WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, 1944

We haven't been making much headway on this project for a variety of reasons.

a) we have a baby with amazing instinctive understanding of film. Meaning that he has a real knack for waiting for the quietest, most wrenching, or most important-to-understanding-the-movie moment to lose his shit.

b) we don't want to watch movies when we haven't written the last ones up

c) and we still haven't written the last ones up.

So I'm going to start doing quick takes on movies we just don't have as much to say about. Not necessarily because we didn't like them, but because they just don't seem like there's enough fodder for a really full discussion.

I really wanted to like Fritz Lang's WOMAN IN THE WINDOW. It's Fritz Lang! Edward G. Robinson! Joan Bennett! I adore SCARLET STREET, right? WOMAN IN THE WINDOW left me with a serious case of the mehs, though. Not that there wasn't some good stuff in there, mind you - Dan Durya has a great time playing a blackmailer, Joan Bennett does her thing, and Edward G. Robinson has to have really enjoyed playing the world's shittiest fucking criminal.  (Seriously.  My god.  We're talking "yell at the TV" incompetent.)  It's got some great sustained suspense and a bit of that "what would you do" action, but I don't feel the whole thing ever really came together for me.

And the ending is Some Bullshit.

Seriously, I cannot with that.  It's rude to the audience. Ha ha, caught you caring, but it was all a dream! It's insulting. I'm not saying it never works, but you'd better think long and hard about that before you serve it up to me.

On the whole it feels like a rough draft for SCARLET STREET, honestly. Similar elements but it doesn't really hum.

- Sara

STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR, 1940

SARA: This time we get to talk about a movie I really, really liked!  STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR is evidently often (along with THE MALTESE FALCON and M) cited as the first film noir, which leads me to believe that the number one thing you need for an iconic noir is Peter Lorre being all popeyed. A reporter (John McGuire) with a crappy apartment is the witness to a murder, testifies at the trial, has an ethical freakout, sees a crazy person, and has a German Expressionist dream sequence.

An actual scene from STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR. (Not really).

WALLACE: This might be the greatest Fritz Lang homage I've ever seen. It's got all of the hallmarks of a Lang movie: mystery, paranoia, a phantom villain, humor, an expressionistic fantasy sequence ... this is a tight little thriller. Even better, the film's upbeat ending doesn't negate any of it's cynicism. Yeah, the final moments of the movie might suggest that the city opened its prisons and released every wrongfully accused man currently serving time. But that doesn't mean we all aren't just moments away from being sent to the gallows by a bored, apathetic jury for a crime we didn't commit.

I've sat in on a few jury trials in my time and they're every bit as terrifying (and arbitrary) as STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR paints them to be.

SARA: I loved the great representation of that middle of the night "scared to look, scared to not look" frozen thing I've had many times, like when my college roommate would occasionally stop snoring and I'd be both entirely sure she had suddenly died and entirely sure I was an idiot. I mean, on the one hand, if you go touch her foot and she's not dead, you're a weirdo, but if she is dead she's gonna be just as dead in the morning, right?  So you shouldn't investigate. But you might be in here with a dead person.

I was almost thinking that STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR, not being a "full noir" necessarily, might do something really unexpected and have the neighbor not be dead at all, the Peter Lorre character another boarder's brother come to visit, and the man on trial be totally guilty. That would also have been a satisfying movie, I think.

WALLACE: The message would have been the same, for sure. But the audience was probably rooting for the jerkhole neighbor to be dead. I actually had more empathy for Lorre's character, who was a psychopath on the third week of a murder bender.

There are still a few elements of film noir that hadn't fully gelled here. First up is the weirdly attractive cast. John McGuire and Margaret Tallichet both look like they stepped out of a Frank Capra romcom. There's not a glimmer of menace in either of their characters, who are as virtuous as Brad and Janet in THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW. That whiskey stained despair I've come to associate with film noir is mostly absent here. Our male hero should have a face like a catcher's mitt; our heroine should look like a vampire.

Also unusual is that both of the protagonists in this film are pretty smart, too.

