Blood Island Journal # 4: The Blood Drinkers (Gerardo de Leon, 1964)

Previously in this hastily scribbled and mysteriously stained journal, we’ve raised the question of what exactly happened vis-a-vis the career of Filipino horror auteur Gerard de Leon in the interim between the sombre professionalism of 1959’s Terror is a Man and the outrageous Tiki bar camp of 1968’s Brides of Blood. 1964’s ‘The Blood Drinkers’ is the answer, and I’m happy to report that it is a very satisfactory answer indeed.

Originally filmed in the Tagalog language under the slightly more poetic title ‘Kulay Dugo Ang Gabi’ [“Blood is the Colour of the Night”] and re-cut and re-dubbed for U.S. audiences shortly thereafter, ‘The Blood Drinkers’ turns out in fact to be an under-appreciated masterwork of world-wide weird gothic cinema – a uniquely oneiric excursion into monster movie dream-space, in which ‘logic’ and ‘narrative’ are reduced to distant, blurry figures waving vainly from the far-off hills, whilst de Leon instead conjures a pungent, indelible atmosphere that at various points bears comparison to the work of Jean Rollin, José Mojica Marins, and the productions of Abel Salazar’s Cinematográfica ABSA in Mexico.

So, yes, basically what I’m saying is, if you were to boil down all of your old Mondo Macabro DVDs into a magic potion, drinking it would probably produce a vision rather like ‘The Blood Drinkers’. I hope I’m not over-selling it, but seriously folks, this is great stuff.

One thing that immediately differentiates ‘The Blood Drinkers’ from the Blood Island movies is the lack of American involvement on the production side. Both de Leon’s regular collaborator Eddie Romero and U.S. co-producer Kane Lynn are notably absent from the credits, with future action-exploitation kingpin Cirio H. Santiago instead acting as sole producer.

As noted, the film was shot in Tagalog, presumably with the expectation that a local audience might actually want to watch it, and – joy of joys – it features no slumming American b-movie actors in garish short-sleeved shirts uncomfortably wiping sweat from their brows. (“It’s nice to know the Filipinos can make a monster movie without John Ashley,” cracked Michael Weldon in his Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film.)

This lack of foreign investment carries with it an accompanying lack of budgetary resources which, strangely, actually works in the film’s favour in some respects. Most notably, a shortage of colour film stock led to the majority of the film being shot in black and white, heavily tinted in post-production with a wild array of hues (red, blue, purple, and everything in between) to give the illusion of colour – a technique which I don’t think had been used this extensively since the silent era.

Although this could easily have been seen at the time as a cheap, misleading gimmick, in retrospect the decision to use tinted B&W was inspired. It lends ‘The Blood Drinkers’ a ‘feel’ that is entirely unique within ‘60s horror, and, whereas the film’s few genuine colour sequences (used to differentiate scenes of ‘normal’, everyday life) look blurry and drab, as if shot with sub-par, bin-salvaged stock, the quality of the black & white photography (courtesy of veteran Filipino DP Felipe Sacdalan) is frequently magnificent.

The antiquated aura created by the tinting process is furthered when, straight out of the credits (blaring, ‘40s Universal style music needle-dropped over crude, blood-dripping typography – very Coffin Joe), we see an extremely ornate Victorian funeral carriage (where on earth did they find one of those in Manilla?!) rolling down an uneven country road, in shots that look as if they could have come straight from Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ or Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’… until that is, we see a (presumably contemporary) black-finned American sedan following close behind.

If the temporal dissonance created by this seems strange, it’s as nothing compared to the raw weirdness generated by the crew who eventually disembark from these vehicles, after they’ve passed through the spiked iron gates of the obligatory crumbling, colonial-era mansion.

I may not have been very impressed by Ronald Remy as the Mad Doctor of Blood Island, but rewind a few years and he’s absolutely fantastic here as Dr Marco (note THAT surname), our resident vampire overlord. (Yes, the vampire is also a scientist, got a problem with that?)

Bearing a passing resemblance to a shaven-headed Marlon Brando (imagine if he’d played Colonel Kurtz ten years earlier in life and you’ll get the general idea), Remy projects a sinister and imposing screen presence, communicating with his underlings using dramatic, sweeping hand gestures, and modelling a fetching pair of futuristic, wraparound shades alongside his regulation opera cape and crumpled evening dress.

Clearly a “belt and braces” kind of guy when it comes to assistants, Dr Marco employs the services of both a capering dwarf and a snaggle-toothed hunchback, and he is also accompanied by an impossibly beautiful young woman, who also sports shades and, in this opening scene, wears a glistening snake-skin dress. Played by Eva Montes and credited as ‘Tanya, the Vampire Bride’ on IMDB, this woman’s taciturn, unexplained presence - reminiscent of Vulnavia in the Dr. Phibes movies - adds greatly to the film’s eerie atmos, not to mention its subliminal erotic charge.

Completing this uncanny procession is a middle-aged lady in a heavy black shawl – she turns out to be the aristocratic mother of the deceased – and of course, the occupant of the hearse herself: the perfectly preserved body of the woman who turns out to be Dr Marco’s Great Love.

Now, personally I would have thought physical death was more or less compulsory for the romantic partner of a vampire, so I’m not sure what the assembled weirdos are all so upset about, but hey, I don’t write these things. Anyway, Dr Marco seems determined to revive his beloved – “in all other matters I have risen above human feelings, but I MUST save Katerina,” he declares at one point. So, before you know it, she is laid out on the slab in the mansion’s cramped chapel of rest, hooked up to his ramshackle array of whirring mad scientist machinery (it mostly looks like WWII-era radio equipment?).

In order to save Katerina, the Doctor announces, he will need to claim the still-beating heart of her estranged sister, who lives down in the village, blissfully unaware of all this. Said sister turns out to be our soon-to-be-long-suffering heroine Charita (Amalia Fuentes, who naturally also plays Katerina with the aid of an unflattering blond wig), and the vampiric cohort begin their plans for her by promptly murdering the elderly adoptive parents to whom Charita’s mother abandoned her twenty years earlier. Nasty.

