ‘auteur’ status following his celebrated collaborations with Harold Pinter, Joseph Losey already had a long history of turning genre conventions outside out. Early American films like psychological noir ‘The Prowler’ (1951) and anti-war allegory ‘The Boy With Green Hair’ (1948) were already total one-offs, and, after the blacklist forced his relocation to the UK, he was soon busy turning humble crime programmer ‘Time Without Pity’ (1957) into an exhausting treatise on post-industrial anxiety, before instigating an unprecedented mash-up of JD youth movie, Kneale-esque science fiction and cold war existentialism in 1962’s extraordinary ‘The Damned’.

All of which makes it interesting to consider just how uncharacteristically normal Losey’s three early collaborations with iconic Welsh tough guy star Stanley Baker turned out to be. The first film they made together, 1959’s ‘Blind Date’ [hastily reviewed on this blog way back in the mists of time] is a stylish but unremarkable whodunit, whilst 1962’s ‘Eve’ [ditto] may have allowed Baker to stretch his thespian wings a little, but is otherwise just a frothy continental melodrama, feeling uncomfortably like a strained British attempt to catch a whiff of post-‘La Dolce Vita’ decadence.

By far the strongest entry in this loose trilogy, 1960’s ‘The Criminal’, is, as its title suggests, just about as generic a crime movie (gangster & prison sub-divisions) as can possibly be imagined. Credited to playwright and future ‘Hard Day’s Night’ screenwriter Alun Owen, from an original draft by Jimmy Sangster, the script manages to trot out a formidable assemblage of hoary old clichés, as Baker’s London-Irish mob boss Johnny Bannion drifts in and out of the slammer whilst punishing his enemies, executing an audacious racetrack heist, hiding the loot, instigating a passionate affair with his ex-girlfriend’s flatmate (Margit Saad), and eventually being betrayed by his trusted right hand man (Losey’s fellow ex-pat Sam Wanamaker).

Could it have been Baker himself who reined in Losey’s more outré tendencies on these projects, I wonder? After all, he got his parallel career as a producer of no nonsense action-adventure pictures off to a flying start with ‘Zulu’ (1964) just a few years later. Indeed, ‘The Criminal’ plays to a great extent like one of the projects its leading man went on to produce (not least the similarly themed ‘Robbery’ (1967)), mixing a sense of raw nerve energy with dour, realistic brutality, whilst showcasing the talents of an extraordinary cast of character players.

Whatever the behind-the-scenes balance of power may have been though, Losey’s presence can still be felt, especially during the film’s prison sequences, which were shot on a vast purpose-built set modelled after the Victorian edifice of HMP Wandsworth (the genuine article was used for exteriors). Though impressively realistic in most respects, this set allows Losey - aided no doubt by cinematographer Robert Krasker, a veteran of Carol Reed’s ‘Odd Man Out’ and ‘The Third Man’ - to frame the action in suitably expressionistic, Kafkaesque fashion, dialling up the claustrophobia to an uncomfortable degree as he obsessively explores the complex power dynamics at play between the inmates and wardens.

In this respect, it would be easy to file ‘The Criminal’ away as the UK’s answer to Jules Dassin’s ‘Brute Force’ (1947) or Jacques Becker’s ‘Le Trou’ (1960). A more relevant point of comparison however might be Raoul Walsh’s classic ‘White Heat’ (1949), which is echoed here in the ‘out-and-in-and-out-again’ structure of the prison story, as well as by the steady accumulation of tension through the film, the betrayal/paranioa tropes and the intermittent outbursts of vein-popping male hysteria.

More importantly for its director perhaps, ‘The Criminal’ also shares with Walsh’s film the underlying notion that its tormented, working class anti-hero never really gets to experience true freedom, finding himself imprisoned just as much by the strictures of the ruthless socio-economic system which defines his actions on the ‘outside’ as he is by the more literal bars and truncheons which confine him on the ‘inside’.

Unpacking all that would be quite enough to keep most filmmakers busy, but Losey, being Losey, also insists on intermittently trying to punch through to the audience via some woefully self-conscious application of Brechtian distancing technique.