SARA: Yeah, I was so glad to see the romantic interest being sensible and resourceful (and, you're right, weirdly wholesome.)  Is that a femme sain?  She annoyed the hell out of me early in the movie for being awfully hard on somebody who's just testifying on the facts in court, but once her fiancé gets framed for murder her response is to go bust her ass canvassing for witnesses in the neighborhood (something the cops don't seem terribly interested in doing). Of course she makes the classic movie misstep of winding up alone with the killer once she spots him, but it's a believable one and her efforts to escape are pretty good, too. (And as a public librarian in a large urban library, I have to tell you I have rarely seen such realistic mental illness ramble. I can't tell you how many times I've heard something exactly in the same tone and general pattern as what Lorre tells her, I mean, usually without the murder parts... probably.  You never know.)

Which of course brings us to Peter Lorre. Man, is he ever not good? I thought the bit with the dog was a really neat bit of writing — it made it clear that this isn't a guy who's evil or cruel. He's dangerous because he's really really crazy and frightened, but still plenty smart.

WALLACE: STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR's willingness to combine genres might be the accidental origin of film noir. This is a mystery with elements of Expressionism, a romantic adventure and a violent thriller that's still beholden to the Old Testament values of the Hays Code. It's that latter element that might be most critical part of the formula. It allowed characters to commit heinous crimes because there would always be a reckoning in the final reel. And the more objectionable the behavior, the more dire the consequences. The pessimistic nature of film noir was hardwired into the genre out of necessity.

SARA: I feel that what makes it a special movie is what it owes to Expressionism, though.  Obviously visually, which leads to the really memorable fantasy sequence, but more subtly in the focus on Ward's fears and the subjectivity of the lens they're viewed from.  (And, I suppose, in the extravagant crappiness of his living situation.  Everything is just a little bit outsized.)  It's also a movie that seems to really enjoy playing with expectations a little bit; consider the diner scene where whatsherface realizes she's sitting next to the killer and he orders raw hamburgers. Both she and the viewer think "holy shit is that guy so evil he eats his hamburgers bleeding?!" and then you see him give them to the dog.  I think maybe the reason she even follows him is partly related to that little ghoulish touch — she is us and we want to see a monster eat some raw meat.

WALLACE: There's something almost Hitchcockian in the movie's structure. We spend the better part of the film following the intrepid reporter, who gets sidelined when the cops eventually charge him with murder. From there, his girlfriend takes the lead ... and the transition isn't condescending or jarring. That's because the movie invested in this change, establishing Tallichet as the haunted voice of reason from the very beginning. If she didn't spend the first act whining about the inequities inherit in the system, Lorre's magical appearance later in the film would have felt a little too convenient.

SARA: That's certainly true, it's just a little unfair of her to freak out at Ward just for giving an accurate testimony! It isn't a mystery per se (it just waits until the killer shows up, and it's obvious that it's gotta be Peter Lorre because, duh, Peter Lorre) but it has the feel and pacing of a mystery. Although this movie does like its female character a lot better than a Hitchcock film ever did.  

THE LETTER, 1940

SARA: Our next film is THE LETTER, a 1940 William Wyler film starring Bette Davis as a murderess on a plantation in Singapore. And it is hella disappointing. I picked it up from the library because we watched the opening scene as part of the "Daily Dose of Darkness" tidbits I've been getting in my inbox as part of the TCM course, and the opening scene works like gangbusters. No fucking around, just get to the "empty your gun at a dude" part!  The next few minutes as Davis' character explains herself to her husband and the authorities works well too, and then there's the rest of the movie to sit through.

WALLACE: One of the taglines for the film was "And I wish I could say I was sorry," which set up Davis' character as some sort of femme fatale. But she spends most of the film making lame excuses for her behavior in the opening sequence. Yeah, she's bad ... but in a way that seems more fitting for the police blotter than a film noir. I can think of a dozen other Better Davis characters that would eat this one for breakfast.

Even though, Davis is still the star of this picture. Her character isn't written any better or worse than the rest, but she's got a real magnetism. And that's coming from somebody who's never been a fan of her work.

SARA: Well I think the problem with the film might be that the movie isn't quite sure who the star of the picture is. Unlike most films noir, THE LETTER doesn't have a viewpoint character.  There's no voiceover and no specific point of view, which is an interesting contrast to DARK PASSAGE, our last movie.  So when the movie is lazily moving pieces around the board, in and out of lawyers' offices and jail cells, there's nobody talking to the audience giving us any sort of internal perspective to liven the place up. There's the Bette Davis character, who's rather hard to sympathize with, and there's a lawyer whose name I never bothered to remember who has the fakest and briefest crisis of conscience I've ever seen, and the film can't make up its mind who it's really following.  So instead it just sort of spins its wheels through the second act.  It picks up a little bit at the end but by then it's too little too late.

