The Unseen #39: Angel Face

Why I Bought It?: Came in the Robert Mitchum boxset I bought.

Why Haven’t I Watched It?: I don’t know, why haven’t you? Oh you have? In that case I have absolutely no excuse.

How Was It?: Is there an actor whose collective poon hounding has gotten him into more trouble then Mitchum?

Oh sure, there are plenty of movie characters led to their doom by a pretty face, but only Mitchum seems to go out of his way to do so. Time and time again he leaves the nice girl he has at home to forcibly attach himself to man devouring succubae who drag him down to his doom.

It might be misogynistic, but that’s just how they rolled in back then and you can’t say that Mitchum wasn’t asking for it.

Angel Face follows Mitchum as a hapless race car driver turned paramedic, who ends up called to the house of a rich lady who left the gas on. Its somewhat obvious that the accident wasn’t really an accident, or for that matter an “accident”, but instead an attempted murder by the victim’s daughter. Mitchum reacts to this news by falling head over heals with the crazy leaving his nice fiancé for a chance at fame and fortune, and owning his own maintenance garage (?) . The results go predictably awry, given you know, bitch be crazy.

The film is directed by Otto Preminger. A director whose reputation has been somewhat on the wane lately despite having a few bonafide classics, and a whole lot of interesting messes under his belt.

Preminger’s hand is evident both in the story’s cynicism, Mitchum is charming as always, but his character is kind of a shit, and the passive aggressive boundary pushing that was his forte. Incest, homosexuality, premarital sex, and other things not considered polite subject matter for dinner conversation in the nineteen fifties are all hinted at. But that’s all they are, hints, inferences, its what drove the Code folks crazy about Preminger, and part of why so many of his films have aged so badly.

Preminger’s great skill was shredding taboos, that are no longer taboos, ironically thanks to in a large part him. But it takes all the gas out of his films today, like Anatomy Of A Murder, whose entire existence is based around the fact that it allowed Preminger to have his characters say “Sperm” and “Panties” on film. All very shocking then, but hardly a suitable payoff for a two hour movie today.

While Angel Face does incorporate this technique it is not dependant on it. Mitchum as always is a heavy lidded source of charisma, the plot is pretty tightly wounded, hinging on the character’s neurosis’s rather then fate (same difference). It also features two spectacular car wrecks which make such fantastic use of its dummies that I can only hope that The Flying Maciste Brothers, the folks behind The Destructible Man spontaneously ejaculate whenever someone watches this film.

I mean come on. That's a car wreck!

Postscript:

(I couldn't in good conscience not show this beautiful poster)

The Unseen #38: Home From The Hill

Why’d I Buy It?: Came with the Robert Mitchum Boxset I purchased.

Why Haven’t I Watched It?: No real reason beyond the film’s non reputation.

How Was It?: A huge mess of unseemly fun. And after consecutive reviews of The Last Exorcism, Winter's Bone, and this, I have no choice but to conclude I've got the south on the brain.

Home From The Hill, begins with Robert Mitchum getting shot by an irate husband, whose wife Mitchum has been sleeping with. Like all the ladies say, “Once you’ve had Mitchum, you go on ahead and pitch ‘em” (short notice, you do a better one). So the husband did have some right to be angry. Mitchum shakes it off though, he’s a Texas land baron who runs his empire like a fiefdom and that girl is just one of many. Besides as Werner Herzog might say “It was not a significant bullet.”

But age is starting to catch up with Mitchum, so he decides to start training his boy to take over in his stead. A training that involves plenty of wild boar fighting. Over the course of a couple of years every skeleton the family has in its closet gets dragged out kicking and screaming, in the prime fifties melodrama fashion and a few new ones are stuffed in their to replace them to boot. This all makes for some good watching.

Home From The Hill, was directed by Vincent Minelli, best known today for being the gay man who loved Judy Garland so much he married her, somehow making him more, not less gay. Home From The Hill is the kind of overheated melodrama that Minelli made his specialty, second only to Douglas Sirk in that particular Sub Genre.

The thing to remember about this particular kind of film is that they were as A list as you could get, the equivalent of today’s Oscar bait. Which is important to remember, because these films often feel like they’re literally insane. There’s a dog versus Giant Wild Boar fight that looks suspiciously like the real thing. There’s a kind of vitality and unpredictability to this kind of filmmaking that is completely lacking in today’s. Remember this is a prestige A list picture…. And it has a wild boar fight in it. As versatile as George Clooney is I don’t expect him to battle a wild boar in his Oscar bait.