This can be most clearly seen during the ‘home-coming’ party which follows Bannion’s initial release from prison, when all music and sound effects suddenly cut out to announce the entrance of his estranged girlfriend Maggie (Jill Bennett). As the assembled partygoers split off to either side and observe her subsequent hysterical outburst like a bemused Greek chorus, what should rightfully be a fairly troubling, low key character exchange is instead imbued with the feel of a ‘West Side Story’-esque ritual showdown. Later in the film meanwhile, an emotionally troubled prisoner is allowed to deliver a long, introspective monologue direct to camera, staring fixedly at the lens in close up as the background shifts out of focus behind him.

In fairness to Losey, he soon found other, better ways to imbue his characters with an inner life, and even managed to incorporate these jarring techniques into his later, more formally experimental, films to great effect. Here though, surrounded by the dour (albeit exaggerated) naturalism of London’s criminal underworld, these attention-grabbing cinematic affectations just seem absurd, bordering on camp - which is frankly the last thing anyone needed, in a movie which was still predicated largely on the simple pleasures of watching Stanley Baker punch people in the face.

Speaking of which, Baker may have railed against being typecast in ‘hard man’ parts in subsequent years (three films in five years with ‘Hell’ in the title will do that for you, I suppose), but for those of us who love the hard-boiled persona he brought to British crime/noir cinema of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, rest assured - we’re pretty much at Peak Stanley with ‘The Criminal’, and it’s beautiful thing to behold, even as he’s hamstrung to some extent by the necessity of slurring his trademark Welsh baritone to attempt some semblance of an Irish accent.

Essentially, Baker lends Johnny Bannion the feel of a man who, above all else, simply wants to be alone, but is cursed to be forever surrounded by other men (and even more troublingly, women) - scheming, wheedling and generally getting in his grill, 24/7. Left to his own devices, we assume, he’d be happy to remain in his outrageously decorated London penthouse, brooding over his impressive collection of jazz LPs; but alas, it’s not to be.

Lest we think we’re dealing with some Jean Gabin-esque sensitive, aesthetically-minded gangster here however, please note that Bannion has a life size photo of a nude model pasted on the back of his bathroom door, and when he is forced to resort to violence (which, of course, is frequently), there is a pure, underhanded street-fighting nastiness to his conduct which is genuinely frightening, whether belting a guard with his hand-cuffed wrists as makes an escape from a prison van, or (in one of the movie’s highlights) reducing a pair of hulking, feckless thugs who have been assigned as his cellmates to tearful agony in a matter of seconds.

Great as he is though, Baker is in constant danger of being upstaged by the rest of the ‘The Criminal’s top drawer cast of cinematic reprobates - not least BITR hero and Losey’s fellow Brechtian, Patrick Magee, getting stuck into one of his very best screen roles as the devilish-yet-craven Prison Warden, Barrows.

Venomous to a fault, Magee builds Barrows into a terrifying and fascinating figure, plumbing depths of weird perversity which I’m 99% sure the film’s script never thought to assign to him. One minute a cowering, authoritarian jobsworth, the next a Mephistophelian provocateur, Barrows seems to be perpetually attempting to stifle his true nature as a glowering sadist, but, he scarcely ever succeeds.

He can’t help addressing his underlings with a hissed, derisive “…mister”, making it sound like the disgusting insult imaginable, whilst the film’s opening sequence finds him pushing obviously-doomed stool pigeon Kelly (Kenneth Cope) down the steel steps to the prison mess hall with all the finality of a witch-hunter lighting a pyre.

Basically, you could write a whole treatise trying to get to the bottom of what makes this gimlet-eyed cur tick, and you’d still never quite get to the bottom of it. Magee’s every gesture appears to conceal some horrible, hidden purpose, and his scenes with Baker in particular crackle with an electrifying antagonism.

Elsewhere meanwhile, British horror fans will immediately feel at home as ‘The Criminal’ opens with the heart-warming sight of Patrick Wymark (‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’, ‘The Skull’) and Murray Melvin (‘The Devils’) enjoying an inevitably crooked game of poker, each looking almost impossibly shifty, and it’s likewise great to see such esteemed players as Tom Bell, Nigel Green and Rupert Davies popping up blink-and-you’ll-miss-it supporting roles. Each of these gents helps contribute to what must surely rank as one of British cinema’s most impressive gallery of villainous grotesques, creating a world so devoid of moral fortitude that Baker’s violent, self-serving antihero appears almost admirable by comparison.

