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.

My Latest on 'Eddie Coyle'

For Part Two of my examination of some key suspense scenes in Peter Yates's The Friends of Eddie Coyle, click here.

There will be a Part Three (and maybe a Part Four), but that's still a work in progress.

Revisiting 'Eddie Coyle'

No one, so far as I'm aware, has tried to make a case that the British-born director Peter Yates (1929–2011) was an auteur. His career was a bit too spotty (with too many low spots), and I think you'd be hard pressed to find much thematic unity in it. But he could make a good movie when he had good material to work with. He was best known for the Steve McQueen detective thriller Bullitt (1968), which at the very least set a new standard for car chases on film. And Breaking Away (1979), for which he received as Oscar nomination, was an enjoyable coming-of-age comedy that cast a charmingly affectionate eye on the American heartland. (A second nomination came just four years later for The Dresser, a film I've yet to see.)

But Yates really struck gold—in my humble opinion anyway—in 1973 with The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a Boston-set crime drama that gave Robert Mitchum one of his best roles. Mitchum's performance and those of his costars have been much praised, but when I revisited the movie recently, I was equally struck by Yates's adroit handling of its suspense/action sequences, which seemed like good candidates for some detailed formal analysis. My efforts to provide that are still in progress, but you can read Part One here. Hopefully, I'll be posting Part Two soon.

Discovering 'Miss Julie'

Until a short time ago, my familiarity with the 1951 Swedish film Miss Julie—much acclaimed in its day and a top prizewinner at the Cannes Film Festival—was largely limited to the knowledge that Alfred Hitchcock, after seeing it, signed up its star, Anita Björk, for the female lead in I Confess (1953). American Puritanism scotched those plans, however. When Ms. Björk arrived in the United States with her lover and out-of-wedlock child, Hitchcock was forced by the powers-that-be at Warner Bros. to go looking elsewhere. Anne Baxter played the role instead.

Given that Miss Julie and Ms. Björk made such a strong impression on my main man Hitch, I'm frankly surprised at myself for not seeking it out earlier. I'm glad I finally did. (A friend's enthusiastic recommendation was the nudge I needed.) I found the movie so remarkable, in fact, that it inspired me to write an essay about one of its several memorable flashback sequences. Click here if you're interested in reading it. 

'Ordet' and Me

With some trepidation, I decided recently to compose what turned out to be a fairly lengthy essay about the 1956 movie Ordet by Carl Theodor Dreyer. The films of the "Great Dane" have been known to confound even the most sophisticated of critics—hence the trepidation. My humble effort is mainly an attempt to sort out some thoughts I had on spirituality and religion that were sparked both by the film and by a Facebook discussion in which I participated. To read my musings, click here.

An Action Scene Revisited

An ongoing conversation with a friend about the subtle but considerable merits of Hollywood master Howard Hawks (1896–1977) led me to revisit a paper I wrote for Professor Stefan Sharff's "Analysis of Film Language" course at Columbia way back in the '70s. Professor Sharff required us to take a single scene from a movie we had viewed in class and break it down shot by shot. I chose Scene 3 from Hawks's great epic Western Red River (1948). Analyzing it according to Professor Sharff's instructions gave me an enormous appreciation for the intelligence of Hawks's technique. It's an action scene which, in its visual coherence and expressiveness, puts to shame the chaotic slam-bang effects of today's action movies, in particular those tiresome, CGI-heavy megaproductions that clutter the multiplexes every summer (and, increasingly, throughout the year).

My friend was curious about what I had written, but I had long since lost the paper. My memory of it was still pretty sharp, however, so after rewatching the scene in question on DVD, I produced a new version (in greatly condensed form, of course).

Red River tells the story of a monumental cattle drive during the early days of Texas ranching. Its first few scenes take place years before the main action, showing how the future cattle baron Thomas Dunson establishes his empire and how he comes to mentor a younger man, Matthew Garth. In Scene 3, Dunson and his sidekick, Nadine Groot, having departed from a California-bound wagon train to start their own herd in Texas, engage with a band of Comanche warriors. Click here for what I wrote about it.

Agee Redux, Part 3

Now available from the University of Tennessee Press in the Works of James Agee series: Complete Film Criticism: Reviews, Essays, and Manuscripts. As I've indicated in a couple of previous posts—click here and here—it's a work with which I'm intimately familiar, having copyedited the manuscript. Perhaps that makes me a bit biased when I sing its praises, but so be it.