At the funeral, Chairta’s birth mother (posing as her aunt) basically tells her, “ok, you must come and live with me now”, and her surviving male relative and the local priest are both like, “yeah, I guess that’s probably the best thing to do here” – but Charita herself is unsure. In particular, she is anxious about the fact that she and her deceased parents seemed to be operating some kind of proto-Air B&B / guesthouse type arrangement, and that some guests – Victor (handsome young Eddie Fernandez) and his two sisters – have arrived from the city in a shiny red convertible, unaware of their hostess’s travails.

Thankfully though, Victor and the girls are nice folks, so they understand that Charita might not have had a chance to make the beds and so on - and indeed, they turn out to be happy to help her out in her fight against the vampire and his weird minions, which is super lovely of them.(1)

And…. that’s about all we’re getting here in terms of plot, which is fine by me. The remainder of the film basically consists of a long series of nocturnal stalkings, random vampiric encounters, eerie, fog-shrouded mesmerism and stern lectures on vampire lore, all of which tend to blur into one, in the best possible way.

In a sense, this mirrors the kind of “characters wandering around bumping into each other” stuff that blights the middle acts of the Blood Island films, but the superior artistry and atmosphere of ‘The Blood Drinkers’ manages to transform this directionless drift into a far more pleasing sensation of woozy, nightmarish delirium, comparable to that subsequently perfected in Europe by the ‘Erotic Castle Movies’ of the early 1970s.

In one particularly startling ‘primal scene’, Charita is awakened in night, only to find the ravenous zombified corpses of her recently buried parents stomping toward her in their grave-clothes. They proceed to man-handle her and attempt to chew her neck with their newly acquired fangs, until Dr Marco materialises out of the darkness and begins flagellating his badly behave undead minions with a giant bull-whip! Holy hell.

Elsewhere, Tanya and Katerina (who now seems to be wandering around under her own steam after drinking some blood, so I’m not sure where that leaves the plot…?) emerge from massive banks of fog (seriously, this film goes toe-to-toe with 1960’s ‘City of the Dead’ for sheer quantity of dry ice), diaphanous gowns swirling as they sl-o-o-w-l-y approach their hypnotised victims, Theremin blaring wildly on the soundtrack. It is all absolutely marvellous.

Until I watched ‘The Blood Drinkers’, I was unaware that the concept of “too much theremin” was one that I would ever need to acknowledge in waking life, but verily, this film’s soundtrack (music “directed” by Tito Arevalo, although I don’t know whether any cues were actually recorded specifically for the movie) has TOO MUCH THEREMIN.

Meanwhile, Victor gets stuck into some creditable punch ups with the hunchback and the dwarf, and Dr Marco calls upon the services of BASRA, seemingly some kind of supernatural bat spirit thing which hovers over him in the form of an adorable flappy-winged bat puppet.

Apparently this whole Basra business was the invention of the film’s American distributors at Hemisphere Pictures, who, whilst recutting the film for the U.S. market, decided that they liked a few brief close up shots of the bat so much, they determined to repeat them about twenty times over the course of the film, giving it a name, and inserting accompanying reaction shots of Ronald Remy singing its praises!

A bastardisation of de Leon’s original film? No doubt, but with the director’s initial Tagalog cut apparently lost to the ages (most likely a victim of vintage Filipino cinema’s catastrophically low survival rate), we’re stuck with Hemisphere’s version, and personally I’m more than happy to accept Basra and his repetitious antics as yet another loopy element crammed into an already rich smorgasbord of demented horror movie imagery. In fact, I really love the little fella. Look at him go!

“Remember my dear, the colour is blood red. Basra is calling, you must discard all other thoughts... you shall utter no word without the permission of BASRA. Remember Basra is your master, Basra is watching!”

As is clearly signalled by the fact that our head vampire is also a scientist (who also seems to venerate some kind of god-bat), ‘The Blood Drinkers’ take on the whole “science vs religion” thing as regards vampirism is a bit confused, to say the least.

At one point, the good guys consult the local priest (voiced in the English dub by your friend and mine, Mr Vic Diaz, who also provides the film’s totally redundant voiceover narration). “Vampires, vampires, ah – here we are,” the priest mutters as he runs his finger down the index of his Big Black Book of Evil (every clergyman should have one), and, facts suitably checked, proceeds to lay down the lore.

Interestingly, the priest insists that stakes plunged into the hearts of the undead must be wooden, because, and I quote, “the mysterious germ, the bacillis vampiris, creates in the body of the vampire a fluid which is similar in chemical composition to that of glue”. This means that they cannot be harmed by bullets, but, “wood turns the glue into water”. Curious stuff indeed.

Subsequently, the priest also clarifies that, “vampires are not afraid of the cross, it is the icon’s reflection that they really fear; they're afraid of the glare of the light”, so, uh… ok, bearing in mind that this movie was probably dubbed into English on a pretty tight deadline, I’m just going to leave that there for more pedantic souls than myself to unpack.

Despite these pseudo-scientific musings however, the priest soon pulls himself together and remembers who’s paying his wages, telling Charita, “there is something more valuable than bullets or wooden stakes, and that is... prayer and faith my child!”

Elsewhere, the Catholic background of Filipino culture makes itself strongly felt, as de Leon fills his mise en scene with crosses, crucifixes, rosary beads and chintzy porcelain icons of one kind or another, and, as things progress, the film seems to follow the lead of its resident spiritual advisor by doubling down on the more church-y side of the equation.

Following a midnight mass and ad-hoc exorcism session at the high altar, the power of our heroes’ collective prayer seems to instigate an extraordinary sequence in which Dr Marco and Katerina awake, apparently freed from their vampiric curse, and emerge into the world of full colour, walking hand in hand through an over-saturated, sun-dappled rose garden. An intoxicating, weirdly moving, non-sequitur, this scene feels almost like a lost fragment from a ‘40s Powell & Pressburger film, encouraging us to feel a certain empathy for the austere romantic dignity displayed by the previously monstrous Dr Marco.

It also feels very much like it should be an ending, but, there’s still twenty minutes left on the clock so, inevitably, things don’t work out for the immortal lovers, and we’re soon back in the blood red netherworld of Basra and Gordo the hunchback for a final good vs evil showdown, including the extraordinary sight of the priest, bible in hand, leading a cross and torch bearing procession of robed church-goers, who square off in the graveyard against Dr Marco’s ever-growing army of the undead. (So, not much room for ambiguity there vis-a-vis the film’s religious intent!)