The cast is filled out with the likes of George Peppard, George Hamilton, Eleanor Parker, and Luana Patton, not a group of what you would normally call heavy hitters, but all doing career best work.

Home From The Hill might seem a bit odd to the modern viewer. It’s spread out over two and a half hours and takes it time not getting anywhere in particular. It might all amount to Giant for the slow, stripped of its ambition and iconography (though not artistry this is Minelli we’re talking about here). But any movie that features Robert Mitchum surrounded by hunting hounds, drinking corn whiskey from a bottle, talking about manliness, while sitting on a throne like a cracker Lear, is more then alright in my book.

(Remember kids, Pimp is spelled M-I-T-C-H-U-M)

Someone Asked Me To Be An Expert In Something Part 1: Out Of The Past

So when I'm not blogging I also serve as a critic for the local weekly. I have a column where I basically get to write about what ever film I want as as long as it clocks in a 500 words or under everybody's happy. Anyway this somehow led to me programming the first half of a film noir festival and today I get to tell a bunch of people why Out Of The Past is awesome. I've had tougher jobs. So I thought I'd go ahead and post my introduction for you fine people. Forgive me if the cadences are a bit off, they're written for speech after and the editing I did on them was minimal.

When I was first asked to pick a film for this screening the one that leapt to mind before any others was Out Of the Past.

Out Of The Past in so many ways isn’t just a film noir, it’s the film noir. All the elements we think of when we think of the genre, the classic stars, the moody shadow drenched style, and doom laden story are all present and accounted for in Out Of The Past. Keeping that in mind I’d like to share two quotes that to me sum up Film Noir better then any other.

The author James Ellroy put it pretty simply when he said “Film Noir, means you’re (blanked).” Scorsese put it a bit more eloquently when he said, the essence of Film Noir was “No matter which way you go Fate sticks out its foot to trip you.”

It’s fitting then that the director of Out Of The Past, Jacques Tournier, knew a little something about fate. Today he is best known for his horror films; particularly those he made with Val Lewton. Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, as well as Night Of The Demon which he made after their partnership but which shared many similarities with his earlier work. All four of these excellent films, deal with fate as a conscience malevolent force. From their opening frames there’s no doubt that the film’s could end any other way except the way that they do. No way for its desperate characters to escape what fate has in store for them. Film Noir so often narrated by the dead, or dying shares this concept, and Tournier applies it masterfully here.

Like Ellroy and Scorsese said, the main conceit of Film Noir is that you’re doomed. This is in direct contradiction to most Hollywood films of the time, and indeed today, with their basic message that everything is going to work out for the best. That fate is kind. The message of Film Noir is that everything is not going to work out OK, Fate is not only uncaring it is actively malevolent.

As Ebert said in his essay on the film, “Most crime movies begin in the present and move forward, but film noir coils back into the past. The noir hero is doomed before the story begins -- by fate, rotten luck, or his own flawed character. Crime movies sometimes show good men who go bad. The noir hero is never good, just kidding himself, living in ignorance of his dark side until events demonstrate it to him.” Mitchum’s certainly charismatic, but he’s a man with no qualms about working for a mobster and no problem with screwing over his partner and client. Once he gets a whiff of the woman in question it’s not his brain he’s thinking with.

Out Of The Past provides us with one of the greatest Noir casts of all time. Mitchum has such dynamic that we can actually fool ourselves that he might get away for a little. Kirk Douglas is one of Noir’s great villains, his cool malovelence is scarier then then his rage ever could be, he never even raises his voice.

