No wife, no puppy, no car, the mysterious Jack Wick ain't got no-thing left to lose

John Wick (Keanu Reeves) resides in a vast modernist manor in the Jersey woods, its décor, like Wick’s wardrobe, so uniformly titanium and ash-coloured that for long stretches we could be watching a black and white film. Wick’s home resembles a luxury tomb, which seems apt: his beloved wife has died, though she had the foresight to arrange to have an adorable puppy delivered the day of her funeral to console Wick in his grief. But, in a perverse twist of fate, that goes to hell too: the spoiled idiot son (Alfie Allen) of some Russian Mafiosi (Michael Nyqvist) eyeballs Wick’s slick ’69 Mustang at a service station and decides to break into Wick’s house, beat him up, steal his ride and kill his puppy. At this point in John Wick we still don’t know much about who Wick is, but the fact that he doesn’t call the cops after the spoiled idiot son and his cronies depart should tell us something.

Turns out Wick’s a highly regarded contract killer who managed to go straight—and a former associate of the spoiled idiot son’s mighty powerful pa. Now that Wick’s lost his wife, car and pooch he’s pretty much got nothing left to do but kill the spoiled idiot son and whoever else gets in the way. That whoever else turns into, oh, maybe a hundred hired douchebags in tailored suits who get shot, kicked, punched, stabbed, head-butted, blown up and run over in dizzyingly quick succession. John Wick is a revenge movie. It was written by Derek Kolstad and is the directorial debut of stunt coordinator Chad Stahelski (though as of time-of-writing IMDb also says it's the directorial debut of actor/stuntman David Leitch). Its violence alternates between clean-cool and messy-ugly, it contains a pleasingly minimal amount of bullshit that doesn’t need to be there, it’s neither very distinctive nor completely generic and it uses Keanu’s natural placidity fairly well. 

Keanu does Lee!

But what I like best about John Wick is the colourful way it populates its comic book crime milieu. There’s a crack team of dead guy disposal experts who show up with Windex and body bags at the drop of a corpse; there’s a posh hotel that prides itself on being a non-partisan, killing-free zone for thugs of all stripes, a sort of Mafia Switzerland in the middle of Manhattan; there’s a crowded nightclub strewn with monochromatic psychedelia that allows Stahelski to stage a small homage to Point Blank, with Reeves casually assuming the Lee Marvin poses; there are sundry bad-asses (one of whom is played by Willem Dafoe) who might save Wick’s life or snuff it out depending on the number of zeroes in the commission. The film’s conceits are all wildly over-the-top but they’re mostly played out with minimal fuss, almost no scenery chewing, some gallows humour, and a nice little cameo from Ian McShane.  

                  

Drawing a Blank—and killing it

A man in a prison cell is all shot up. He collapses on the floor in a heap, hands twitching, staring at the ceiling, or at heaven, or into an abyss. Or, perhaps, into his own past. Or future.

The injured man slides into the sea. Over the soundtrack a female voice speaks of Alcatraz’s history. And, just like that, the man is now in a suit, looking calm, no longer dying, on a ferry circling the infamous island penitentiary. (That voice belongs to a tour guide.)

The man will walk a very long hallway, heels clacking. We won’t know where that hallway is or where it leads, but the man arrives at a bungalow occupied by his wife. He storms in, pistol in hand, grabs her, then rushes to the bedroom and blows the hell out of the empty bed. (Later he’ll shoot a telephone.) “I’m glad you’re not dead,” says the wife. But is he? Not dead? Might this be Purgatory? Fantasy? Is this dream? The man’s name is Walker. But it might just as well be Sleepwalker. Or Walking Dead.

Point Blank (1967) was based on The Hunter, a bracing crime novel by Richard Stark, a pseudonym of the late, great Donald Westlake. The project was initiated and closely protected by Lee Marvin, its star, and John Boorman, the director Marvin chose. I believe both men respected the book, but what they constructed is so purely, adventurously cinematic as to resemble a violent, intricate, heartbroken puzzle/fever dream/temporal weave which the book scarcely suggests. The oneiric compression of exposition in that first mesmerizing montage, enveloped in composer Johnny Mandel’s funeral brass. It’s a fusion of genre and modernism more indebted to Last Year at Marienbad (1961) than anything in Hollywood’s gangster pantheon. And its influence has proved immense: Point Blank is written into the DNA of The Limey (1999) and The Limits of Control (2009).  

Marvin was no one’s idea of an arty type, yet he seemed to connect with Point Blank, perhaps because its compelling balance of violent vengeance drained of emotion and Walker’s haunted pathos and abandonment did justice to Marvin’s own guilt over surviving the assault on Mount Tapochau during World War II, where most of his company was killed. Marvin was cannier than his tough persona might imply. Surely he was aware of just how marvelously complex and layered—and challenging to mainstream audiences—Point Blank was. That complexity includes the very curious friendship between Walker and Mal Reese, the man who tries to kill him, who steals his money and his wife. Mal eventually drops the wife in favour of the wife’s sister (a sumptuous Angie Dickenson), and Walker’s revenge campaign eventually incorporates making the sister his own as well. Two sisters, and two men so close they may as well be brothers (of the Cain and Abel variety). The two men each love the same two women—perhaps as a way of loving each other. This isn’t so far out a reading. Just look at the way the men rush to meet each other at a crowded party. It’s much more of a love scene that anything involving the women. 

      

Killers, coffee, last dying words: Columbia Pictures Film Noir on DVD

Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Volume One collects five fascinating studies—four of them previously unavailable, each on its own separate disc—in how this thing we call noir developed throughout the 1950s, when the style/genre/sensibility was first named and catalogued. It was also the decade that saw the end of the classic noir cycle, partially as an inevitable effect of its newfound self-consciousness.