As more open-minded vintage horror fans will be well aware, the explosion of regional gothic horror production which spread across the world in the wake of Hammer’s ‘Dracula’ (and, to a lesser extent, AIP’s Poe cycle) in the 1960s was a rare and wonderful thing to behold. The progress of this wave can literally be traced border to border across the entire globe, but, within the further reaches of the cycle, I’d go so far as to say that ‘The Blood Drinkers’ is probably the best explicitly Western-influenced ‘60s gothic horror film I’ve ever seen from an Asian country - a heavily qualified boast perhaps, but an impressive one nonetheless.

In view of the presumably minimal resources available to them, the film stands as an extraordinary achievement on the part of de Leon and his collaborators. Over half a century later, it stands out for its beautiful photography, intelligent and emotionally engaged direction and wildly imaginative production design, as well as for its richly pungent atmospherics and – die-hard gothic horror viewers should take particular note of this final point – for its *pacing*.

Yes, within the context of its oft-plodding genre, ‘The Blood Drinkers’ moves like a rocket, with almost non-stop spooky action, and relatively little dialogue-based down-time. Imagine - a ‘60s gothic horror without any stuffy scenes in which people sit around an oversized dining table making awkward small talk, and get shown to their rooms because they must be tired from their long journey etc. Incredible though it may seem, Gerardo de Leon proved it was possible. Praise the lord, or Basra, or whoever!

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(1) Checking out Eddie Fernandez’s IMDB profile reveals a whole secret history of (now presumably lost) Filipino crime movies and spy adventures, informing us that he appeared “in the title role” of ‘Johnny Oro: Kaaway ng Krimen’, ‘Hong Kong 999’, ‘Triggerman’, ‘Wanted: Johnny L’ and ‘The Lucky 9 Commandos’, amongst others. Oh, for a time machine, and the necessary funding to establish a temperature-controlled film preservation facility in Manila circa 1966, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Check out these great European poster designs:

New Movies Reviews!

As in, a few short-as-possible takes on recently released movies – because, uncharacteristically, I seem to have watched quite a few of them recently.

One Cut of the Dead

(Shin'ichirô Ueda, 2017)

If you’ve not yet seen this high concept Japanese indie mega-hit, let me simply say that you probably should, because it’s wonderful.

Beyond that however, it is the very definition of a film that is almost impossible to write about without spoiling the surprise, so what follows is less of a conventional review, and more just a couple of quick pieces of advice for potential viewers.

1. Though it is being marketed as a zombie film, I’d probably tag this one more as a family drama, disguised as a film-about-filmmaking, disguised as a zombie film, so - keep your monster kid expectations in check.

2. Though the opening half hour might well cause you to question why you’re bothering to watch this thing, stick with it and you will be richly rewarded.

3. Likewise, if you, like me, tend to experience motion sickness when watching shaky-cam handheld footage, this opening act will soon become a horrendous, stomach-churning nightmare. Once again though, please keep it together and keep your eyes on the screen, because blessed relief awaits at the thirty minute mark, and you’ll be disappointed if you missed some important details whilst staring at your shoes feeling nauseous.

And finally, I will note that, despite its low budget origins, this film’s achievements in the oft-overlooked fields of pre-production planning and continuity are quite possibly unparalleled in the medium, and, I believe, deserve to be recognised with some kind of gigantic medal and a hearty round of applause from the entire international film community.

Get Out

(Jordan Peele, 2017)

So yes, I was pretty late getting around to this one. I really liked it though! In particular, I appreciated the way in which Peele manages to spin his “yeah, I see where this is going” Stepford/Bodysnatchers type premise into a considerably more challenging and thought-provoking social allegory than I had been expecting.

By which I mean, I like that he clearly decided that making his bad guys traditional white supremacists would be just too easy, and instead sets his satirical sights upon a slightly trickier target – namely, a very particular slice of white, liberal America that tends to fetishize the black experience whilst failing to respect the existence of black people as independent, self-determining, well… people, basically.

Elsewhere, the film has some fine acting and character interplay and some effective bits of humour, together with an exquisitely rendered atmosphere of unease, top notch cinematography and a handful of queasily surreal images that will live long in the memory. All in all, it rather put me in mind of a slicker and more professional Larry Cohen film, which is certainly no bad thing. (One Larry Cohen film in particular in fact, but… that’s a story we’ll get into in another forthcoming review, I suspect.)

All of these qualities are meanwhile only slightly undermined meanwhile by a script so monumentally unfeasible that plotholers will no doubt be gleefully trooping toward this one with their hardhats and grappling hooks for years to come.

(My biggest personal bugbear: I know there’s probably a point to be made about the black community being ill-served by law enforcement, but even so, surely someone in a position of authority must have noticed that ten plus missing persons cases were all in a relationship with the same woman at the time of their disappearance…?)

The Sisters Brothers

(Jacques Audiard, 2018)

A sprawling, historically detailed pre-Civil War western with an oddball, black comic tone, ‘The Sisters Brothers’ is in many ways an unmistakably contemporary (by which I mean, 21st century) prospect, but at the same time, it certainly wouldn’t have embarrassed the architects of the great, revisionist westerns of the 1970s, in terms of its narrative ambition, production design, immersive visuals and general sense-of-place.

In these days of micro-managed, producer-bedevilled screenplays, I appreciated the way that the film feels, for better or worse, like the sole vision of writer-director Jacques Audiard (who makes his Hollywood debut here I believe, having previously hit big in his native France with ‘A Prophet’ (2009) and ‘The Beat My Heart Skipped’ (2005)). This in spite of the fact that the list of production companies & sundry other entities involved in ‘presenting’ ‘The Sisters Brothers’ takes up an entire widescreen frame of subtitle-sized text. (Honestly, I thought it was a gag, until the opening scene – depicting a massacre - established a considerably less flippant tone.)

In particular, I liked the way that this film’s storytelling moves away from the “leaden gravity of karmic fate” approach so often favoured by westerns, instead adopting a rambling, quixotic framework that allows all kinds of episodic diversions and sidebars to distract us from the main thrust of the title characters’ intertwined arcs, including random bear attacks, shipwrecks, transgender casino proprietors and a tour through the bright lights of Gold Rush-era San Francisco.

Adherence to conventional screenwriting doctrine would have seen most of this stuff mercilessly excised, but personally, I’m glad that that these various bits and pieces made the final cut, simply because they are fun and interesting, and help to make the world of the film richer and more involving than it may have been if restricted to a straight-down-the-line, three act type job.