But the real key to the movie is Judy Greer as Kathie, as Ebert notes, “Mitchum and Douglas think the story involves a contest of wills between them, when in fact, they're both the instruments of a corrupt woman.” The Femme Fatale in her purist form. However, The crime writer Ed Brubaker… and if you like crime fiction (and if you’re here I’m assuming you do) and you’re not reading Brubaker you’re missing out. Has a different view “Kathie has often been called the ultimate Femme Fatale, but to me she’s so much more then that. Because I can understand Barbara Stanwyck’s motivesin Double Indemity –she wants out of her loveless marriage and she wants to be rich- but Kathy Moffett remains an enigma. Why is Kathie doing any of the things she’s doing? What made her so alone and so afraid that she’ll turn on almost anyone, even trying to murder the people she loves.” It’s that beautiful chaotic desperation that elevates Moffett and Out Of The Past to a level most noir films never achieve. Kathie’s only motive appears to be survival and yet with Jeff, she finds both happiness and passion, as well. That she’s wiling to give the latter up for the former is her undoing. But it’s a particular kind of human failure and one again which comes from desperation. Long after any viewing of Out Of The Past I will find myself wondering where that desperation comes from.”

Desperation is really the key word in Out Of The Past. Everyone in it is desperate for something, Mitchum’s trying to escape his past, Douglas is trying to keep control of his empire and the only woman he’ll never be able to keep, and Greer is desperate to get away from whatever terrible thing is driving her. Of course none will get what they want, the trap is already been sprung, the only thing anyone can hope to do is “Die Last” as Mitchum says late in the movie.

In closing I’d like to take another quote from Brubaker’s essay “Good noir often has an element of disability layered inot it. It’s symbolism and character all at once – the old man in the wheelchair who hires Bogart in The Big Sleep, the Professor’s sexual hang ups in Asphalt Jungle, the reporter with two canes in Lady From Shanghai the GI with shell shock in The Blue Dahlia, just to name a few off the top of my head. Noir is showing us a fractured world full of damaged people, who nonetheless try to survive, but who mostly fail… The mute kid that Jeff Markham befriends fits that noir theme here, serving as both a supporting character and as a symbol for Jeff’s need to keep his past a secret. That alone would have been a great noir beat., to hit, but the final stroke of genius of this film is that only the mute boy and the audience ever know the truth about Jeff and why he does the things he does. No one else in the film does, not even the girl who loves him. The silent pact between movie and viewer echoes long after the final credits have rolled.”

And that to me is what Noir is, a dark secret that reaches out past the decades, coming for us always Out Of The Past.

The Unseen #13: Macao!

Why’d I Buy It ?: Came in Robert Mitchum Box Set.

Why Haven’t I Watched It ?: No good reason what so ever.

How Was It?: I’ve had to put this project on hold, thanks to the gignormous Eva revisit. But now that that beast has been slain it’s time for THE UNSEEN to return! Only to be put it on hold again in a couple of days to start another month long project. Still I wanted to put one up to prove that the series isn’t dead. And I picked one hell of a stopover.

There’s a whole lot to like about Macao. It’s old school Hollywood filmmaking at its best. Powered by a great director (actually two great directors Nicholas Ray came into pinch hit for Von Sternberg) lush black and white, sultry exoticism, and two stars who aren’t so much people as they are sentient balls of sex.

Macao is as dirty of a movie as one could make under the production code. It might as well have been subtitled “Everybody Wants To Sleep With Jane Russell!” Given that Jane Russell and the level that everyone wants to sleep with her, is what drives the movie. Oh sure there’s some macguffins about stolen diamonds and a smuggling ring, but really it’s all about Russell and her uh attributes.

And what man could possibly stand up to Russell without seeming like some sort of eunic? Robert Fucking Mitchum that’s who. Mitchum is of course the coolest son of a bitch who has ever walked the planet. A granite slab of lazy eyed unintimitable masculinity. Mitchum owns every scene he’s in, in this movie or in any movie for that matter. Heck I'm fairly certain he owns scenes in movies he's not in.

Mitchum plays a drifter who winds up in the backwater of Macao. He fends off a would be rapist who was giving Russell some trouble and she steals his wallet to say thank you. Mitchum ends up mistaken for an undercover cop by a prominent ganglord who Russell ends up singing for. The gangster targets Mitchum for death, though Mitchum doesn’t seem to worried. Neither does Russell, indeed they seem interested in little aside from what fine specimens they find each other to be.

This is all done with the best of studio system economy. The film barely runs over eighty minutes and crams more entertainment and artistry into it’s scant runtime then most films do at twice the length.

Anyone looking for an old fashioned picture filled with exotic locales, danger round any corner, where men where the men where cool and smoked like chimneys, and the women where dames and wore the phrase like a complement, would do well to visit Macao.