The Sniper (1952) opens with Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) carefully assembling his rifle and taking aim from his bedroom window at a woman as she climbs the stairs across the lane. No rounds are fired. For now, Eddie’s still satisfied with rehearsal. But how long before Eddie snaps, before he needs to release his charge, before some poor singer had to die, her stricken body shattering the glass that encased the poster announcing her gig? Eddie’s a walking time bomb, and the chilling thing about this picture, among the first to attempt a serious portrayal of a serial killer, is that Eddie’s the protagonist.

Women really piss this guy off. Everywhere he goes they torment him with their mere presence, even little girls. It’s painful to watch Eddie attempt to chat up pretty ladies in bars or in their homes when he delivers their laundry. He’s upset when a strange woman doesn’t believe that he’s an engineer and that he built a bridge between two Hawaiian islands. He’s tormented and lonesome, yet, in one of the film’s little masterstrokes of social critique—this was an early Stanley Kramer production—the ostensibly normal men and women who might offer consolation consistently express this casual misogyny that only confirms the acceptability of Eddie’s vilest compulsions.

Edward Dmytryk directs with ingenious economy throughout, a superb example of his approach being that scene where a hot burner illuminates the ceiling and is overshadowed by Eddie’s hand as he presses his palm against the burning coil—a pretty awkward cry for help. Yet The Sniper’s most memorable imagery comes from Dmytryk’s dramatic use of San Francisco—unnamed yet unmistakable—whose vertical, maze-like topography feels eerily aligned to Eddie’s agitated psyche. The disc features a commentary from the “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller (not Miller), a life-long Franciscano and a fountain of knowledge pertaining to both the film and its location.

Glenn Ford plays a rogue cop trying to annul a marriage between city officials and organized crime in The Big Heat (53). He has the moral high ground, his single-mindedness is transfixing, yet what of the fact that his crusade results in the torture and killing of three innocent women? It’s a revenge film, but not an unreflexive one. Women are collateral damage, but they’re also the most compelling, most richly detailed, smartest characters in the movie, especially Gloria Grahame, unnervingly sexy and sassy, and finally scarred by lanky Lee Marvin as a marvelously oafish gangster with a child’s feeling for stupid sadism. Grahame gets him back in the end, and I always wonder if he could smell the coffee boiling before she threw it in his face. Fritz Lang orchestrates scenes with restrained menace, the camera hanging back and then pouncing like a cat.

5 Against the House (55) finds college boys planning a prank heist in Reno with Kim Novak, here a lounge singer. This “field experiment in psychology” is strictly caper material, with lots of smart alecky gags, some nifty casino insider bits, Novak as luscious eye candy, and one weird-ass robot valet service that deserves its own documentary. Smartly directed by Phil Karlson, it’s consistently entertaining, if somewhat out of place in this collection. The sole noir element comes from Brian Keith’s Korean vet, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, ready to explode, his eyes bulging and body shaking, the hidden, writhing violence lurking beneath this film’s relatively placid surface.

A ship’s porter tosses some luggage into a cab, the cab zooms away, the cops follow, the cabbie’s shot, the car crashes. A cop’s killed in the chaos. No one understands what just happened. That’s the first 60 seconds of The Lineup (58), a San Francisco procedural based on a Dragnet-like TV show. It’s prime Don Siegel: clean, taut, lucid, and bracing. Siegel exemplifies the evaporation of the romantic fatalism of 1940s noir and the emergence of something more visceral and nasty. Less than a third of the way through the bad guys arrive from Florida to collect a shipment of heroin and completely take control of the picture. Eli Wallach plays a killer named Dancer, offing a guy in a bathhouse during a sequence baldly driven by latent homoeroticism. Bodies fall from great heights, limbs a-flopping, one of them onto a skating rink—the old Sutro Baths complex is brilliantly used. Robert Keith plays the dapper chief heavy, rather humorously trying to refine Wallach, and revealing himself to be a collector of people’s last dying words, which strikes me as a pretty apt metaphor for noir in all its emotionality, enigma and morbid fascination.

The Lineup also features a commentary track with Eddie Miller, but Miller spends most of his time fending off James Ellroy, who repeatedly goes rabid and indulges some of his most incoherent, far-right, pro-police brutality pet topics. Ellroy has been a welcome contributor to commentary tracks on the Zodiac (07) special edition and the recent Crime Wave (54) DVD, but here he proves far less illuminating and far too easily distracted.

Was Murder By Contract (58) already neo-noir? It certainly exudes a sly knowingness about noir convention and, being the story of a guy who becomes a hitman so he can buy himself a nice house on the Ohio River, it lends itself to being read as consumerist satire. It is in any case a low-budget wonder, brimming with brilliantly quirky characterizations and scenes in which killer Claude (Vince Edwards) kills time playing mini-golf, deep sea fishing, and going to the fucking zoo when he’s supposed to be killing a woman set to testify in a high profile trial. When he’s informed that his target is female he recoils, not because he’s squeamish about having to murder a woman but because he should have charged double—women, he claims, make undependable marks. At one point Claude embarks on a nihilist rant when a waiter brings him a coffee cup with a lipstick stain. But he’s most of the time Zen-like, obsessed with efficiency, and doesn’t like guns—he’s the evil version of a Jim Jarmusch protagonist.

Elegantly photographed with the barest of resources by Lucien Ballard, who’d later collaborate with Sam Peckinpah, smoothly directed by Irving Lerner, and enveloped in a quiet, insistent, all-guitar score by Perry Botkin Jr., Murder By Contract is deeply creepy, darkly funny, and totally engrossing, perhaps the premiere discovery from what’s looking like the best multi-title DVD release of the year.