Suspicion

When Lina (Joan Fontaine) first meets the charming Johnnie (Cary Grant) while sharing a first class car on a train, he is carrying a third class ticket and just happens to be short on change that day.  Right?  He starts courting her and as quickly as he starts the fire, he leaves for weeks without one word of correspondence right after she has enthusiastically told her parents about him.  Just as Lina is most desperate for him, after hearing her parents call her ‘spinsterish’, he comes back, sweeps her off her feet and they elope.  When he takes her home to a big house full of servants, Lina assumes Johnnie has plenty of money.  Turns out, he’s a broke playboy.  He just gambles and borrows money to pay for things.  As money issues pile up, Johnnie becomes more interested in murder mystery novels and seems secretive, especially in his business travels.  When his business partner is mysteriously murdered, Lina wonders if she could be his next victim.

In Suspicion, director Alfred Hitchcock lets the whole plot rests on how we interpret what Lina is thinking.  Her new husband isn’t exactly who she thought he was, what else is he hiding?  When a new clue is found, we look straight to Lina for understanding.  Her big eyes, careful stance, suspicious looks all tell us that we can’t trust Johnnie.  Fontaine drives this film, yet naturally makes us feel like it is all out of her control.  They way she lets us place all our trust and understanding of what is happening on her is perfect and completely deserves that Oscar win for best actress.

Throughout the film, Johnnie calls Lina ‘Monkey-face’ as a nickname.  I love how much I hated that little detail.  It is not just the name, which I find no endearment in, but how he can say it.  If I were Lina, there would always be a wondering in the back of my mind every time he said it, “Is he mocking me?”  Is he?  Does he have this plan to kill her?  My mind started turning the nickname into a horrible device to slowly dehumanize Lina to Johnnie.  Animals are easier to kill than people, right?

Another detail I found absolutely entrancing is the glass of milk.  In one scene, Johnnie brings Lina a nice tall glass of milk as she is sick in bed.  We see him walk across the large open floor and up the stairs in the dark, with beautiful shadows all around, and the milk seems to glow ominously.  Turns out, Hitchcock put a little battery powered light under the glass to give it this effect.  So simple and elegant to make one small detail so sinister.

Unfortunately, Suspicion doesn’t make it on my list of favorite Hitchcock films, but I still enjoyed it.  The story is wonderful and the characters are intriguing, but that ultimate level of suspense I have only found in Hitchcock films was missing for me.  There were hardly any moments to yell at the screen, simply because Lina was too smart to fall for any tricks most of the time.  I feel like an anti-feminist coming to terms with this, but I guess I just love Hitchcock films where he doesn’t give his female lead a decent set of brains.  Oh Tippi Hedren, you knew that room was full of birds.  Thanks for going in there anyway and letting Mr. Hitchcock throw live birds at you for a week.

“If you’re going to kill someone, do it simply.”

The Maltese Falcon

Not that I’m bragging, but I’m so dedicated to this insane blog project that watched The Maltese Falcon twice.  Not that I really wanted to, but my first viewing, after a long day, was late last Saturday night, tummy stuffed on grilled shish-kabobs, courtesy of my loving husband.  He saw The Maltese Falcon on my pile of Netflix discs and popped it in, recognizing it as a good movie he once saw on a plane.  I was nodding off repeatedly throughout the film.  I woke up multiple times asking my husband, “What’s going on?  Who’s that guy?”  By the end, I was just angry that I was missing some crucial connections.  Monday morning, I watched it again, this time after coffee and a shower.  I would highly suggest brewing an extra pot to get the best quality out of this film.

Sadly, it was still a bore.  All talk and very little action.  And the talk was so fast it can be hard to keep up.  If your mind wonders for ten seconds you can be twenty steps behind Bogart and the gang.

You see, Humphrey Bogart plays Samule Spade, a Private Investigator, who has just been asked by a concerned woman by the name Miss Wanderly (Mary Astor) to find her sister and convince her to come home and leave the man she ran off with, Floyd Thursby.  That night, Spade’s partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan), goes out to tail Thursby only to end up dead shortly before Thursby does.  Spade is considered a prime suspect, so he finds Wanderly to try to clear his story, only to discover she used a fake name to try to allude him and a dangerous cast of characters closing in all searching for a jewel encrusted artifact, the Maltese Falcon.  Spade decides he’s the only man who can protect her but gets greedy and becomes entangled in the messy transaction for the Falcon.

