The Aspect Ratio


	Home Theater by Lons ISSUE #2: He's making a scrapbook of everything I kill! One thing I've always found interesting about film noir as a genre is that the films don't self-identify. Back in the 40's, no one set out to make something called "film noir." It didn't exist. These were crime pictures or detective pictures or gangster pictures or melodramas. Many of the great Hollywood films of the 40's shared the traits we now think of as noir staples - extreme light and shadow, anti-social, criminal or even violent leading men, femme fatales, expressive slang-heavy banter - but the entire aesthetic had yet to be over-analyzed and pigeon-holed. Before it was the subject for 100,000 film school essays, film noir was just about making an intense, romantic and stylish movie. When modern filmmakers adopt these trappings, they don't have this kind of freedom, by definition. "Blood Simple" is not a crime film that happens to share some traits with film noir. It's a modern reinterpretation of an old style, in which all the familiar visual signposts of the genre refer back to classic techniques even as they advance the Coen Brothers original narrative. It's a great film, don't get me wrong, but merely by virtue of being self-aware and referential, it has lost some of the provocative edge that makes the best noirs so mysterious, so gritty and so glamorous. The selection of films in Warner Brothers' latest Film Noir box set (volume #3) features films from the late 40's and early 50's, the period when some filmmakers first began to explore the outer boundaries of the traditional noir genres. As such, none of the movies in the set (at least, out of the three films I've seen) meet all the exact specifications of the Film Noir category, if one is being strictly textbook. Instead, these titles integrate noir elements into other forms of classic Hollywood filmmaking. One reason for this change was procedural, a kind of soft censorship. Following concerns that Depression-era gangster films glorified criminality, Hollywood studios focused on telling stories about more traditional heroes. One way to refocus the movies on more positive protagonists but without giving up the seedy atmosphere that had become so popular with audiences was to make movies about cops. They operate in the same world as the crooks, play by the same tough rules of the street, but no one minds when they get to hug their wives and drive off into the sunset at the end. This is the sort of middle-ground philosophy that produces a movie like The Racket, a tepid 1951 outing with some grand but never-realized ambitions. No-nonsense cop McQuigg (Robert Mitchum) and steely mob boss Nick Scanlon (Robert Ryan) discover they share a common enemy when a big crime syndicate begins operating in town. It's an interesting premise that at times brings to mind Michael Mann films, particularly Heat. Like that film, The Racket focuses on the ways in which a man's job (and, in these movies, it's always the men with these kinds of jobs) begins to define him. Scanlon and McQuigg have a lot in common, particularly in the ways they use their quick wits to maneuver around the many dangerous obstacles in their paths. But because they've become set in these roles, pursued and pursuer, they're destined to clash even when working towards a similar goal. Unfortunately, despite the interesting ideas that went into the script, The Racket itself is a flat, dry kind of movie. Ryan's always fun to watch, the kind of hulking, energetic presence that makes these sorts of movies memorable in the first place. But the role of Scanlon, as written, wastes his considerable talents. Save for a few violent sequences in which Scanlon's animal rage appears suddenly and dissipates quickly, the character's a stock old-time movie gangster. Mitchum comes off even worse, failing to really get inside McQuigg in any significant way. He just seemed uninterested to me, disengaged from the entire film. Mitchum's a guy who can be tremendous in the right part with the right director, exuding a quiet but horrible menace in Night of the Hunter and a sly duplicity in Out of the Past, but it just doesn't work if he doesn't connect to the material. Director John Cromwell's film is by no means terrible or unwatchable. It just lacks the grace and dexterity of the best entries in the genre. The Racket doesn't have the ceaselessly clever dialogue, the hyperstylized technique or the stark beauty found in the work of, say, Otto Preminger or Edward Dmytryk. Anthony Mann, though he made his share of crime films, is probably better-known as a Western director. His entry in the noir box, 1949's Border Incident, combines these two disciplines into a social message film that, while highly entertaining and surprisingly prescient, couldn't really have less to do with film noir. Mann's film opens with a brief documentary-style look at the job of the Border Patrol, ushering in Mexican farm laborers with work permits while keeping out illegal immigrants who want to sneak in around the complex and overwhelmed legal system. We're informed that a vicious gang of bandits has been robbing and killing some of these illegal immigrants, and a joint United States-Mexico task force devises a plan to stop the violence. Specifically, a Mexican cop (Ricardo Montalban) goes undercover as a farmhand while an American cop (Jack Bearnes) ingratiates himself with the smugglers trafficking men across the border. It's not a very good plan. The smugglers figure out pretty quickly that the undercover Mexican cop isn't a real farm worker, and when a mysterious American shows up offering to sell them suspiciously-obtained guest-worker passes out of the blue, the bad guys start to put the pieces together. Many double-crosses, shoot-outs and other, well, border incidents ensue in a series of effective individual set pieces, all of them shot by Mann in tight, crisp baclk and white. Most enjoyable are the many sequences that take advantage of the director's background in Westerns. Chase scenes across acrid terrain, shootout amidst craggy towers of rock and chance meetings along lonely stretches of train track highlight the