There have been collections of Agee's film writings before but none as comprehensive as this. Volume editor Charles Maland secured the help of the archivist at Time, Inc. in identifying every one of Agee's unsigned reviews for the newsmagazine and now all those reviews are available between hard covers for the first time. Previous collections have included only a smattering of the Time reviews, several of which were misattributed to Agee. All of the Nation reviews are here, of course, including Agee's critique of It's a Wonderful Life, inexplicably omitted from previous collections. Included as well are writings that were unpublished during the writer's lifetime along with pieces that appeared in publications other than the two magazines with which he was most identified as a film critic. All told, it's essential reading for anyone interested in 1940s cinema and the very particular perspective on it offered by one of America's most gifted writers.

For more information, check out this description on the UT Press website.

Plausibles and Implausibles

In a recent conversation with an old friend from my film school days, we got to talking about The Third Man, the 1949 classic directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, and Alida Valli. (For those who haven't seen it, the film is a bit too complicated to summarize here; suffice it to say that it's a thriller involving black-market intrigue in postwar Vienna. Also, if you're new to the film, be warned that spoilers follow.)

Near the end, Welles's Harry Lime, the charming villain of the piece, is about to rendezvous with his friend of 20 years, Holly Martins (Cotten), at a café, unaware that he's stepping into a trap. Holly, disgusted with what he's learned of Lime (that the diluted penicillin the latter peddles on the black market has claimed a number of innocent victims, including children), has decided to cooperate with military policeman Calloway (Howard), whose men are gathered in the shadows surrounding the café, ready to nab Lime when he appears. As Lime enters the establishment, he overhears his lover (Valli) denouncing Martins as a police informer. She yells at Lime to run. A memorable chase through the sewers of Vienna ensues and Lime is ultimately shot by Holly.

My friend, who had seen the film many times before (as have I), found that during his most recent viewing, this question suddenly occurred to him: Why does Harry Lime go into that café? Up to this point the film has shown him to be a man of considerable cunning and shrewdness, even faking his own death to elude capture. Why would he expose himself so foolishly at this point? And is this action so implausible as to undermine one's suspension of disbelief and send the film careening off the rails?

With my friend's question in mind, I rewatched the last third of the film again, and it does seem to me that Greene and Reed at least try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to lay the groundwork for the scene in an earlier one in which Lime and Holly meet at Vienna's famous Ferris wheel and have a heart-to-heart chat in one its compartments as it slowly ascends to a dizzying height. The emphasis of this scene is on Lime’s utter venality and disregard for human life. But as ruthless and amoral as he is—he chillingly calls his victims “suckers and mugs” and questions what difference it would make if one of those “dots” on the ground below were to "stop moving forever”—he's also shown to be oddly sentimental about his longtime friendship with Holly. Even after Holly reveals that he has talked to the police and that they “dug up [Lime’s] coffin,” Lime, though clearly shaken, ends up saying Holly remains the only one in the city he can trust. He suggests they meet again, though warning Holly that he’d best not bring the police.

It would seem, then, that Lime (whether plausibly or not) thinks that Holly would never betray him—and indeed it is only after Calloway takes Holly to a hospital to show him some of Lime’s victims that Holly agrees to act as a decoy. Otherwise, he was ready to leave Vienna. And when the climactic meeting finally comes, Reed does show Lime exercising a certain measure of caution: he emerges from the shadows atop a wreckage pile overlooking the street and carefully surveys the scene before approaching the café, which he enters from the side door, not from the street entrance. This demonstrates a deliberate effort on Reed and Greene's part to cover the credibility bases, and there is so much else that is good about the film—from the moral issues it raises to its crisp editing, effective use of chiaroscuro and canted camera angles (perhaps Welles's influence), overall plotting, and memorable performances—that most viewers, at least on one viewing, are likely to overlook the possible gap in logic. And let's face it: the filmmakers were probably counting on most people seeing it only once and not having a second thought about whether Harry Lime's fatal error is really plausible or not. That was how both my friend and I had experienced it even after repeated viewings.

Truth to tell, I don’t think a lot of movies in a somewhat realistic vein such as this one (musicals, horror, fantasy, and  science fiction films, and most comedies and action movies are another matter altogether) would withstand the plausibility test if you examine them closely enough. And even when logical lapses are pretty obvious, it becomes a question of whether enough virtues remain to compensate for them. The typical film, especially a heavily plot-driven one, is such a compressed form of storytelling that resorting to shortcuts and a certain amount of narrative sleight of hand is almost inevitable.