I did appreciate the Hays Code used specifically as a suspense mechanism; once somebody gets away with murder in a court of law the audience knows the clock is ticking down and she's gonna get it.

WALLACE: I just realized that somebody didn't get their just desserts: Davis' friendzoned lawyer friend, who took part in extortion, perjury and a host of other shady deals to get her acquitted for murder. The most he suffers for his crimes is a brief bout of the flop sweats.

Is this a good time to talk about racism? Because that's when THE LETTER gets weirdly complicated. Old Hollywood movies are like that relative we all have who thinks racism is measured entirely by how much you use the N-word. There might not be any slurs uttered in THE LETTER, but that doesn't mean it gets a pass for how it treats its Asian characters.

SARA: Oooh, yeah. Every fan of old movies cringes when a movie busts out the plinky "Asian music" in the first five minutes. "Don't be racist don't be racist don't be — GODDAMNIT!"  And no, before I get an inbox full of snotty comments about how I'm too stupid to realize that things were different back then, I know things were different back then and it is entirely possible to enjoy a film while simultaneously not thinking it's okay and that it's worth pointing it out.  I will not soon forget bringing home HOLIDAY INN in blissful ignorance of the Lincoln's Birthday number.

WALLACE: I'd love to talk more about this film, but there's not much to chew on. The first and final minutes of the movie are terrific, but the meat of the film is forgettable. Even its casual racism is half-assed. The film wants to have things both ways: We're supposed to sympathize with Gale Sondergaard as "Inscrutable Asian Dragon Lady" because her husband's murder went unpunished ... but it's really hard to sympathize with a character who doesn't speak, change facial expression, etc.

Sondergaard's character is almost a symbol for the film's major problem, now that I think about it. The characters are just too sketchy to care about.

SARA: And too faux-exotic!

Dat opening tho...

DARK PASSAGE (1947)

SARA: This summer we're adding a bunch of films noir to our movie watching diet with TCM's Summer of Darkness.  Turner Classic Movies is showing over a hundred noirs this June and July, some of them rare or newly restored.  That sounds awesome!  Unfortunately we have no money, so we have no TCM.  They've also prepared an online film course (Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir) in partnership with Ball State University that's free to take, and as a really classy gesture the course suggests freely available public domain films that support the syllabus.  We'll be following along and supplementing what we can find on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime with our local library's collection.  You can join the course at any time; sign up at http://summerofdarkness.tcm.com/.  You can also see the film schedule there, buy tickets for Fathom Events screenings of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and... buy fedoras?  Yeah, you can buy fedoras.  If you're a Twitter user they want you to use #NoirSummer.

We started out with DARK PASSAGE, one of the TCM "San Francisco Noir" selections.  If you're confused about which Dark Whatever you've seen and which you haven't, this is "the one with the first third of the movie in Bogart's POV".  You don't actually see the star's face until over an hour into the movie; the first third is shot almost entirely from his perspective.  The obvious question is: does this work?

Have you seen this killer? Because we haven't.

My opinion is "eh, not so much."  The film vocabulary we're accustomed to varies the kind of shot.  I'm not saying that's the only kind of vocabulary that can work (Western music's chord structures aren't the only way to make music, after all), but it's certainly what we're used to and without it, I really felt the first third of the film dragged.  As a modern viewer the similarity to a video game with a really elaborate conversation tree was hard to ignore, and there's a real awkwardness to the framing when the camera looks at people, not quite the way a human being looks at them, but full on eye contact and always the same distance away.  So you need me to collect how many plants for you so you can make the medicine to sell in the big city so you'll give me your father's sword so I can save everybody in this town including you?

FALLOUT 3 was in development for a really long time.