For all this though, ‘The Criminal’ is also noteworthy as an example of a British film in which barely anyone on screen in actually English… well, not in the genealogically correct, WASP-centric manner which would have been recognised as such in the late 1950s, at least.

Bannion and most of his gang members are Irish, as, presumably, is Barrows, whilst the loosely allied gang (led by the affable Grégoire Aslan) who run the prison’s black market are Italian. In fact, it’s striking that, during a scene which takes place in the prison’s Roman Catholic chapel, pretty much our entire cast of characters - inmates and screws alike - are present, solemnly receiving communion!

The few ostensibly English inmates meanwhile tend to have prominent Northern accents, whilst all purpose thug ‘Clobber’ (played by Milton Reid lookalike Kenneth J. Warren, last seen around these parts in The Creeping Flesh) is Australian. As portrayed by the Jewish-American Wanamaker, the ethnicity of Bannion’s right-hand-man Carter is difficult to pin down, whilst Johnny’s girlfriend Suzanne, as played by Saad, is evidently German. In fact, the film’s the only definite, RP-enunciating southern Englishman is actually the haughty prisoner governor, marvellously played by Noel Willman (‘Kiss of the Vampire’, The Reptile).

A near-comically stern yet weak-willed exemplar of English good manners, everything in the tiny world of the governor’s office appears perfectly symmetrical. He is mildly perturbed when a dish of arrow-root biscuits accompanies his morning tea-tray (a cringing lackey apologises for the lack of digestives), seemingly oblivious to the violence, chaos and rampant corruption which define the defiantly heterogeneous community of incarcerated troublemakers beyond his door. 

Even more surprising is the notable presence of black characters in ‘The Criminal’. At the outset of the film, one of Bannion’s cellmates is a West-Indian - though seemingly not fluent in English, he seems a trusted ally nonetheless, communicating through ritual chants of “ok, sailor, ok”, along with the occasional patted shoulder - whilst, delightfully, Johnny’s cellblock also boasts a Sir Lancelot-esque calypso singer, who strums his guitar in the canteen, improvising new lyrics to reflect the prison’s latest dramas, in what seems like a homage to Jacques Tourneur’s ‘I Walked With a Zombie’ (1943). (1)

Elsewhere, during the racetrack scene, the camera briefly zeroes on a black man decked out in some kind of far-out witch doctor get-up (perhaps a real life hawker or busker of some kind?), whilst at Johnny’s home-coming party, we can even see a fully-fledged black gangster strutting his stuff in the background. (Probably not something the Krays or their bigoted ilk would have stood for, needless to say.)

Though not exactly the most progressive representations of black Britons ever seen on screen, the very presence of these characters in an era in which non-whites were generally entirely absent from popular cinema feels like a deliberate statement on the part of the filmmakers. Were they perhaps attempting to portray the criminal class as a kind of loose coalition of oppressed minorities, or just trying, however haphazardly, to provide a more realistic portrayal of working class life in the post-Wind Rush era than had usually been seen on screen up to this point..? Who knows.

Music too contributes hugely to ‘The Criminal’s overall power. In what became a recurring trope in Losey’s films, diegetic music is everywhere - not only in the myriad of songs, chants and rhymes through which the inmates communicate during the prison sequences, but also in Johnny’s prominently displayed jazz collection. As is almost inevitable for an early ‘60s Losey film in fact, UK jazz luminary Johnny Dankworth provides an exquisitely nuanced score, even as viewers are far more likely to remember the contribution made to the soundtrack by his better half, the equally ubiquitous Cleo Laine.

A striking, Nina Simone-ish, near a-cappella blues, Laine’s ‘Prison Ballad (Thieving Boy)’ plays over the film’s opening and closing sequences, and indeed is reprised a number of times in-between. You could accuse the filmmakers of over-playing this track, were it not for the fact that its haunting, icy simplicity proves so astoundingly beautiful that it stops us in out tracks each time it is heard.

Evoking a contemplative, melancholic air which eventually colours the entire film, Laine’s ballad allows this brutal, boot-to-the-face drama to veer, momentarily at least, toward the kind of fatalistic, stylised noir being explored at around the same time by directors in France and Japan.