Hitchcock, not surprisingly, was particularly disdainful of those he called “our friends, the plausibles.” And indeed, his films abound in improbabilities that most viewers (except for the plausibles, of course) are more than willing to forgive or overlook. My own favorite bit of Hitchcockian illogic comes near the end of Strangers on a Train, when the tennis-player hero, Guy Haines, struggles to win a match quickly so that he’ll have time to intercept the villain, Bruno Anthony, before the latter can plant an incriminating cigarette lighter and frame Guy for the murder of his wife. If time is of the essence, why does Guy try so hard to win the match? Wouldn’t it be more logical for him to throw the match and let his opponent win? That would get it over with in a hurry. But then, of course, we wouldn’t have that great sequence in which Guy’s battle on the tennis court is intercut with Bruno’s desperate efforts to retrieve the dropped lighter from a storm drain.

Critic Molly Haskell touches on this issue a bit in the new Film Comment. In an otherwise appreciative essay on Robert DeNiro, she talks about how little of Taxi Driver makes sense to her: “Why would smirky princess Betsy go on a date with creepy cabbie Travis in the first place? And why would he take her to a porn film? And then be shocked when she walks out on it and him? And then be shocked when she rejects it and him?” After mentioning a few more flaws—the sexlessness of Travis Bickle, the farcical ending, the film’s “indigestible melding of Ford and Bresson"—she concludes: “But despite all this,Travis Bickle lives, and thanks to the untethered nature of DeNiro’s instinctive performance, breathes, flourishes, threatens, as myth: the savage male underbelly endlessly renewable and terrifying." In short, while Taxi Driver is clearly not Haskell's idea of a masterpiece, it contains at least one transcendent element—DeNiro's powerful presence—that makes it worthwhile.

The Third Man may not be a masterpiece either. But in my view it comes pretty damn close, even when Harry Lime's questionable final decision is taken into account.

Agee Redux, Part 2

A little over a year ago, I noted the forthcoming publication of two new volumes (both of which I copyedited) in the Works of James Agee series by the University of Tennessee Press. I'm happy to announce that one of those, The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter: First and Final Screenplays, has just become available. One could call it a heavy tome in both the literal and figurative senses. It comes in at more than 900 pages and lists for $90. Loaded with annotations and supplementary materials (including variant scenes, correspondence, and Agee's notes), it features the first-draft screenplays and shooting scripts for both movies. The editing of Prof. Jeffrey Couchman (College of Staten Island) represents film scholarship at its best. If you're a serious cinephile interested in Hollywood history and the complex, collaborative processes through which words on a page become images on the screen, the book is one I can't recommend highly enough. Click here for more information.

Due out later this spring is the definitive edition of Agee's film criticism, edited by Prof. Charles Maland (University of Tennessee). It's a superb work as well, presenting a panoramic view of 1940s cinema through the eyes of one of the first film critics to command respectful attention. And this volume will be the first to include all of Agee's unsigned reviews for Time.

To be sure, my involvement with these two books makes me biased. But that doesn't make my praise here any less sincere.

The Great Oscars Screw-Up . . . My (Conspiracy) Theory

I think Trump did it.

I believe that the tangerine Twitter tot, knowing he would get a lot of dissing at the Oscars ceremony, had one of his minions (probably someone who knew Steve Bannon from his Hollywood days) mix up the envelopes that led to La La Land being mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner instead of Moonlight. That way, the headlines would all be about the epic flub that ended the show, not all the digs that our so-called president received over the course of the evening. I also suspect that Steve Harvey, who made a similar flub at the Miss Universe pageant (once owned by Trump, BTW!), came up with the idea and passed it along during his visit to Trump Tower a while back. See, it all makes sense.

You heard it here first, and that's all I'll say about the Oscars this year.

The Fall of 'House of Cards'?

It will be interesting to see whether the Netflix series House of Cards will survive the Trump presidency. It's not that I expect Trump to order its cancellation. It's just that the show's seemingly farfetched scenarios may have a hard time keeping up with the new reality in Washington.

P.S. Ditto for Scandal, Veep, Homeland, and Madam Secretary.

Let's Extend the 'Game of Thrones' Analogy, Shall We?

New York Times opinion writer Maureen Dowd today turned over the bulk of her column to her right-wing brother Kevin, who used the space to gloat over Trump's Electoral College victory. It seems that, along with some Trump "champagne," he brought a little statuette of Cersei, the conniving queen of Game of Thrones, to the family's Thanksgiving dinner. That was to represent the now-vanquished Hillary Clinton.

Well, if Clinton is Cersei, then Trump is Ramsay Bolton, the woman-abusing sociopath of the North and everybody's favorite "man you love to hate" for the past several seasons. Let's hope some Jon Snow (i.e., charismatic progressive) rises from the dead (the current disarray of the Democratic Party) to beat the crap out of Ramsay before turning him over to Sansa Stark (women everywhere), who then feeds him to his own starving dogs (the legions of working-class Trump supporters he will surely betray).