dusty, murky ambience of the Mexican desert. Admirably, though the film is set largely among Mexican immigrant workers, the overt racism is kept to a minimum. The film takes great pains to be respectful towards Mexicans, a group it presents as largely loyal, honest and hardworking. As well, the opening narration makes clear that even the illegals are merely seeking a better life for their families, and are themselves frequently victims of large-scale black market enterprises. Having said that, this is after all a movie from the late 40's we're talking about, so a lot of subtextual racism will be starkly observable for the modern viewer. Most significantly, I couldn't help noticing that all the honest, forthright Mexicans were light-skinned (particularly Montalban's hero, who could easily pass as a white European) while the greedy criminal Mexicans looked darker and more ethnic. Still, for its era, Border Incident can only earn high marks for racial and cultural sensitivity. While Mann's film only shares a passing resemblance to film noir, Richard Fleischer's His Kind of Woman seems intent on overturning every recognizable aspect of the genre. What begins as a warmed-over remake of Out of the Past (even bringing back star Robert Mitchum) eventually becomes something of a meta-noir, a familiar situation for these films but without any kind of purpose or forward momentum. Finally, with the introduction of an egomaniacal and half-insane matinee idol (played in a delightful comic turn by Vincent Price), the movie transforms again into a madcap farce. His Kind of Woman was initially shot by John Farrow only to be completely scrapped by producer Howard Hughes, who gave it to Fleischer for reshoots. Perhaps its schizophrenic production explains the film's zany postmodernism, a kind of seen-it-all bemusement at the mechanics of typical film thrillers. Everything from Mitchum's snarky lead performance as professional gambler and rambler Dan Milner to the swashbuckling movie-in-a-movie starring the Vincent Price character evidences a delight at picking apart the conventions of Hollywood films of the era, subverting the traditional methods of storytelling to catch the viewer off-guard. The film's first few scenes are a tease, introducing a vain underworld figure (played with sweaty, bug-eyed verve by Raymond Burr, reminiscent of Peter Lorre suffering from gigantism) only to abandon him in favor of Milner. Dan's called into a fancy office and offered $50,000 to fly down to Mexico. Why is he going there? How was he specifically chosen for this job? Isn't that an awful lot of money just to fly to Mexico? These are all pertinent questions, but Dan's not really in much of a rush to get the answers. Mitchum plays the character with a cool non-chalance that borders on catatonia. It's a full half hour into the film before he seems to care about anything, and even then it's only about sharing a table with sultry heiress Lenore Brent (Hughes staple Jane Russell, co-starring with her breasts). But rather than a laconic, disinterested performance like his turn in The Racket, Mitchum's a real treat to watch here. He's got a thousand great, subtle little one-liners, and I loved how Fleischer and Farrow are unafraid to make him kind of an asshole, muttering sarcastic retorts under his breath in just about every scene. (At one point, a pilot's complaining to him about the lack of recent work, and he deadpans "Yeah, I know, things are tough all over..." like this is the most bored he has ever been in his life.) Once they arrive in Mexico, at an isolated resort near the tip of Baja California, Dan and Lenore just kind of wander around for a while, giving Fleischer plenty of time to play around with stock thriller set-ups and conventions. Lenore wanders around at all times in an evening gown, jewelry and high heels, even on the beach. We meet all the other guests of the hotel, including a pompous businessman (Jim Backus, aka The Millionaire from "Gilligan's Island"), a mysterious writer (John Mylong) and a sweet little small town girl (Leslie Banning), whom Dan will have to help out via gambling. Eventually, the movie goes about tying up its complicated and clever main storyline, almost forgetting entirely about the majority of its established characters and scenarios in the process. The actual scheme that has brought Dan to Mexico turns out to be pretty clever but also rather easily thwarted. But by this time, Price and his shenanigans have so thoroughly overtaken the movie that any thoughts of plausibility go right out the window. This is really fun, hilarious work by Price, a man best-known for his horror films but who possessed a wonderfully silly sense of humor and excellent comedic timing. He gets the lion's share of the film's best lines - when leaving to go save Dan from his captors, he laments "Alas, why must I be plagued by yammering magpies on the eve of battle?" And as I mentioned before, the scenes featuring his character's new film - a play on the Errol Flynn adventures of the period - works beautifully as parody. (This has got to be one of the first appearances of this venerable comic scenario, the fake "movie within a movie" that plays on a well-worn genre. I can't think of any of these sorts of scenes pre-'51.) You could almost call His Kind of Woman the first anti-noir, a movie that attacks the genre right around the same time French critics began to define it. Like Laura, another stylish, funny mystery with Vincent Price, it explodes the core assumptions behind these films (like manipulative women who force men into acts of wanton criminality), heightening their already-heightened atmosphere to the point of rendering them ridiculous and keeping just enough of the style intact to make them recognizable. In some ways, it sets the stage perfectly for those aforementioned French guys - from Melville to Godard - to recontextualize noir into more introverted, cerebral, occasionally funny, humane and self-aware films. -- crushedbyinertia.blogspot.com	Issue 2: He's making a scrapbook of everything I kill! Issue 1: Okay, could I be a worse narrator?

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