Speaking of rambling however…. well, let’s just say that, whereas the great American westerns of the past were largely united by their zen-like mastery of the ‘SHOW, DON’T TELL’ approach to character development, Audiard by contrast takes the Wes Anderson route here, allowing his characters to bang on interminably about their family backgrounds, personal ambitions and psychological conflicts, sometimes even in the form of fourth wall-breaking, straight-to-camera monologues.

Lord in heaven, I’ve never known such a bunch of touchy-feely cowboys – The Wild Bunch they ain’t. In fact, if sainted Sam Peckinpah was still with us, the effect of a screening of this one on the old boy’s blood pressure might have finished him off for good.

This all culminates in a curious variation on the old ‘Treasure of Sierra Madre’ gold prospecting expedition, in which three of the four grizzled, gun-toting participants gradually come to recognise each other as frustrated, autodidact intellectuals who share a utopian belief in the common brotherhood of man…. leaving only one authentically brutish tough guy amongst their number. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well, but, like most everything else in this film, it at least ends badly in a pretty unusual way, breaking curious new ground within this most heavily codified of cinematic genres.

I’ll admit, all the self-reflective nattering and teary pontificating in ‘The Sisters Brothers’ really got my goat – perhaps simply because it conflicts so strongly with my own personal ideal of the western – but on the other hand, there’s a whole load of satisfyingly cathartic violence here too, so hey - swings and roundabouts.

In most other respects however, this is an admirable piece of proper, old fashioned filmmaking, anchored by a truly exceptional performance from John C. Reilly as the older, more mature of the two brothers. His relationship with his wilder younger sibling (Joaquin Phoenix) touches upon that same ‘old, dying west vs new, incoming civilisation’ conflict that lies at the heart of so many of those brilliant ‘60s and ‘70s westerns - only here, it is civility, settlement and compromise that Audiard sees as the more noble, more poetic option, in contrast to the doomed, twilight-of-the-gods masculine belligerence hymned by directors like Peckinpah and Leone.

Though the film’s occasionally quirky tone and failure connect with me emotionally prevent me from hailing it as a modern classic, there is a lot going on in ‘The Sisters Brothers’ for western scholars to get their teeth into, and it certainly makes for a fine way to pass an evening, irrespective of one’s personal investment in the genre.

Widows

(Steve McQueen, 2018)

Venturing even further toward the mainstream (because Japan Airlines in-flight entertainment neglected to include any English friendly old movies), I actually thought the trailer for this all-star heist movie from Steve McQueen (not *that* Steve McQueen, as I will insist on specifying until the day I die) actually looked quite promising, and indeed, as an intricately plotted crime procedural set in modern day Chicago, it’s rock solid.

In fact, watching it feels very much like reading a rock solid, intricately plotted contemporary crime novel, an achievement which I’m going to assume goes all the way back to Lynda La Plante’s source novel. (I’ve never previously felt the need to read any of her charity shop-filling doorstops, but I do feel somewhat warmer toward them on the basis of this satisfyingly labyrinthine, POV-hopping yarn.)

Outside of all the stuff with gun and gangsters and vans blowing up, there is plenty of swelling music, emotive flashbacks, manipulative ‘tearjerking’ moments and a lot of (perfectly reasonable, let’s face it) commentary on the hard road faced by women and ethnic minorities in contemporary society to endear the film to the Oscar Bait crowd, but I personally didn’t find any of it too cloying, and the relentless mechanics of the plotting keeps the engine ticking over nicely throughout; keeping our eyes always on the next corner, so to speak.

Initially, I thought we might be looking here at a kind of sophisticated, non-exploitative modern Hollywood take on the old Pam Grier/Jack Hill via Pinky Violence formula, wherein we get to enjoy the cathartic release of seeing wronged women exact revenge against a grab-bag of utterly despicable, cartoonishly horrid males (representatives of course of an utterly despicable, cartoonishly horrid system), but, as ‘Widows’ progresses, characterisation on both sides of the gender divide becomes murkier, casting at least some welcome shade onto the film’s socially progressive right n’ wrong dynamics.

Ironically for a film that so deliberately puts its female characters centre stage, I actually found that by far the most compelling aspect of the story was the material concerning the behind the scenes machinations of a local election, wherein two equally corrupt, duplicitous male candidates from opposite sides of the tracks attempt to put one over on the voting populace of the city ward in which the action takes place.

Both Colin Farrell as the Teflon-coated old money candidate who secretly hates the hypocrisy of the role his domineering father has groomed him for, and Brian Tyree Henry as the ruthless gangster who has reinvented himself as the “progressive social change” candidate simply because he believes politics will offer him better kickbacks and a longer lifespan, are fantastically monstrous creations, and it’s great too to see old Bobby Duvall pretty much napalming the joint in a ferocious turn as Farrell’s aforementioned father.

To be honest, the interlocking sisters-doing-it-for-themselves narrative suffers in comparison, feeling a bit underdeveloped, in spite of the vast acres of screen-time allotted to filling in the protagonists’ respective back stories. Nonetheless though, performances remain strong, and the film believably conveys the destabilising trauma that can ensue when every day, more-or-less-law-abiding citizens suddenly discover that their lives sit precariously atop a steaming mountain of corruption, violence and extortion.

The eventual emotional impact of all this is muffled by a few loose ends and a BIG PLOT TWIST which feels poorly handled and unnecessary, but hey, you can’t have everything. Overall, ‘Widows’ is a solid crime film that lives and breathes within the conventions of its genre despite its wider thematic concerns, and its heart is certainly in the right place.

I’ve not yet had the opportunity to see S. Craig Zahler’s controversial cop epic ‘Dragged Across Concrete’, but I’d imagine it could make for an interesting “compare and contrast” with this one. Something tells me I’ll probably rate ‘..Concrete’ more highly as a film, but I’m pretty sure I already know which of the two I’d rather hang out with were they to take on human form, if you get my drift.

The Predator

(Shane Black, 2018)

I’m assuming that, by this point, this awkwardly monikered sequel/reboot/whatever must have already been consigned to obscurity, from whence it will be distantly recalled as one of the biggest franchise-killing turkeys ever to have strutted its way through the gates of the Fox backlot onto the baking streets of Hollywood. I’d normally be content to leave it there, sizzling on the sidewalk, but the curvature of the earth adds about ninety minutes to the reverse leg of my annual Tokyo / London flight, so – ladies and gents, ‘The Predator’.