I have no doubts that the plot is solid and engaging, but this is the motor-mouth of classic noir films.  I’ll give the great John Huston a break, this was his directorial debut.  At times, it felt like an exhausting exercise in listening to keep all the clues and details in place within my mind.  There are no moments of suspense because no other ideas can get in there with all the dialogue.  Any silent moments feel uncomfortable after the first few minutes.  Have you ever seen an episode of The Gilmore Girls?  It was like that, only instead of girly dribble it was all Bogart crime noir.  Non stop.  Sitting here writing in silence and thinking about the constant bombardment of words I had to keep up with is still a little unsettling.

Obviously, I was pretty disappointed with The Maltese Falcon, but that doesn’t mean everyone will be.  My husband refused to alter his original Netflix rating of five stars, and I admire that.  If you enjoy Bogart, mysteries, crime or any classic noir, maybe this will work for you.  Just keep your ears perked up at all times so you don’t get lost.

“Here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding.”

Double Indemnity

There are four things a film noir must be: dark, smokey, seducing and cynical.  To write a decent piece about Double Indemnity, one of the best examples of film noir, I feel the need to pull the shades closed, put on a fedora and let cigarette smoke waft around the room.  But I don’t smoke, and with my modern computer screen blazing at me, it’s hard to strike that dark mood anymore.  It’s as if all noir retired along with the typewriter.

In the film directed by Billy Wilder, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is an insurance salesman and when he visits the Dietrichson household about renewing their auto policy, he gets more than he expected.  Mrs. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) is at home, clad only in a towel on the second floor looking down to Neff in the entry way.  The attraction is instant and rather than shoo Neff away to come back when Mr. Dietrichson is around, she meets him downstairs and starts to ask questions about accident insurance.  Neff is no dope and can sense that Phyllis has murder on her mind.  Neff resists at first, but she pulls him in with lustful greed and together they concoct a plan to get Mr. Dietrichson accident insurance without him knowing and then stage a scene that looks like a train accident, because those pay double.  But Neff’s boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) can sense that something isn’t right and creeps closer and closer to figuring out that Neff was in cahoots with Phyllis the whole time.

What makes this story so compelling is how we feel that Neff could be any good man and Phyllis can be any woman who chooses to use her sexuality for evil.  Neff has many chances to back out, but he’s driven by greed and lust.  Because of his inside look at the insurance business, he gets overconfident and thinks he can outsmart the system.  Meanwhile Phyllis is the face that can launch a good man into a murderous fraud scheme and keep cold and calculating enough to take that blond wig seriously.  I still can’t look at a woman with dark eyebrows and perfectly molded blond hair without thinking of Double Indemnity, and I would never trust them.

One of my favorite moments in the film is the suspenseful scene where Keyes visits Neff’s apartment at the same time that Phyllis is due to arrive.  Keyes talks about how he’s sure she was working with a partner to kill her husband and stage his death, it’s only a matter of time until the two are found together.  Meanwhile, Phyllis is listening just behind the door.  The best part is how tense everything feels as Neff realizes Phyllis is behind the door and Keyes says,  “They may think it’s twice as safe because there’s two of them, but it isn’t twice as safe. It’s ten times twice as dangerous.”  The warning goes straight to the both of them.

Sadly, Double Indemnity did not win the award for best picture, but I can understand why.  In 1945 with war raging and people trying to keep positive back home, a film dark film about murder and scheming women just isn’t what the world needed to take top honors.  A film about murderous adulterers was already controversial, so it’s not surprising that it lost to Going My Way’s story of a heartwarming singing priest.  But today, Double Indemnity is the go-to film when studying film noir.  It’s upheld in the AFI’s top 100 as #29.  And personally, it takes a great weight off my shoulders to know that my husband has finally seen it.

“How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”

Crossfire

As the opening credits fade away, we are shown a dark room and two shadows fighting on the wall.  The light is broken, leaving the end of the struggle a mystery.  When the light is replaced, we see one man on the floor, another sitting in a chair pulled up by and out the door by a third man.  There is the murder, the rest of the film unravels the mystery.

