What a wicked sense of Mother’s Day humor, Mr. Dewey. Programming a triple feature of adaptations from that most Mother devoted and obsessed writer,
Cornell Woolrich. A trifecta of neuroses, blamelessness and Guilt that only a Mother can love.
I'd become a sort of a reverse zombie. I was living in a world already dead, and I alone knowing it. – John Triton, “The Mental Wizard”
A marvelous description of the Fear and Dread permeating the Universe of
Woolrich and
NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (John Farrow 1948). John Triton (
Edward G. Robinson) has a gift…or is it a curse? A theatrical mind reader*, he discovers that he actually has visions of future. With this, he makes a fortune for his partners (
Jerome Cowan and
Virginia Bruce) and himself. Then, concerned that he’s not predicting the future, but actually causing the future, he secrets himself away (Note to Ms. Cutter: His hideaway is in Bunker Hill next to Angel’s Flight.). He tells three-quarters or so of the movie in an extended flashback (unreliable narrator?) to
Gail Russell, the daughter of the now dead
Cowan and
Bruce, whose deaths and means of death he had predicted, and her fella
John Lund (looking for all the world to have been separated at birth from
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.).
Now he must save
Russell, whose death is envisioned for 11:00 p.m., under a thousand stars. The men in her life – her fiancée and various stakeholders in her Father’s estate – see
Robinson as a con man, the man behind the deaths. The cynical cop,
William Demarest, sent to protect
Russell, especially sees him as a murderer. But she is convinced his visions are real. And they are. But as we
Woolrich fans know, not she, but the man with the Guilt – and who is blameless – is Doomed.
We saw a beautiful 35mm studio archive print, which showed off the Paramount cinematography of Chicagoan,
John Seitz, whose credits include
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (1921),
THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942),
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944),
THE LOST WEEKEND (1945),
THE BIG CLOCK (1948),
THE GREAT GATSBY (1949),
SUNSET BLVD. (1950) and three
Preston Sturges movies.
* Speaking of obsessions, Our Host appears to have a thing for movies with carny-type mind or card readers. How else to explain his cult-like devotion to
NIGHTMARE ALLEY,
THE LEOPARD MAN,
THE AMAZING MR. X and
BUNCO SQUAD?
I was so ashamed when I went out of there. All I could keep thinking of in the dark was: Is that what I wasted my whole life at? –
Cornell Woolrich in a letter to poet
Mark Van Doren after seeing
BLACK ANGEL (Roy William Neill 1943)
It wasn’t a waste,
Cornell. Like his novel,
The Black Angel, there is an adulterous husband, a murdered paramour, and a wife desperate to save her husband. After that, the movie drops the “The” from the novel’s title and twists every other piece of its narrative thread. It, however, still finds a way to maintain the essence of
Woolrich’s bleak Universe and, despite
Woolrich’s disgust with the movie, it is one of the two or three best representations of the World of
Woolrich on film.
Like a few other
Woolrich works, the femme fatale is murdered within the first five minutes or so of the movie, but her presence is constantly felt. The poor schlump of a cheating husband,
John Phillips, is convicted, of course, because all evidence points to him – a Woolrichian clue that he couldn’t have done it. And his devoted wife,
June Vincent, sets out to prove he didn’t do it. She enlists
Dan Duryea, the estranged husband of the victim, to help. Nightclub owner,
Peter Lorre, seen entering her apartment the night of the murder, is obviously the killer. Except he was in the custody of stick-in-the-mud police captain
Broderick Crawford when the murder occurred. Nope,
John Phillips is going to get executed...unless
Duryea suddenly remembers that he was drunk that night…and went to her apartment…and strangled her…and forgot all about it due to alcoholic amnesia…and confesses to
Vincent and
Crawford on the night of the execution…and
Crawford gets the Governor on the phone in the nick of time.
Obsession, Guilt, blamelessness, and weird psycho-sexual games (the sado-masochistic
Freddie Steele,
Lorre’s muscle, is worthy of a treatise – watch how he and Lorre relate to each other and, then, the pleasure on his face as he punishes
Vincent at
Lorre’s behest). That’s our
Cornell!