Would it be too much of a stretch to claim that the snow-covered, rural locations in which the film’s predictably grim final act takes place reminded me of Truffaut’s ‘Tirez Sur Le Pianiste’ / ‘Shoot the Piano Player’, which premiered one month after ‘The Criminal’?

Probably, but nonetheless, that feeling is in there somewhere, helping Losey’s opus slog its way into viewers’ affections with a steely determination worthy of Baker himself. Though overlooked by critics upon release, ‘The Criminal’ now stands out as one of the strongest entries in the cycle of late 50s/early 60s British noirs within which its star proved such a defining presence, remaining sharp, brutal and disconcerting enough to make vicars, governors social workers choke on their arrowroot biscuits, however many decades down the line.

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(1) Hearteningly, Tommy Eyrtle, playing the calypso singer, went on to enjoy a prolific career in British film and TV, notably performing his own composition ‘Man Smart (Woman Smarter)’ in the 1965 ‘Dangerman’ episode ‘Man on the Beach’. Prince Monolulu - presumably playing the un named West Indian prisoner, although he is credited as “himself” on IMDB(?!) - had less luck however. Born in the Danish Virgin Islands in 1881, he died in London in 1965, his only credit subsequent to ‘The Criminal’ being an appearance on ‘The Ken Dodd Show’ the same year.

Noir Diary # 15: The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)

Following the lead of the film itself, let’s start off here by getting the boring bit out of the way: Don Siegel’s ‘The Lineup’ is, technically speaking, a TV spin-off.

Also known as ‘San Francisco Beat’, ‘The Lineup’ began as a radio drama in 1950 before moving to TV via the auspices of CBS in 1953. Generally viewed as a close competitor to Jack Webb’s more successful ‘Dragnet’, the show followed basically the same formula, following the day-to-day crime-fighting travails of straight-laced SFPD detective Lieutenant Ben Guthrie (played by Warner Anderson, who here resembles a somewhat older, less physically intimidating Lee Marvin), with Tom Tully (mysteriously absent from the movie version) as his partner, Sergeant Matt Grebb.

Over a decade since Jules Dassin initially kick-started the trend for cross-breeding Film Noir tropes with shot-on-location / faux-documentary police procedural stuff in 1947’s ‘The Naked City’, it’s safe to assume that movie-goers knew the drill pretty well by this point, and one can only imagine that yet another based-on-the-hit-TV-series trudge through the same good-solid-detective-work, ‘crime doesn’t play’ type palaver didn’t exactly sound too thrilling.

Assigned director Don Siegel and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant apparently agreed. After Silliphant knocked out a script which the pair both saw as the basis for an exciting, unconventional crime movie, Siegel claims that he pleaded with producers Frank Cooper and Jaime Del Valle for the opportunity to extract the movie from the ‘Lineup’ brand and let it stand alone as its own thing - but no dice. Although Cooper & Del Valle apparently didn’t give much of a damn how the film actually turned out, a ‘Lineup’ movie had been promised, and a ‘Lineup’ movie was going to be delivered.

Needless to say, Siegel and Silliphant responded to this decision by essentially pulling the same audacious bait and switch on their audience that Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides had laid on fans of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels a few years earlier with their extraordinary and iconoclastic ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ (1956).

Doing little to hide their disdain for the franchise they were ostensibly working within, the director and screenwriter proceeded to entirely side-line the familiar certainties that viewers of the TV show might have been expecting, largely confining the obligatory police procedural segments to the opening twenty minutes, and pointedly relegating the show’s star Warner Anderson to the bottom of the on-screen cast list.

Meanwhile, they proceeded to kick up a veritable sandstorm of darker, more challenging and just plain weirder material, resulting in a movie which, a few decades after the dust had settled, began to gain recognition as one of the most startling and forward-thinking American crime films of its era.