With Captain Finlay (Robert Young) at the scene, we learn that the victim’s name was Samuels (Sam Levene).  Just before his death, he was at a bar talking to a group of demobilized soldiers.  Of the group are Leroy (William Phipps) a naive boy from Tennessee, Sgt. Montgomery (Robert Ryan) a bossy racist, Floyd (Steve Brodie) who follows Montgomery’s lead and Mitchell (George Cooper) who’s reported to have been acting a little nuts lately.  With Mitchell’s wallet found at the scene, he’s the prime suspect.  But no one can find Mitchell, so the soldiers go out trying to find him before the police do.

As characters are found or questioned, the story is told in flashbacks.  Each person has more to reveal about the crime and their actions leading up to it.  When it turns out that Mitchell claims to have an alibi, his freedom may rest in what jaded dancer Ginny (Gloria Grahame) has to say about him.

There’s a great internal conflict that comes up about demobilized soldiers.  With WWII just over, they’re left with no mission and no money.  Now that all that is over, it seems the men are lost.  For years they have had a job to do and someone to direct their hate towards.  When the real murderer and motive comes out, it’s much uglier than anticipated.

Crossfire is an interesting whodunit with a post WWII moral agenda.  If you enjoy a murder mystery, classic noir style or a military drama, I recommend this film.

“You know the kind. Played it safe during the war, keepin’ themselves in civvies, nice apartments, swell dames… you know the kind.”

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

After Jim Allen (Paul Muni) returns from serving in WWI doesn’t want to return to his old job at the factory.  Instead he wants to become an engineer, “a man’s job where he can do things.”  He starts from the bottom up, travels as a skilled laborer wherever the job takes him but soon work becomes scarce.  One night, an acquaintance brings him to a burger joint and tries to rob the place.  Wrongly accused of armed robbery, Jim is sentenced to ten years on the chain gang.

Now, before we get into the best parts of the film, what do you imagine a chain gang to be exactly?  I think I only had cartoon images of men in stripes chained to a cannonball.  All the little details about life on the chain gang is what makes this film so fascinating.  Jim is first fitted with iron shackles around each ankle with thirteen links of chain between his legs.  You notice that the men walk in short scuffed steps, even after they’ve been released.  A second chain is attached to the one between their ankles and has a large iron loop at the end.  Jim quickly learns to always carry this one, rather than let it drag.  The loop is used to connect all the men together on one large chain during work, sleep and riding in the back of the truck.  When the men are unstrung, the chain is ripped out, clanking and probably whipping the men’s hands as they hold their loop.

The men are treated like animals by the guards.  It seems that every night, they find someone to pull out of bed and whip, whether he’s been out of line, lazy or just in need of some reminding.  While working, the men can’t even wipe the sweat from their face without permission.  And Jim is supposed to endure ten years of this?

During work one day, Jim makes a daring escape.  This is one of those classic and exciting chase scenes.  Jim is running through the woods, searching for a way to cover his scent with the hounds just one step behind him, the guards yelling, rifles in hand ready to kill and in the distance we hear a train wailing.  Director Mervyn LeRoy knows his chase scenes.

Once Jim has escaped, he knows everyone is looking for him.  The tension and suspense as a man on the run is what makes this such a great classic noir.  The barbershop scene had me on pins and needles and left me relieved with laughter: “How was it close enough?  Plenty.”

When the search has quieted down, Jim changes his name to Allen James (yeah, that’ll really fool them) and restarts his dream of becoming an engineer.  But he’s constantly looking over his shoulder.  How long can this dream last as a fugitive?  Will he have more merit now as an accomplished man?

Without seeing Calvalcade, State Fair or Smilin’ Through I have to pick I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang for 1932-1933.  It’s wonderfully gritty, realistic and sets up the classic noir genre to a high standard that will explode in the next decade.  Paul Muni carries the film on his shoulders with ease and Mervyn LeRoy createst every scene to be tantalizing, smart and eyeopening.  See it just to have a new understanding of a chain gang.  If you enjoy prison movies, escape films or classic noir I cannot recommend this film enough.