Random Oscar Impressions

It was a pleasant surprise to see Spotlight take best picture. As a onetime newspaper reporter, I really appreciated director Tom McCarthy and his cowriter Josh Singer's depiction of the craft—a brand of serious journalism that, one hopes, is not in its last throes.

As widely predicted, host Chris Rock wasted no time ribbing the academy for the lack of diversity in the nominations. His early line—"I'm here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People's Choice Awards"—was among his best. The (thankfully brief) moment with Stacey Dash, however, was just plain weird. I hope Rock didn't have a hand in that miscue.

Call me a sucker for a certain kind of schmaltz, but Rock's Girl Scout Cookies solicitation warmed my heart, as did the sight of Michael Keaton munching on one at the end as he joined the Spotlight celebrants onstage.

Owing to my advancing age, I decided to record the show and watch it today. Early to bed and all that. Of course, there was no surprise factor—I couldn't resist checking up on the winners—but DVR technology sure does make it easy to zip through commercials and windy acceptance speeches. Doubtless, this will be my practice in the years ahead.

Wexler and Zsigmond, RIP

Within a week of each other, two great American cinematographers left us. Haskell Wexler, whose credits included Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, In the Heat of the Night, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, Matewan, and most of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, died on December 27. Vilmos Zsigmond, the DP of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Deer Hunter, passed away on January 1. Both played important parts in the "New Hollywood" phenomenon of the 1970s, both were Oscar winners, both received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Society of Cinematographers. I join with my fellow cinephiles in bidding a fond farewell to these two legends.

Updike on Screen

Among the several good books I've read recently is Adam Begley's 2014 biography of novelist-poet-essayist John Updike (1932–2009), one of my favorite writers since my high school years (and the subject of my very first term paper). Begley's treatment is fair minded, thorough (but not overwhelming as so many bios tend to be these days), and written with an elegance worthy of Updike himself, a consummate stylist whose sumptuous sentences still take my breath away.

I was slightly disappointed, however, that Begley had almost nothing to say about the film and television adaptations of Updike's work. Discussing them wouldn't have added many pages to his tome since the efforts to bring Updike to the big and small screens have been relatively few. The Witches of Eastwick (1984) was made into a theatrical feature by George Miller (of Mad Max fame) in 1987, followed by a couple of TV pilots and an actual series, Eastwick, that was cancelled after one season. In 1979 Fielder Cook adapted Updike's series of short stories about a suburban couple, Richard and Joan Maple, into a TV movie, Too Far to Go. And nine years before that, Jack Smight's adaptation of Rabbit, Run (1960) appeared (briefly) in theaters. And that's it, so far as I know. Updike did sell the rights to his 1968 best-seller, Couples, to Hollywood for six figures, but the movie was never made. (I seem to recall that Franklin Schaffner [Planet of the Apes, Patton] was supposed to direct.)

Begley only mentions Miller's Witches, recounting how Updike and his wife, Martha, caught a showing at a mall multiplex: "She loathed it; he was less bothered, especially as the screenplay veered away from the book and the whiz-bang special effects took over, leaving him free to enjoy the three witches [Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer], each lovable in her own way. In the book he had been careful to keep Van Horne [the tale's Satan figure] from stealing the show as the devil tends to do, but [Jack] Nicholson, who had no such scruples, gave an outrageously exuberant performance; Updike was pleased that the filmmakers had nonetheless managed to convey that the story was about women." As I've always found the page-to-screen process fascinating, this left me hungry to learn even more, especially about Updike's responses to the other adaptations of his books.

I confess that in addition to Witches, I've only seen Smight's film of Rabbit, Run, and that was once, years ago, on television, with commercials. What I mainly recall is how utterly pedestrian it was despite (or, more probably, because of) its slavish faithfulness to the novel. Never more than a mediocre director, Smight could muster no cinematic equivalents to Updike's shimmering prose. The film did have one lasting effect on me, however: as I read Updike's three Rabbit sequels, I kept picturing James Caan, the star of the film, as the books' titular protagonist. The author himself thought otherwise. At an Updike lecture I attended around the time Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final novel in the tetralogy, was published, he made a comment to this effect: "Caan was not how I saw Rabbit." I just wish I could remember what else he said on the subject. Unfortunately, Begley's biography provides no further illumination.

I can't help but suspect that the short shrift Begley gives to "Updike on screen" reflects a litterateur's bias against that upstart medium, the cinema. Now that the movies are 120 years old and postmodern theory has blurred the distinctions between high and low culture, such biases aren't as pervasive as they used to be, but I fear they persist nonetheless.