Right out of the gate, Siegel’s take on ‘The Lineup’ plunges us into chaos. Out of control automobiles screech around the Embarcdaero in San Francisco’s port district, as suitcases are flung around, incomprehensible yells are exchanged and a police officer is callously mown down by a speeding taxi before the driver takes a bullet in the back and careers into the side of a jack-knifed truck. When Guthrie and his surrogate partner Quine (played by frankly terrifying tough guy actor Emile Meyer) dutifully arrive on the scene to assess the damage, all they can do is despairingly ask, “why?!” (1)

Twenty minutes or so of briskly-paced but uninspiring A-to-B police-work - sticking broadly within the TV show’s remit, albeit with a somewhat harder edge and more attractive locations - help them answer this question to a certain extent, as they uncover the bare bones of an elaborate conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the city, using pre-loaded ‘oriental’ souvenirs carried through customs by unsuspecting tourists.

There are some fun moments during this opening slog - both Anderson and Mayer do solid work, there is some exquisite San Francisco location shooting and I particularly enjoyed the bit where the police’s ‘lab man’ opens up a suspect package with a flick-knife, licks a big dollop of powder off his finger and declares, “yep, it’s heroin alright” - but it is only once the focus shifts elsewhere that the movie really begins.

Indeed, Siegel had literally wanted the film to begin here, as we board a flight into the city and meet the two contractors hired by an unseen cartel to reclaim the hidden dope from its unwitting carriers -- and boy, what a pair they are.

The uncertain relationship between psycho triggerman Dancer (Eli Wallach - blank stare, twisted grimace, porkpie hat) and his older, somewhat effeminate ‘handler’ Julian (brilliantly played by Robert Keith - beady eyes, skull-like grin, pencil moustache) was reportedly intended by Silliphant to mimic that of an aspiring Hollywood star and his agent (“if he continues to listen to me, he’ll be the best,” Julian declares at one point, in the process of talking up his boy’s unparalleled talents in the field of crime). A sly, in-jokey conceit, this approach which works superbly, creating an unforgettably amoral, inscrutable odd couple whose interplay pretty much dominates the film from this moment onward. (2)

Once Julian and Dancer (god, that name) are on the scene, Guthrie and Quine fall almost entirely into the background, turning up merely to shake their heads over the latest corpses and radio in for roadblocks and ambulances. We’re 100% with the bad guys on this one, and that’s just as well, because we just can’t keep our eyes off these two creeps - They’re just fascinatingly perverse in every respect.

As Sergio Angelini thus observes in his essay on the film for the Indicator label’s Columbia Noir Vol. 1 box set, “chaos is given a face and a psychological profile while order is merely represented by men in hats”. In truth though, what keeps us so glued to the travails of these goons is that Silliphant and Siegel never allow us to get an angle on - as the guy who gives Dancer the low-down at the port puts it - “what makes [them] tick”. They are nightmare figures from a world we will never understand.

Where did they come from? (The script tells us Miami, implausibly citing their alleged tans, but if so they must have been living underground like moles.) How did they meet? Has Julian spent his entire life recruiting young psychopaths and sponging off their ill-gotten gains like some kind of sociopathic boxing promoter? What exactly is the nature of their relationship? (Let’s not even go there.)

Throughout the film, the characters Dancer and Julian encounter seem as unsure what to make us them as we are. Pushed by their port-side contact, Dancer makes some blunt statement about not having had a father, but that doesn’t really take us very far in terms of armchair psychology. Later in the film, when tearful hostage Dorothy Bradshaw (Mary LaRoche) demands to know “what kind of men” the pair are, the string of gnomic non-sequiturs the lizard-like Julian spits out in response (“women have no place in society”, “crying is aggressive and so is the law”, “people of your class don’t understand the criminal’s need for violence”) raise more questions than they answer.

All we know at the outset however is that, like all good agents, Julian has his boy learning proper English grammar (“how many characters on a street corner know how to say, ‘if I were you?’”), tempering Dancer’s sullen, animalistic incomprehension with his own twisted sense of refinement. Meanwhile, he gleefully obsesses over the poetic implications of the last words of the Dancer’s victims, which - in another wonderfully tweisted detail of Silliphant’s script - he scrupulously records in a notebook.

Add a young Richard Jaeckel to the equation as the duo’s feckless ‘wheelman’ - fish-faced, bowtied and alcoholic, he’s been drafted in at short notice after the phony taxi driver we saw in the opening got snuffed - and it’s clear the deck is stacked for some pretty hair-raising mayhem over the next sixty minutes or so.

