A Friend's Take on a Scene from 'The Killers'

Of all the people I knew in film school (so many years ago!), I remain in close touch with only one of them: the very smart, funny, and energetically opinionated Jace Gaffney. We connect every week by phone to talk about movies, mostly older ones, and during the intervening days he emails me tidbits of wisdom about a film he's revisited on TCM or discovered somewhere in the recesses of the internet. Like me, he's a great aficionado of film noir, and he recently shared some thoughts about that suspenseful scene from Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946) in which Edmond O'Brien's insurance investigator Jim Reardon is led into a deadly trap involving the movie's titular assassins. Jace kindly gave me permission to post his comments on this blog and add some screen captures. Here's the link. Enjoy!

Rest in Peace, Alan Arkin (1934–2023)

Farewell, Alan Arkin. You were one of the greats, in both comic and dramatic roles.

Click here for some wonderful photos from his long career.

Analyzing a Sequence from 'Shadow'

I'm back, after a long absence, with another of my shot-by-shot analyses. This time it's of a sequence from one of my all-time favorite films, Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Hitchcock was very painstaking when it came to matters of form, which makes his work especially suitable for exercises of this kind. To those of you who elect to read it: I hope you it find it interesting—perhaps even illuminating.

One Nutty Noir

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in His Kind of Woman.

I almost missed it, and I'm really glad I didn't.

I refer here to the 1951 RKO release His Kind of Woman, featuring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, Vincent Price, Raymond Burr, Marjorie Reynolds, Jim Backus, and Tim Holt. It had been playing for months on the Criterion Channel before leaving on August 31, and were it not for a friend's offhand recommendation, I wouldn't have caught it.

It's probably the nuttiest film noir I've ever seen. Consider this: the final act is a variation on one of the hoariest situations in popular American cinema. In this scenario, two narrative strands are involved and linked by crosscutting. In one strand is an imperiled character; in the other is the person coming to the rescue. Think of the girl being tied to a railroad track and the dashing hero rushing to save her on a galloping stallion. Only here the person in peril is not some fair-haired damsel but beefy Robert Mitchum, who's being tortured, beaten, and threatened with the injection of a memory-erasing drug. And the rescuer, of all people, is Vincent Price—playing, appropriately enough, a hammy Hollywood actor—whose conveyance is not a handsome horse but a rowboat, which is filled, incidentally, with a ragtag band of Mexican police and hotel guests whom Price has commandeered to assist him. At one moment there's brutal, edge-of-the-seat action; in the next there's some of the silliest slapstick this side of the Marx Brothers. Quite the contrast.

The plot, I should mention, is noirish enough: A cynical gambler down on his luck, Mitchum is lured into a shady scheme hatched by deported gangster Raymond Burr, who wants to assume Mitchum's identity in order to get back into the States. The action unfolds mainly in a resort hotel in Baja California, where Mitchum spends most of his time trying to figure out what he's gotten himself into. That's when he's not being distracted by Jane Russell, a gold-digger who's passing herself off as a Boston-bred heiress. It could easily have been played straight and wound up as a routine crime picture. Luckily it became something else.

The movie had a wild production history. The director of record is John Farrow, but when his cut was rejected by studio head Howard Hughes, Richard Fleischer (uncredited) was brought aboard; he ended up reshooting much of the picture not once but twice, as actors were fired and new ones hired. Mishaps and production delays abounded. A fight scene got out of hand, causing injuries that shut down filming temporarily. Hughes was so obsessed with minutiae that at one point he ordered some floor tiles custom-made in Milan and flown to Hollywood for the reshoot of a two-minute scene—a move that reportedly cost more than the movie's original budget. A yacht in which Mitchum is held prisoner during the final act proved too big for any of the tanks at RKO, and a new one had to be constructed. And so on and so on.* 

His Kind of Woman shouldn't have worked, but somehow, amazingly, it does. Hughes's madness paid off, resulting in one very entertaining picture. Film historian John Belton, in his book on Mitchum's acting career, called it "sublimely ridiculous." Yep, that says it.

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* I'm indebted to Mike Kemp, a fellow member of the "Classic Film Noir Lovers" Facebook group, for supplying these details in response to my post about the movie.

Change of Plan

Part Four of my examination of the action/suspense scenes in Peter Yates's The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) didn't shape up quite as I had hoped, so—with a little tweaking to Part One and a more substantial addition to Part Three—I'm concluding my analysis. For the links, see my three previous posts or the sidebar on the left headed "Essays, Reviews, etc."

One thing this exercise has taught me—no, make that reminded me of—is how close readings of individual films can lead you in all sorts of directions, often unexpected ones. Perhaps someday I'll rework and expand what I've written into a small book along the lines of those in the British Film Institute's "Film Classics" series. I'm sure my millions of readers can't wait!

The 'Coyle' Analysis Continues

Part Three of my deep dig into the action/suspense scenes of The Friends of Eddie Coyle can be found here. There will be a Part Four—and that should do it. Then I'll have to find something else to occupy my time during this period of "sheltering in place." Catching up on some old movies I haven't yet seen sounds like a good option.

P.S. Take precautions and stay safe, everyone.