Actually, in truth, I feel a certain sympathy for this effort simply because I’m aware that director Shane Black is a close friend and long term collaborator of Fred Dekker, a man still revered by us horror fans as the creator of ‘Night of the Creeps’ (1986) and ‘The Monster Squad’ (1987). Indeed, Black & Dekker (ha! I only just noticed…) share the sole screenplay credit for ‘The Predator’, although god only knows what percentage of the movie they originally had in mind actually made it to the screen after what I imagine to have been a torturous nightmare of uncredited re-writes, executive producer ‘notes’ and studio-mandated re-shoots.

Nonetheless, the movie (during its first hour, at least) retains a breezy, happy-go-lucky b-movie feel that is actually somewhat endearing, including a few dialogue exchanges which I’m sure must have come straight down the line from Dekker’s sainted keyboard. (In particular, I enjoyed the running gag about the Predator not technically being a predator at all, because it hunts for sport rather than for food, with a character at one point likening it more to “an intergalactic bass fisherman”.)

With its definitive article title rendered even more redundant thanks to the fact that the script actually features several Predators, ‘The Predator’ is, undoubtedly, a bad movie, rife with forehead-slappingly dumb ideas and mindless, video game-y nonsense. Crucially however, it is not an unenjoyable bad movie.

Unlike most second tier Hollywood action product, the first hour here is neither boring nor charmless, and it’s muddled totality can perhaps best be appreciated by considering it as the kind of movie that some ‘80s trash maven like Albert Pyun or Fred Olen Ray might have made, had they been gifted with an eighty million dollar budget and a cruise liner full of Red Bull-huffing digital effects “artists”.

Would Pyun or Olen Ray’s Predator movie have included cute alien doggies who chase and swallow hand grenades? Probably!

Would they have presented us with the idea that a bus-load of inmates from the psychiatric ward of a military prison might actually turn out to be a gang of lovable, good-natured goofballs who can be safely left in charge of children and trusted with an array of city-block-levelling firepower? Sure, why not!

Would they have tapped into some paint-by-numbers Spielberg type shit by having a hard-done-by autistic kid take possession of a Predator helmet and wear it out as a Halloween costume, using its powers to take care of bullies, etc..? Well, ok, perhaps that’s a little bit far off the low rent sci-fi action movie tracks for Pyun and co, but if you can get some school holiday/family TV appeal into the bargain it’s all money in the bank, right?

Well, either way -- you know that whole business with the hot lady biologist being whisked off by helicopter to a top secret pentagon alien research lab built into the side of a mountain, where visitors need to strip naked for the ‘decontamination chamber’, whilst a white-coated scientist-who-looks-like-Gary-Busey-but-isn’t cracks wise over the body of a sedated Predator they have restrained on the examination table (absolutely NO danger of it waking up and slaughtering everybody, no siree)..? THAT is some prime ‘80s trash sci-fi business right there, no question about it.

(The only difference is, in the ‘80s, there would have been boobs. But, as we all know, they don’t exist anymore (at least outside the context of grim, taboo-breaking ordeal movies about how sex is horrible and people would rather cut bits of themselves off with rusty knives), so no dice, lechers.)

In this spirit, I’d go so far as to say that – bearing in mind I was sitting in an air-conditioned tin can thousands of feet above the plains of Siberia when I watched it - I actually found much of ‘The Predator’s run-time uproariously entertaining, in an “I can’t actually believe what I’m seeing here” kind of way.

My enjoyment was further enhanced by the fact that the film’s in-flight presentation had been “edited for content” in the most hilarious fashion, leading to dramatic exclamations of “FUDGE!”, confusing references to a female character’s “pudding” and macho soldier guys who tell each other to “shut the heck up”. (I’d assumed that this kind of melon-farming TV redubbing was now a thing of the past, so I’m delighted to see it making a comeback.)

It’s a shame then that the film’s final act more or less squanders this good feeling and proceeds to become extremely boring and charmless – an interminable, knocked-up-inside-a-PC, sound & fury styled action finale in which the sight of characters the film has tried its best to make us care about getting violently killed off inspires little more than a passing shrug as we wait in vain for the damned thing to be over.

Unfortunately, this finale also serves highlight my least favourite aspect of the film – namely, the generic “bombastic action movie music” that seems to have been plastered wall-to-wall across the entire picture without even the slightest attempt to match it to the on-screen action. It’s like some kind of hellish anti-muzak, designed to keep you aggravated and on edge, and it gets pretty tiresome after a while. Perhaps this is just normal now though, I don’t know?

In fact, there are a lot of things I don’t know. Like the reason why Fred Dekker hasn’t been allowed to write or direct a film in over 25 years, despite his brief run in the late ‘80s suggesting he might be quite good at it, for instance. Eat my pudding, Hollywood!

Just a Quick Note...

...to let you know that I had been planning to share a few more paperback scans with you over the next few weeks, to cover the time I'll be out of the country. Unfortunately however, a few days before I went on my holidays, my trusty old laptop pretty much packed in, severely limiting my ability to carry out computer-related tasks.

Researching, buying and setting up a replacement will have to wait until I get back in June, and could prove an ardous process, given my fervently held belief that home computing technology reached its peak in about 2006. Actually, my old printer/scanner is on it's last legs too, so I should probably get a new one of those whilst I'm at it, so.... what I'm trying to say is, there could be delays. My apologies in advance. Blame the devil-gods of Built-in Obselescence.

Bloody NEL: Dracula’s Brother by Robert Lory (1973)

Until I picked this up somewhere the other day, I’d never heard of this series of Robert Lory 'Dracula' books. (This is the third in a series of five, following on from ‘Dracula Returns’ and ‘The Return of Dracula’, apparently.)

Once again, this is a reprint of a U.S. book, published earlier the same year by Pinnacle, and the book’s copyright notice bears the telltale name of ‘70s paperback kingpin and ‘Nick Carter – Killmaster’ overlord Lyle Kenyon Engel.

Despite this copyright however, Robert Lory was a genuine writer, and there is no reason to believe this is not his work, presumably written on spec for Engel's publishing operation.