As Angelini further notes, our ostensible ‘heroes’, the quotidian cops, don’t even get to share any screen-time with these outlandish villains. Mirroring the movie’s opening, Guthrie and Quine only make it to the final showdown in time to despairingly survey the carnage. Seemingly left speechless before the final fanfare crashes in, they are denied even their obligatory “well that just about wraps things up” sign off, closing the movie on a note of nihilistic self-destruction which an empty dedication to hard working SFPD does little to dissipate.

In spite of his legendary status amongst crime/noir aficionados, in truth I’ve always felt that Don Siegel’s work as a director can be a bit hit and miss (it’s difficult to imagine his cult gaining much traction on the basis of pictures like Private Hell 36, for example). Looking across his wider career however, he always seems to come alive when dealing with tales of morally ambiguous anti-heroes or outright maniacs of one kind or another - so of course it figures that he was absolutely at the top of his game for this one. Basically we’ve got the man who brought us ‘Riot in Cell Block 11’ and ‘Dirty Harry’ firing on all cylinders here, and the results are nothing short of spectacular. 

In fact, ‘The Lineup’ feels very much like the Ur-text of all past and future Siegel movies, revelling in the pulp-crime aesthetics of his earlier black & white pictures whilst prefiguring elements of the most memorable films he would go on to make over the next few decades (not only the high voltage action and San Fran location work of ‘Dirty Harry’, but the psychotic criminal protagonists of ‘The Killers’ (1964), the elliptical visual storytelling of ‘Charley Varrick’ (1973), and many more besides, I'm sure).

As Siegel wrangles raw, livewire energy, technical precision and unsettling, off-beat artistry here, it’s easy to understand why a young Michael Reeves made a pilgrimage to the director’s doorstep early in the ‘60s to prostrate himself before the master; as a concise summation of the director’s formal strengths and auteurist tics, ‘The Lineup’ is pretty hard to beat.

As with so many of these ‘50s Columbia flicks, the claustrophobic framing and expressionistic shadows of ‘traditional’ noir style have been thoroughly swept away in ‘The Lineup’ (aside from anything else, the entire movie takes place in daylight). Rather than merely falling back on a kind of bland quasi-realism however, Siegel and his DP Hal Mohr offer an alternative visual sensibility which proves just as compelling as the old-time good stuff.

It has often been said that, in a Siegel movie, the camera is always in the right place, and ‘The Lineup’ consistently bears this out, as he and Mohr make inspired use of the by-now-standard widescreen aspect ratio, framing the film’s locations in such a way as to highlight jagged, horizontal lines bisecting bright, white spaces, creating an anxious collage of portside cranes, highway overpasses, art deco tower blocks and advertising hoardings.

Throughout proceedings, the placid serenity of the San Francisco skyline is cut through with a jittery, urban energy, as examples of every means of mechanised transportation known to man (ships, planes, motorcycles - even a blimp at one point) roar hither and yon behind the action, emphasising the relentless velocity of the movie’s plotting whilst casually pre-empting the starkly modernist take on the crime genre inaugurated by John Boorman’s ‘Point Blank’ a decade later.

All of which of course is merely a high-falutin’ way of leading up to the fact that the extended car chase sequence which forms ‘The Lineup’s finale is totally out of control, incorporating a level of stunt-work, action direction and cranked up, adrenalin rush cutting which feels startlingly ahead of its time, pretty much single-handedly inaugurating the “beat THAT” lineage of attention-grabbing car action which would eventually go on to bring us the successive thrills of ‘Bullitt’, ‘The French Connection’, ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ and so on.

Certainly, I’m not aware of anything else from ‘50s that even comes close to this level of visceral excitement. Even though Siegel falls back on using back projection for most of the interior car shots, it’s at least the best back projection you’ll ever see, with the actors’ reactions and the movement of the ‘foreground’ car perfectly timed to match the hair-raising swerves and near misses of the pre-shot footage, lending it a sense of realism which rarely wavers.