WALLACE: I was hoping Humphrey Bogart would activate the cheat codes and begin a GRAND THEFT AUTO-style killing spree. There's nothing wrong with DARK PASSAGE that you couldn't fix with a scene of Bogie (or Lauren Bacall, for that) shooting a police helicopter out of the sky with a rocket-propelled grenade. But we haven't really discussed the movie's actual plot. Here's what IMDB seems to think this movie is about:

"A man convicted of murdering his wife escapes from prison and works with a woman to try and prove his innocence."

Do you think that's accurate?

SARA:  Uh, technically?  I mean, isn't that at least 5% of all movies?  I promise you, if you were trying to figure out if you've seen this movie before, that will not help you.  Honestly, does the plot even matter? (Does the plot ever really matter in a noir?  I swear I was stone cold sober through OUT OF THE PAST and if you offered me a million dollars if I could tell you what happened in the last third of that movie we'd still have a mortgage.)

WALLACE: This isn't my first encounter with DARK PASSAGE. I discovered Bogart not long after high school and it was love at first site. Unfortunately, THE BIG SLEEP, KEY LARGO and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE were some goddamn tough acts to follow. I like DARK PASSAGE more now than when I first saw it, but it's definitely one of Bogart's lesser films. Part of the problem is its shtick — specifically the first-person POV element from the first act — functions almost like anti-drama. The first exchange between characters takes place in front of a rear-projection screen with one of the actors (Clifton Young) speaking directly to the camera lens for almost five minutes. Bogart's voice can be heard, but it's clear from the start that he's not really in the scene.

The Humphrey Bogart Simulator (bourbon sold separately).

SARA: But in a way that's kind of an interesting aspect to the movie.  For the first third the camera is restricted to this very extreme POV business, and in the second third he's trapped under a set of claustrophobic bandages and unable to speak.  We as the audience can't really get a handle on his character but might that not be a little on purpose?  I mean, maybe the video game thing isn't just facile; one reason video games put you in that perspective and often even have silent protagonists is that you're supposed to put yourself into the game.  This movie thinks we're going to automatically be so much on Bogie's side that he doesn't even tell us that he's escaped to clear his name and find his wife's killer until two thirds of the way in!  And everybody including at least one of the antagonists roots for the guy, gives him aid and comfort and information, which is odd because he's an escaped murderer and the newspaper has brought out their WAR font to give updates on him that actually go past the fold because they ran out of screamin' room. Maybe it's a bit of a fantasy. Certainly the ending is.

WALLACE: Hollywood seems to have leaned some lessons from this movie. LADY IN THE LAKE was released that same year and was a lot more audacious: The entire movie was shot from star Robert Montgomery's point of view, but the execution renders it almost unwatchable. DARK PASSAGE wisely split this gimmick into several acts. When Bogie's seen during the first act, it's as a shadowy figure. After his plastic surgery he becomes a more physical presence ... but temporarily loses his voice. Bogart's character is assembled piece by piece like Frankenstein's monster, but he never really gels as a character. He remains little more than a cipher for the audience.

Despite its artifice, the POV "fight" between Bogart and Clifton Young at the start of the movie works fairly well, though. It's a fakey as a Godzilla costume under florescent light, but it's also cramped and intimate in all the right ways. Had the gimmick ended there it would probably be better remembered today.

DARK PASSAGE: The first film shot entirely in Persecution Vision!

SARA: I do wonder what it would have been like to see it when it was released - now we're very accustomed to the technique and if anything this example is strange because it isn't filmed in Motion Sickness Vision.  At the time it was a lot more audacious.

Talking about the rest of the movie feels a little bit like "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"  There's a lot of good here that isn't related to the camera gimmicks, though.  Once Bogie actually does get to do some acting I think it's great stuff; the scene with the cop in the diner works like gangbusters.  That's an actor who didn't get a lot of opportunities to play tentative and afraid, but he really sells it there.

The larger plot is a little thin on the ground that I kept getting excited about ideas I had that would have been really good, y'all, all "well maybe it's going to do THIS?!" or "oh maybe she's IN ON IT!" because there's just not a lot of there there and you want to fill in with something more interesting or less far fetched.  How on earth does Bacall even know Bob and Madge?  Swinger's party?  Her character never really had a lot to do; she's in the film a lot but only in a few scenes does she get anything to work with.  I really wanted to see more of what made her tick, since the script and direction doesn't play it up but she's really just one of those creepy women who marry serial killers on Death Row, right?

