Ex spots the mark

From an arial view of some anonymous stretch of Los Angeles we descend into a parking lot, and in that parking lot we find a man and a woman, hiding amidst the cars, speaking hushed and excitedly, and in the midst of this exchange we cut jarringly to the man’s point of view, to a close up-vision of the woman’s sculpted, lovely face, her eyes like luminous planets, and she’s looking right at him, at the camera, at us, and this is how, with great economy and elegance, we get locked from the very start into the almost dreamlike subjectivity of the doomed hero of Criss Cross (1949). We become lost in his longing as he watches the woman he desires dancing a rhumba in a club with Tony Curtis, and later become lost in the haze of a heist gone awry, a landscape made of smoke out of which figures in suits and gas masks and carrying guns appear and disappear. The hero’s voice-over narration speaks to us of the inescapability of fate—a thesis strengthened by the film’s subtle array of grid-like imagery—and, seeing events play out from his claustrophobic perspective, it becomes hard to argue with him.

Following Double Indemnity (1944), the second film in Metro Cinema’s Film Noir series leaps ahead five years to a moment when both the major studios and poverty row were churning out moody crime thrillers like so many bratwursts. Yet it’s remarkable how consistently good these films were, as though whatever, in retrospect, makes these films noir—artful atmosphere, moral ambiguity, social commentary, hot sex—makes them good. Director Robert Siodmak and star Burt Lancaster had already collaborated on the sublimely fatalistic, extremely liberal adaptation of Hemingway’s The Killers (1946), and while Criss Cross revisits somewhat similar thematic terrain, Daniel Fuchs’ script, based on Don Tracy’s novel of the same name, offers some fascinating variations on by-now familiar motifs. We’re back in the realm of secret affairs, criminal plans to escape or do away with an oppressive male power figure, and the femme fatale’s capacity to drain the hero’s better judgement—presuming he ever had any—familiar from Double Indemnity. But in this case the deadly female, played by Yvonne De Carlo, a considerably more angelic actress than Barbara Stanwyck, is no stranger taking advantage of the hero’s ignorance. She’s his ex-wife.

So Criss Cross is the story of a marriage. Lancaster’s beefy, hopelessly romantic armoured car guard already tried sharing a life with De Carlo’s object of desire, and, he says, they fought like cats and dogs. He left town for a while, then came back, and with one look at her on the dance floor, she not even knowing he’s watching her, he’s drawn in again. Since he went away she got herself glued to a very amusing douche bag crime lord, deliciously embodied by Dan Duryea, so she and Lancaster begin an affair—if you’re no good as spouses, maybe it’ll work as adulterous lovers. It doesn’t, of course. They want too much, nostalgic for what never really was. I hope I’m not spoiling things when I tell you that things end badly. But how do we get to that ending? Believe me, you’ve got to experience Criss Cross to really understand.

The mark of Cain

Here’s what I think of when I think of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944): Barbara Stanwyck’s legs, coming down the stairs, wearing that anklet, of course, but more than that it’s the gait, the stride of a woman (or a jungle cat) who knows, somehow, that she’s finally been cued to assume her long-anticipated, destined role; Fred MacMurray’s apartment, where he and Stanwyck luxuriate in barely disguised postcoital bliss; the grocery store where Stanwyck and MacMurray meet, in sunglasses, to discuss their nefarious plan in deadpan tones, not facing each other, surrounded by anonymous canned goods; the cigarette Edward G. Robinson lights for MacMurray while MacMurray lies slumped in the front doors of his insurance company’s headquarters—it is the only moment of genuine affection shared by any two people in the whole film. MacMurray and Stanwyck’s story is one of lust; MacMurray and Robinson’s is the film’s (platonic) love story.

So: an insurance salesman (MacMurray) conspires with the wife (Stanwyck) of a client to have the client die in an ostensible accident and thus collect twice the normal rate on client’s life insurance policy. That’s the story in a nutshell, but what we’re trading in here is philosophy, impulse and, above all, mood. Double Indemnity is the inaugural film to be screened in Metro Cinema’s Film Noir series for a reason: the film encompass myriad elements that, about ten years later, would be declared key motifs of the noir style, ie: voice-over, low-key lighting, hard-boiled banter, lust, crime, fatalism and femme fatale. But, unlike so many other beloved and canonical films noir, it was also classy, very much an A-picture, with stars, production value and the kind of backing that gets you seven Oscar nominations. (Though the film didn’t win a single statue.) Its narrative trajectory and heavily poured-on attitude has become so ingrained into our collective notion of noir that some viewers may regard it as trope-laden kabuki, but the film, which was co-scripted by none other than Raymond Chandler, transmits these elements with such confidence as to feel sui generis, organic, and though it were inventing its own ritual and cosmology as it goes along—which it basically was, even though Chandler had considerable contempt for his source material.