Much like Marvel’s '70s 'Tomb of Dracula' comics, these books seem to feature Dracula running around getting into scrapes in the modern world, acting almost as a kind of sympathetic / super-heroic figure, whilst a bunch of human protagonists follow in his wake, trying to piece together the secrets of his power - insofar as I can tell, at least.

A quick skim read doesn’t suggest that there’s much in the way of atmos or strong horror content going on here, but there is a whole bunch of hoo-hah about Atlantis, a load of occult profanations, and lots of run-of-the-mill action / adventure / espionage type stuff, so…. what can I tell you folks, this thing looks nuts.

Bloody NEL: House of Bondage by Alfred Bercovici (1979)

As I'm sure any collector of pulp paperbacks would, I instantly grabbed this one when I saw it rise to the top of the £1 bin at a charity book fair recently, and didn’t really give it a second thought until I got it home and, upon closer inspection, realised that it must rank as one of the most horrid volumes to have ever graced my library.

The icky tagline and weirdly unappealing artwork perhaps don't bode well, but when it comes to the actual content of the book… good god. Basically, this thing reads as if Guy N. Smith had turned his hand to writing a soft porn novel in the spirit of the briefly ascendant ‘Mandingo’ / ‘Goodbye Uncle Tom’ “slavesploitation” sub-genre.

Skimming through, you’ll find toe-curlingly cheery descriptions of non-consensual slave/master sex, interspersed with sadistic punishments, and seemingly endless melodramatic diatribes from a variety of comically stereotyped ‘Southern Gothic’ character types, all dished up in what seems to be a spirit of bottomless cynicism, with any fig-leaf of anti-racist sentiment crucially undermined by the author’s decision to voice the black characters with a kind of childish, nattering, broken English dialect that makes them all sound like congenital idiots.

Goofy, barrel-scarping trash of the lowest order this may be, but I’m afraid I just can’t dial my sense of humour dark enough to extract any yukks from it; there’s a feeling of sheer nastiness here that just plain stinks.

A quick web search doesn’t turn up any info on Alfred Bercovici, and this seems to have been his only published work, under that name at least.

Another American reprint, ‘House of Bondage’ originally came out via Popular Library in 1978. Their version has a slightly more respectable “bodice ripper” type cover, but I’d still sure hate to see a map of the U.S.A. detailing the areas in which it sold best.

Bloody NEL: Croc by David James (1977)

Chapter Fourteen

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

----

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

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

Bloody NEL: Lord of the Spiders by Michael Moorcock (1975)

Once again, I’m going to be out of the country for a few weeks, so whilst I’m gallivanting, I’ll leave you in the company of some recent additions to my paperback mountain, beginning with a few from the ever-pungent exploitation vats of New English Library.

Even before the late ‘70s saw paperback racks suddenly overflowing with sharks, crocs, rats, bears and crabs (more of which in a few days), monsters already seem to have often taken pride of place on NEL’s SF covers (see To Outrun Doomsday, for example), and, in their own weird sort of way, these delightful bat-headed spider things feel as iconic as anything in the realm of ‘70s British paperbacks. (Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a name to attach to the cover art anywhere online, but as ever, info or speculation is welcomed in the comments.)

Likewise, I’ve always had a real soft spot for Michael Moorcock’s early straight science fiction novels, but for some reason I’ve never gotten around to this one – originally published in ’68 as ‘Blades of Mars’ - or it’s predecessor ‘City of the Beast’.

Basically these books are an unabashed homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars and Venus stories (lest we forget, Moorcock began his literary career, aged 17, as the editor of ‘Tarzan Adventures’), and verily, they are red-blooded stuff, full of grand sentences, with many commas, ending in proud exclamation points!

(Perhaps the fact that NEL also reprinted the Burroughs books in the ‘70s had something to do with their decision to acquire these particular Moorcock works? Who knows..)

Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me that Moorcock was knocking out this delightfully old school stuff at the same time that he was championing the most far out voices of SF’s experimental / psychedelic new wave as the editor of New Worlds. But then, that goes straight to the heart of what makes him such a unique and vital figure in the field of popular culture really, doesn’t it? At any given point in his career, he has contained multiples, and his determined refusal to acknowledge a dividing line between high and low culture, between intellect and entertainment, between reality and fantasy, should stand as an inspiration to us all.

Noir Diary # 3: He Ran All The Way (John Berry, 1951)

Within the grand index of blunt-poetic film noir / pulp fiction titles, I think “HE RAN ALL THE WAY” ranks as a pretty good one. Perhaps not quite up there with the abstract magnificence of ‘Blast of Silence’ or ‘Kiss Me Deadly’, but it definitely fits in nicely alongside ‘Everybody Had a Gun’ or ‘They Drive by Night’ in the “slightly more literal” category.

It’s a shame then that the film itself finds indolent small-time hood Nick Robey (John Garfield) running only as far as his nearest swimming pool, after he finds himself holding the bag when a botched payroll robbery leaves both his more experienced partner (Norman Lloyd) and a cop bleeding out somewhere behind his departing heels.

Desperately trying to concoct a short term survival strategy whilst literally treading water in the crowded public pool, Robey strong-arms himself into an uncomfortable “meet cute” situation with Peggy Dobbs (Shelley Winters), an insecure young woman so startled by Robey’s amorous attentions that she is persuaded to let him accompany her back to her family’s brownstone apartment -- where he proceeds to spend the rest of the movie, holding Peggy’s mother, father and pre-teen brother at gun-point in what modern viewers will swiftly identify as an early example of the now familiar Home Invasion sub-genre.

I suppose it must have been decided at some point that “HE BASICALLY STAYED IN ONE PLACE” or “HE REFUSED TO LEAVE” just didn’t quite cut it as titles, but no matter; where sprinting enthusiasts may find themselves disappointed by ‘He Ran All The Way’, fans of the more socially conscious / gritty realist strand of early ‘50s film noir are in for an absolute treat. In every sense other than the lack of running, this one is about as good as it gets.

As you may be aware, John Garfield stands as about the closest thing ‘40s/’50s Hollywood ever got to a martyred saint. After a career largely spent bucking the demands of the studio system and instead championing radical theatre and progressive social causes, Garfield found himself blacklisted with immediate effect after he refused to “name names” when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. It has since been widely assumed that the stress caused both by this and by the simultaneous collapse of his marriage were the main factors which led to his sudden death from a pre-existing heart condition in May 1952, aged just 39.