And wait, am I supposed to believe Agnes Moorehead beat a full grown man to death with a trumpet?

WALLACE: Agnes Moorehead can do anything she likes, as far as I'm concerned. I didn't get this MARGO LANE 4 LIFE tattoo for nothing.

It's going to be hard to discuss the end of this movie because it has more than one. I'm not sure that DARK PASSAGE is a full-blooded noir thanks to its unwillingness to stick the landing. Had the credits rolled after Moorehead tosses herself out of her apartment window, I'd happily file this movie in the noir drawer. THAT ending would have delivered all the nihilistic uncertainty you expect from the genre: Not only was Bogart's new cover blown, but now he's wanted for a second murder he didn't commit. THE END.

Instead, we get a tacked-on escape scene that serves no real purpose, followed by the "Happily Ever After" denouement in Peru.

Agnes Moorehead? More like Agnes MOREDEAD. Amiright? Hello?

SARA: Hey, how do those cars know they're supposed to park diagonally there?  Did the first guy do it and everybody else figured he knew what he was doing?

I want to see three days after the end of the movie, when they've found out that Bogie farts in his sleep and Bacall is a mean drunk but they're stuck there for another week until the next plane out.  "I liked you better when you couldn't talk!"  "Yeah, well I liked you better when you were stalking me throughout my trial and imprisonment, QUIETLY!"

Lots of style to talk about, by the way.  I love the oppressive ceilings everywhere, and once you pointed out that there are vertical "bars" everywhere (the suits, everything Bacall wears, the Golden Gate Bridge, the bannisters on the stairs, etc.) I couldn't stop seeing it.

WALLACE: It's a claustrophobic film, for sure. Even the outdoor sequences are constructed in a way that hems in the characters. For example: The shot at the start of the film that show's Bogart's character fleeing the barrel. He appears to be running away, but the edge of the barrel around the frame of the picture suggests he's still a prisoner. Which is another reason that THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION ending doesn't work for me ... it betrays the film's overall message.

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered."

SARA: It really skirts the rules, too.  Yeah, he might have been innocent of killing his wife, but he sure was guilty of breaking out of prison, assaulting people, endangering a police officer doing his duty, fake ID...  how "bad" do you have to be under the Code to have to be punished by the end of a movie?

Grounding the film in the geography of San Francisco was nice, by the way.  When you've got such a fantastical construction as a Plastic Surgery Plot it helps to have a concrete location; there are some great shots in this that are wide open and specific in location but still claustrophobic.  I'm thinking of the cable car scenes and the one where he stands at a huge wide intersection but still totally hemmed in.  And of course the scene on the bridge with the roadblock.

WALLACE: While some of the production design was cliché (but the good kind of cliché) this is definitely a movie designed with the audience’s perspective in mind. Even after it drops the first-person perspective, it’s still a movie that treats the viewer like a … well, not a participant, exactly. Maybe a passenger?

SARA: Agreed, and I think that's what ultimately somewhat saved it from being just a gimmick piece.  I'd say it wasn't entirely successful but I liked it well enough.

So, verdict: interesting film, worth watching, not the best example of anything in particular.

Necessary Exposition

#GRAYSCALE was almost doomed.

By which I mean the first name to leap to mind for this website was, quite literally, "Doomed." The name felt appropriately thematic, all things considered. This blog is meant to serve as a place for my wife and I to talk about the movies featured in TCM's free multimedia online course, "Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir." The program runs from June 1 until Aug. 4 this year, after which this website will probably reach its tragic conclusion.

But then again, it might not. The first film in the series that we watched together, DARK PASSAGE, had an uncharacteristically happy ending.  We'll be talking about that film soon enough, but its resolution gave me pause on branding such as dour moniker on this website. After all, it's not like the two of us are going to stop watching movies when "Into the Darkness" ends.

The film course runs concurrently with the TCM's "Summer of Darkness” series, which airs 24 hours of films noir every Friday in June and July. #Grayscale has one minor handicap, though ... we don't have access to TCM.

Luckily, the film course is structured in a way that allows us plan ahead. Home video and streaming media will fill in a lot of the holes, but we're likely to miss a few movies here and there.

(And don't forget to visit my regular gig, The Collinsport Historical Society. It's got vampires!)

— Wallace McBride