With stellar direction by
Roy William Neill, the man who brought us ten “Sherlock Holmes” movies starring
Basil Rathbone and
Nigel Bruce (1942-46). He started directing in 1917 and spent his career directing B-movies. For most of the ‘30s, he was at Columbia Pictures and, for most of the ‘40s, at Universal Pictures. Beyond “Sherlock Holmes”, he is best known for directing
FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (1943).
BLACK ANGEL was his last film, dying at 59 under quite Woolrichian circumstances.
And magnificent cinematography by the unjustly neglected
Paul Ivano (1900-84). His work is in perfect sync with
Neill’s direction and
Duryea’s portrayal, with lighting changes and camera set-ups echoing character shifts between night and day, urban and suburban, claustrophobic and spacious. Born in France,
Ivano served as a photographer for the U.S. Army, then emigrated to the U.S. Rooming with
Rudolph Valentino for a while, his first movie work was with
Valentino. He started in 1922 as the second unit director of photography and cameraman, often uncredited. A partial list of movies on which he fulfilled that function:
GREED (Erich von Stroheim 1924),
BEN-HUR (Fred Niblo 1925),
BLONDE VENUS (Josef von Sternbergn1932),
GONE WITH THE WIND (Victor Fleming 1939),
THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (Nicholas Ray 1948),
CRISS CROSS (Robert Siodmak 1949). At the same time, he was the cinematographer, again, sometimes uncredited, on an impressive array of films:
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413, A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA (Robert Florey 1928 – an incredible experimental short),
QUEEN KELLY (Erich von Stroheim 1929),
FRANKENSTEIN (James Whale 1931),
THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (Josef von Sternberg 1941),
FLESH AND FANTASY (Julien Duvivier 1943) and seven B-movies in the ’50s directed by the extraordinary
Hugo Haas. Moving to television in the mid-‘50s, his final work was on
Family Affair (57 episodes 1967-69). Another treatise-worthy career.
And finally, from Monogram (A Mark Meaning Quality Noir in my book), and so nice I sat through it twice,
FALL GUY (Reginald Le Borg 1947).
It all adds up to Tom being a fall guy for somebody.
Yes, it does. The reference books say it’s adapted from
C-Jag aka
Cocaine, an early
Woolrich noir. And, for each story,
Woolrich borrowed heavily from his earlier stories. But I have never seen a
Woolrich adaptation that is such a mash-up of earlier
Woolrich stories and movies. Echoes of
PHANTOM LADY (there’s an unknown woman as bait and
Elisha Cook, Jr. as a set-up guy),
FEAR IN THE NIGHT (there’s a dead body in that closet that the protagonist only has the vaguest memory of, based on a key and a knife, but his brother-in-law, the cop, will help solve the crime…if there was one) and
I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES (there’s a police apprehension based solely on circumstantial evidence).
Leo Penn (for the later-to-be blacklisted father of
Sean Penn, this was his second movie and first credit – and I swear he reminded me of a bit-more-chiseled
Farley Granger), while under the influence of a narcotic, appears to have killed a woman at a party and stuffed her in a closet. Now to find the person who took him to the party, the location of the party and other people at the party. All with the help of his brother-in-law the cop,
Robert “Call me ‘Carl Denham’”
Armstrong, and girlfriend,
Teala Loring, who lives with her uncle,
Charles Arnt, who we later learn isn’t really an uncle, but just a friend who promised her dead parents he’d look after her and now he (I sense a
SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS in the air) really looks after her in a little too loving way. Thank you, again,
Cornell.
Le Borg is an idiosyncratic director that I really want to investigate further. A review of one of his films,
BAD BLONDE, can be found
here. Cinematographer
Mack Stengler worked for years, from 1926 to 1949, at Poverty Row studios, primarily Monogram Pictures, and shot 130 feature films. He shot
I WOULDN’T BE IN YOUR SHOES (William Nigh 1947), another
Woolrich adaptation, at Monogram. In the ‘50s he turned to television and was the cinematographer for series such as
The Lone Ranger (78 episodes, 1949-51),
Hopalong Cassidy (26 episodes, 1952),
M Squad (13 episodes, 1957-59), and
Leave It to Beaver (142 episodes, 1958-62). An for the real trivia buff who was a regular viewer of
The Merv Griffin Show, one of
Penn’s roommates at the police detox center was an uncredited
Brother Theodore.
This was Richard’s final appearance at the Roxie this season, but stepping up for his first night was Noir City Don. Good-bye, Richard. Hello, Don.