But the source material was absolute gold. James M. Cain wrote novels that practically begged to be filmed—if only they could make it to the screen with all their tawdrier bits intact. There are many things to recommend in Tay Garnett’s adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), but the sunny ending ties itself into increasingly risible knots in its effort to try and redeem Cain’s hell-bound characters. (I remember watching it with a packed house at the Film Forum some years back and getting irritated by all the laughter coming from the audience, though in those final scenes, who can blame them?) Whereas Todd Haynes’ five-part miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce (2011) is as brilliant and transportive as it is in part because it’s so faithful not only to Cain’s narrative but to his dialogue and character conception. Double Indemnity kind of splits the difference, cloaking its less savoury traits in a tasty fusion of Chandler’s romanticism and Wilder’s wickedly cynical humour. The result is smoldering, seductive and unforgettable. No one film defines noir, but this one is as good as any for getting the conversation started.

The Prowler on DVD: Stop, look, and listen

The opening shot of The Prowler (1951) peers in out of the night through the luminous bedroom window of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes). We suppose we’re assuming the eponymous prowler’s point-of-view, but who exactly is the prowler? Officers Bud Crocker and Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) arrive to check for signs of trespassage, the latter condescendingly reassuring this nervous and attractive wife of a late-night disc jockey while admiring her affluence and formulating plans to seduce her. But it’s not at all clear that our heroine’s adversary (and soon-to-be lover) was the opening’s peeper, though Webb will briefly inhabit the very same perspective as that first shot while surveying the house’s exterior. The identity of the bearer of the eyes through which we first leer at Susan remains ambiguous. Audaciously so, considering the film’s titled after this creature-voyeur ostensibly nestled in the shrubs. Does he (or she) even exist? Are we the prowler?

Previously unavailable on DVD, The Prowler has finally appeared, released by VCI and gorgeously restored by the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Directed by Joseph Losey and secretly written by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, The Prowler is brooding yet taut as a timing belt, brimming with lust and petty ambitions yet complicated by a thicket of unarticulated, conflicting emotions. With its overt perversions and premarital sex, it’s one of the period’s most flamboyant violators of the production code. A broad abstract of its plot promises a retread of Double Indemnity (44), replacing femme fatale with homme, but there’s so much more going on here. Every new sequence renegotiates the story’s direction and tone. At times it’s a comedy of discomfort, at others commentary on class envy. While moving through Susan’s cavernous bungalow it carries the air of a horror picture: there’s that monster, and he wants inside. But as we move from Los Angeles suburb to Nevada highway to a desert ghost town, the film’s landscapes become increasingly oneiric, the couple’s motives increasingly bizarre—yet somehow it all makes an eerie kind of sense.

Oblivious to his own douche-bag menace, Webb is Heflin at his finest: those round, Wellesian eyes that keep glancing backward as he swaggers away from Susan’s door, the way he abuses his authority to make himself at home, worming his way in, asking for milk, thumbing the records in search of some Guy Lombardo. Webb and Susan discover they share roots in rural Indiana—they attended the same football dances—and with this tenuous connection Webb commandeers their affair, delighting in toying with Susan’s feelings. He tells her he wants to buy a motor court in Nevada. Every time he’s in Vegas he drives out just to see if it’s still there. At first Susan says she married her older, wealthy husband to get away from guys like Webb, but she still falls for him. Is Susan lonely or mentally ill? Is she genuinely drawn to this creep? The elegance of Keyes’ performance lies in its sustained uncertainty. It’s often impossible to discern what she’s thinking, though it’s clear she’s thinking something. And it’s probably a bad idea.

Susan’s husband is heard on the radio during their trysts. (I love that the voice is supplied by Trumbo.) That voice assures the adulterers of the husband’s absence, yet it also makes him perpetually present, a bodiless chaperone, announcing song titles that read like chapters in the novel of his wife’s affair. When Webb kisses Susan the camera swings over toward the radio as if seeking a reaction shot. Susan never describes her husband physically, and that first fleeting moment in which we finally see him is also the last. In this way Losey’s film becomes a delicious, rigorous study in what it means to see and to hear in the movies. Everything out senses are given is precise and provocative. “I’ll be seeing you, Susan,” the husband says each night as he signs off, and we’ll be seeing her too: The Prowler is a noir masterpiece, and deserves to be revisited again and again.