Shot at around the same time that Garfield was called to testify before HUAC, ‘He Ran All The Way’ represents the star’s final film appearance, and, in retrospect, it provided him with one hell of a way to go out.

As an early champion of the “method”, Garfield perhaps drew upon his own feelings of persecution and impending criminalisation to help transform Nick Robey into an unsettling, sweat-drenched case study in twitchy, working class delinquent paranoia. Simultaneously pitiable and self-pitying, feckless and sadistic, Robey is unpredictable and delusional enough to become genuinely frightening – the kind of guy capable of flipping out and doing just about anything in a moment of rage, only to breakdown and cry with remorse when it’s all too late. At the same time though, he is also weirdly sympathetic – the archetypical dumb, overgrown kid who was probably raised with a daily beating, and never got an even break.

Garfield delivers a powerhouse performance here that can’t help but dominate the film, and if Robey sometimes feels like a character we’ve met a hundred times before, that’s probably because we’ve seen variations of this kind of performance style refracted through the prism of subsequent generations of actors for whom Garfield’s example kicked open the doors, be it Brando, Pacino, Hoffman, Hopper or whoever.

Speaking of tragic heroes of the black-list era, I’m assuming that screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – who, strangely, used ‘Werewolf of Paris’ author Guy Endore as his “beard” on this occasion – needs no introduction. Although Trumbo has found himself re-evaluated in recent years as a dignified man of letters and the subject of bittersweet, Oscar-bait biopic, his work here serves to remind us that, at its best, his writing wasn’t merely hard-boiled in the conventional sense, but mercilessly cynical and – if you’ll forgive the neologism - dark as fuck.

Systematically assaulting the fragile fictions that his characters use to keep their self-identifies intact, Trumbo’s screenplay for ‘He Ran all the Way’ eventually leaves all of the principal players brutally exposed, with barely a hint of authorial sympathy to fall back on.

Robey’s dysfunctional background for instance is sketched in about as concisely as is humanly possible. When we first meet him, he is in the process of being woken from his slumber, late in the morning, by his dissolute, hard-drinking harridan of a mother (a wonderful bit part from Gladys George, whom you may recall from her turn as Miles Archer’s wife in ‘The Maltese Falcon’).

“If you were a real man, you’d be out looking for a job,” she scolds her son. “If you were a man, I’d punch your teeth in,” he snaps back, before making a cheap shot about her looking worse for wear for her hangover. Oof. It’s hilarious to observe such a comically dysfunctional mother/son relationship, but, when it comes to figuring out how our protagonist ended up as such a mixed up, deadbeat punk, what more could we possibly need to know?

(We only meet Mrs Robey once more in the film incidentally, when the police come calling after Nick is identified as the perpetrator of the robbery. She appears to be enjoying a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast, and basically tells them that she doesn’t give a damn if her son lives or dies. Nice lady, huh?)

Through the remainder of the film, Trumbo’s obsessive unpicking of character dynamics helps generate uniquely grim sense of tension, as the five participants in the confined, hot-house apartment set-up flex and pull against each other like the strands of a cat’s cradle. As Robey’s destabilising influence intensifies, all of the component relationships that make up the Dobbs family – father/son, daughter/parents, husband/wife – find themselves compromised and turned upside down.

Wallace Ford in particular does great work here as the father, Fred (‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ reference, anyone?), and the scenes that depict his young son’s respect for him disintegrating as he sacrifices his masculine authority by taking a cautious, safety-first approach to dealing with the killer in their midst, are heart-breaking.

Perversely, even as he threatens and insults them, Robey also seems to become fixated with the idea of gaining the family’s acceptance. Presumably recognising their home as the kind of loving, mutually supportive environment that he has so lacked in his own life, he finds himself trying to insert himself into their daily routine as if he were some long lost eldest son, sub-consciously framing Ward as a substitute for his own absent father figure, even as another part of him viciously mocks the older man for his passivity and supposed cowardice. It is only when Robey realises that this acceptance will – obviously – not be forthcoming that becomes enraged and turns to violence.

In all cases though, the characters gain a real depth as their desperation increases. During the early part of the film – before Robey first pulls a gun on the family - we’re inclined to wonder why Peggy Dobbs would tolerate his already slightly unhinged, passive-aggressive behaviour, even to the point of inviting him back home to meet her folks after their first meeting.

A later scene between Peggy and a co-worker at her bakery job however clarifies for us that she feels so starved of male attention, and is so lacking in the self-confidence to go out and find any herself, that, when Robey initially comes on to her at the pool, she’s so taken aback that she deliberately overlooks the atmosphere of violence and suspicion dripping off her new suitor, and, once their physical attraction to each other has been established, finds herself willing to do just about anything to stop him leaving without her… even though that is the very thing upon which her family’s safety depends.

In her own way, Peggy is revealed to be as desperate and self-deluding as Robey. Torn between the bosom of her family and the desire to break away and establish an independent life for herself, she represents something very different from the procession of femme fatales, wronged wives and dilettante daughters we normally encounter in film noir, and Winters – a consistently underrated performer who went on to play a long series of these “doomed, mixed up floozy” roles – makes her into just as much of a fascinating and unpredictable piece of work as Garfield does his character.

If ‘He Ran All The Way’ has one weakness, it is probably it’s tendency to veer toward one of those “filmed stage play” type movies that became all the rage on the more cerebral side of Hollywood during the 1950s, as the kind of resurgent theatre so beloved of Garfield began to exert a greater influence upon the industry. (You know, ‘All About Eve’, ’12 Angry Men’ - that sort of thing. Actually, Robert Aldrich’s 1954 film of Clifford Odets’ scabrous Hollywood bridge bonfire ‘The Big Knife’, with a thinly veiled analogue of John Garfield as its central character and Winters in a supporting role, is a perfect example too.)

Unlike some films in this vein however, ‘He Ran..’ rarely suffers too badly from its limited scope, and never feels anything less than thoroughly cinematic. Which brings us neatly the third corner of this movie’s black list triangle – the considerably less feted figure of director John Berry.