In fact, the sweaty, maniacal claustrophobia of these ‘in-car’ shots - which see the crooks collapse into violent, recriminatory mania as their hostages cower and shriek and the car screeches crazily to avoid on-coming traffic - anticipate yet another trope which would become a staple of hardboiled filmmaking a few decades later, primarily on the other side of the Atlantic, where similar in-car chaos was utilised to great effect in films like Mario Bava’s ‘Rabid Dogs’ (1976) and Pasquale Festa Campanile’s Hitch-Hike (1977), amongst others.

And, when we move outside for the wider exterior shots, well, the stunt-work is just honest-to-god breath-taking, climaxing in a heart-stopping emergency stop / handbrake turn on the edge of an unfinished highway overpass which would have given Jackie Chan the jitters thirty years later. (3) 

Once we stop to think about it for a few minutes of course, much of Silliphant’s script for ‘The Lineup’ is outrageously implausible. Right from the outset, the idea that an international criminal cartel would go to the trouble of planting shipments of dope on unsuspecting tourists, only to then hire a pair of highly conspicuous out-of-town psychos to collect the goods, leaving a trail of murder victims and drug traces in their wake, is totally absurd.

And, that’s before we even get on to the practicalities of smuggling junk in the handles of ivory tableware, or - my personal favourite - the notion that a reclusive, wheelchair-bound mob boss would undertake a dope pick-up himself, in-person and apparently alone… and in a location which can only be reached by navigating multiple flights of stairs, no less!

But, when a movie’s writing is this consistently inventive and attention-grabbing, when the on-screen action is so fast-moving, so packed with wild beauty and delicious craziness, the viewer is forced to engage a mind-set usually reserved for watching giallo and euro-horror movies and simply ask, who cares?

As James Ellroy points out in his characteristically scabrous contributions to the commentary track for the film recorded alongside noir expert Eddie Muller, when it comes down to it, crime fiction is essentially bullshit. Nothing as sensational or destructive as the events portrayed in this film has ever gone down in the annals of real life crime in America - so as long as you’re making shit up, why not go wild?

As in a Fulci or Argento film, each one of the aforementioned scripting absurdities allows for the creation of cinematic moments - most of them heretofore unmentioned in this review - so audacious and unexpected that only the most joyless, movie-hating pedant would really have cause to complain.

From Vaughn Taylor’s ice-cold turn as ‘The Man’, to the assassination Dancer carries out in the steam bath of ‘The Seaman’s Club’, so loaded with unspoken sexual tension it’s a wonder it didn’t jam the projector, to the horribly suggestive sight of Julian tearing apart the innards of child’s Japanese doll as its owner looks on aghast and uncomprehending - almost every scene in ‘The Lineup’ offers something unforgettable. Like some golden treasury of pulp crime excess, it all serves to build a picture of a precarious, morally bankrupt world in which our bourgeois certainties might explode into bloody violence might explode at any moment.

For a ‘50s studio film, ‘The Lineup’ ultimately presents a remarkably frightening conception of the world, and, anchored by exceptional performances for Wallach and Keith, it remains entirely believable on an emotional level, even as the plotting skirts the fringes of outright insanity, helping cementing its place in the pantheon alongside ‘The Big Combo’, ‘Touch of Evil’ and ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ as one of the very best American crime films of the ‘50s. Hard-boiled cinema at its finest.

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(1) You’ll recall Emile Meyer for his role as the crooked cop in ‘The Sweet Smell oSuccess’ (1957), or perhaps as the priest in Kubrick’s ‘Paths of Glory’ (also ‘57), or as Rufus Ryker in ‘Shane’ (1953). Once you’ve seen him in anything however, his face’ll stick with you, that’s for sure.

(2) Outside of this film, I mainly know Robert (father of Brian) Keith for his role as the unconventional, sympathetic cop character in another excellent San Francisco noir, ‘Woman on the Run’ (1950), but as a solidly reliable character actor he played smaller roles in a raft of quote-unquote ‘classics’ over the years, including ‘The Wild One’ (’53), ‘Guys and Dolls’ (’55) and ‘Written on the Wind’ (’56).

(3) Legend has it that stuntman Guy Way performed this stunt with his own girlfriend in the back seat of the car, doubling the movie’s female hostage. She needed to be helped out of the vehicle, having entered a state of extreme shock, and Siegel later implied in an interview that the couple’s relationship never recovered.