Unlike Garfield and Trumbo, Berry was only just beginning to establish himself as a Hollywood ‘name’ when the Feds came knocking (he directed the highly regarded noir ‘Tension’ in 1949), and as a result he seems to have struggled to make much headway after he returned from exile in France (where he directed several of the Eddie Constantine Lemmy Caution movies) in the ‘70s, working only intermittently on a decidedly odd bunch of projects through until he slipped out of the industry in the ‘80s.

This is a shame, because, on the basis of his work here, Berry certainly had the necessary chops to have done some really great work, had circumstances been different. The opening scenes depicting the robbery and Garfield’s flight to the swimming baths are great examples of the kind of down-on-the-street location shooting that started to bring a new energy to noir and crime films from the late ‘40s onward, and his approach to blocking the action within the cramped apartment set within which the latter two thirds of the film take place remains novel and involving throughout.

Taking a few notes perhaps from John Huston’s old “power relationships expressed through the framing” jive in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, Berry manages to keep the lid pushed down tight on the movie’s pressure cooker plotting, giving his actors enough space to let rip whilst never allowing things to boil over into melodrama.

The film’s quality is further enhanced meanwhile by some superb photography from the legendary James Wong Howe. Though he has relatively little to work during interior scenes, the few nocturnal exteriors we get to see, as the increasingly paranoid Robey sneaks glances through the blinds, seeing sinister figures passing in the night, look absolutely fantastic. Minimal lights gleams like liquid gold off the bonnets of pitch black automobiles as they slide through gaps in the deep, inky blackness, highlighting stark silhouettes lurking on the corners of the screen. It’s pure noir, and pure brilliance – a beautifully expressionistic method of shooting urban environments that Howe would go on to perfect a few years later in a similarly talky movie with a few rogue strands of noir lurking in its DNA, Alexander Mackendrick’s ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’ (1957).

All of these strengths – Howe’s sleek visual poetry, Berry’s dynamic direction, Trumbo’s writing and a set of feverishly intense performances from the central cast - come together for what I believe has to be one of the greatest and most devastating ironic finales in all of film noir. I won’t spoil it for you here though, so instead let’s talk about the political undercurrents that – somewhat inevitably, under the circumstances – can be found lurking beneath the surface of this ostensibly simple story.

In view of the personnel involved, it’s not surprising to discover that ‘He Ran all the Way’ attracted the attention of our old friend Thom Anderson, who included it on the list of films he considered key exemplars of what he termed film gris - a short-lived trend of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s that saw a small group of left-leaning filmmakers using the tropes of the low budget crime thriller to offer a critique of American capitalism, and to explore collectivist alternatives to Hollywood’s usual brand of heroic individualism.

Whereas pictures like Thieves Highway and Force of Evil were explicitly polemical in this regard however, ‘He Ran All The Way’ is a lot more circumspect, keeping things sub-textual for the most part. Indeed, it is easy to watch the film without even considering the possibility that it is trying to make a political point; I know that I certainly did. It was only later, noting that the film made it onto Anderson’s list and considering the background of the people who made it, that it got me thinking about just how well the hard-boiled crime idiom lends itself to an anti-capitalist message.

This isn’t exactly a new idea of course, and wouldn't have been in 1951 either. After all, the Warner Bros gangster films of the 1930s provide about as savage a critique of free market capitalism as could possibly be wished for, whilst many of Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining stories explore the human cost of greed and civic corruption. Specifically in terms of film noir though: where there is money, there are guns, and where there are guns, there is death (and sex, but that’s another story). It ain’t exactly a subtle equation, but what more could an aspiring socialist filmmaker need to get the ball rolling?

In ‘He Ran All The Way’, the Dobbs family seem happily devoid of any of these things when we first meet them. Although they clearly struggle to make ends meet, for the most part they seem satisfied with their lot in life, and I don’t think any family members mention money (or a lack thereof) at any point. They function as a tight-knit, collective unit, with each member keeping the well-being of the others in mind at all times.

When Nick Robey crashes into their life however, he brings money – loads of it. Flashing it around, boasting of how much he got away from the robbery with, he tries his best to revel in the status it confers. He also brings his gun of course, wielding it with all the shaky-handed, phallic substitute ‘certainty’ you’d expect. He mocks the family for their lack of ambition, for the drudgery of their dead-end jobs and for their failure to pursue their individual dreams (and, through his hold over Peggy, he brings the dangerous promise of sex into the picture too of course). Under the stress of his assault, the functionality of the family unit begins to deteriorate, as long repressed resentments and independent desires begin to surface.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Robey attempts to win the family’s gratitude by ordering in a lavish banquet for them. Like the sainted peasants in some revolutionary melodrama however, they take a united stand and refuse his food, recognising it as the fruit of his ill-gotten gains and returning to their own simple fare instead.

This of course sends Robey into a calamitous rage which sees his supposed gesture of kindness transformed into a weird new form of torture, as he forces his prisoners to eat the luxury food at gun point; a reflection perhaps of the way that, for all its promises of benevolent progress, American capitalism countenances no alternatives, having essentially spent the entire modern era refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer from the rest of the world.

Admittedly, it could be argued that the psychological complexity of the film’s characters makes such a straight allegorical reading problematic, but it’s certainly there if you want it, and it adds a particularly dark caste to the Dobbs family’s prospects of future unity after their trauma ends and the credits roll, given the nature of the circumstances that eventually lead to Robey receiving the tarmac-and-lead-based reward we know lays in store for all such independently motivated, overgrown J.D. psychopaths.

Looking back with almost seventy years-worth of retrospect, it seems deeply ironic that, whilst the McCarthyite assertion that Hollywood movies were subliminally spreading dangerous communist sedition has generally been judged by history as wrong-headed, paranoid hysteria, close textural analysis of a film like ‘He Ran all the Way’ might have helped give credence to all of HUAC’s worst fears.

As the final film on Anderson’s chronological list, ‘He Ran all the Way’ can be seen to represent the last gasp of ‘film gris’ before the blacklist shutters slammed down. As Nick Robey’s fist grabs at the air and his wild eyes close for the last time, it also bids farewell to one of the best – and certainly one of the most influential – actors of the noir era.

That’s quite a weight of historical significance for a quick n’ nasty low budget thriller to shoulder, but the movie itself is more than solid enough to take the load. Standing alongside ill-starred classics like ‘Gun Crazy’ (1950) and Ida Lupino’s ‘The Hitchhiker’ (1953), it is one of the very best crime movies to have emerged from this particular time and place.