Plague Noir

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Two men are traveling with death, both completely oblivious of that fact. One is a monster, the death is seeped into his skin and blood and lungs, though he can’t feel it, as he chases through the streets of New Orleans looking to validate his ignorance. The other man is a punk, a loser, who believes that the death he holds in his hands is actually money, and so he will protect his own death with all his power. Some twenty minutes after meeting him, we will hear him cough, and we will know he is already dead.

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The first man, the monster, is Blackie, played by Jack Palance in Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets. His death is the pneumatic plague, and it traveled over the ocean to meet him. A man he murders early in the film is discovered by the coroner to be carrying the plague, and so the ensuing race by the authorities – headed up, in this instance, by a Navy doctor played by Richard Widmark – to catch a murderer doubles for, and is in fact superseded by, the need to find the new source of this wheezing death, the man who caught it from the man he killed, before it can be breathed from man to man and woman to woman, and bring down the entire city.
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The punk is Vince Ryker, played by Vince Edwards in Irving Lerner’s City of Fear. His death is not an ancient germ but a canister of concentrated Cobalt 60, radioactive material ranked as one of the deadliest substances on Earth. Ryker believes it to be heroin – as if that was somehow better – which he plans to sell, and on which he pegs his deluded hopes of a bright future. His future, any kind of future, good or bad, was cut off at the knees the moment he touched that canister, but he protects it like a baby, guards it against theft, and waves the canister’s invisible buzzing clouds that have already killed him at all the other punks and losers with whom he deals, and at anyone else unfortunate enough to be nearby.
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Blackie seems to enjoy killing people, which makes his responsibility as the carrier of an entire city’s death one that is well-suited to him. In fact, by the end of Panic in the Streets, Blackie will have killed more people consciously – with his gun or his bare hands – than the pneumatic plague, which has the potential to eradicate hundreds and thousands in a few days, manages in the same amount of time. A couple of Blackie’s victims he must share with the plague, as they are deeply sick men when Blackie shoots them, or, in one case, pitches the make-shift stretcher on which the man lays over a staircase railing, dumps his slack, delirious body into the depths like a bucket of fishguts tossed off the side of a boat. Blackie is happy to do the plague’s work, or speed it along, or take it down unexpected alleys. The pneumatic form is only one type of plague, after all, only one of many.
.Panic among the citizenry, the authorities know, is to be avoided if at all possible, but a certain amount is inevitable once, paradoxically, the need to protect that citizenry must include informing them of danger. This danger is what Vince Ryker cradles to his crumbling chest with withering arms when some among the strangers he meets connect him and his deadly canister to the news reports they’ve been watching. Now he becomes a leper who must be dealt with swiftly, his disease taken from his hands by men with gloves who wear rubber suits.
.Blackie, the monster, seems to fare better. There is a cure for one of the plagues he carries inside, and beyond that he faces a lengthy incarceration. Perhaps that’s fine by him. Perhaps he can make that come out to his favor in some way. His work is not yet done.

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This post has been part of the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon, hosted by Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren.

Speaking of Film Noir...

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These are the guys who saved The Prowler. Before that one was restored by the Film Noir Foundation, when was the last time any of you guys saw it? Yeah, that's what I thought. So click the button, for Pete's sake!

You're Old and You're Ugly and You Killed Me

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Starting today, and running through April 6, TIFF Cinematheque is running a restrospective called Hollywood Classics, focusing on a wide variety of film noir, "both canonical and cult, celebrated or unjustly obscure, presented as often as possible in new, restored or rare prints", as their website describes it. Clicking on that link will reveal which films we're talking about -- Out of the Past for the canonical, the recently restored The Prowler for the obscure, and so on -- and clicking on the individual film titles will give you their showtimes and dates. A fine line-up, I think you'll agree, one that nicely corresponds with the upcoming For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and The Self-Styled Siren, which itself is being done in support of Eddie Muller's Film Noir Foundation, saviors of the aforementioned The Prowler. So this all works out very neatly, I must say.

I do take mild issue with TIFF's description of Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, the penultimate film in the series, as "genre-defining". They also call it a "masterpiece", which I have no problem with, but I watched Scarlet Street recently and though the 1945 film comes relatively early in what is generally called the "film noir cycle", Lang seems to be employing something of a scorched earth policy in regards to tone. Much of Scarlet Street plays very close to a light-hearted comedy of unrequited love and con artistry (with a sadness at its heart, of course, because what are we to do when Edward G. Robinson's Christopher Cross reassures his own wife that he's never seen a naked woman before, other than chuckle so as not to feel his desperate sadness too sharply?), but that's before the plane slams into the mountain. There are also the unpredictable, deliberately misleading questions of who will kill who and when and why and what will happen then, the posing of and answers to such queries eventually combining to make Scarlet Street a film that keeps the viewer uniquely off-balance. The point being, I've seen few noirs that so happily upset the viewers handle on its proceedings like this one, and had Scarlet Street defined the genre we might not have quite so many traditions within film noir that would allow it to be defined in the first place.

Whatever, this is why TIFF Cinematheque is showing the film in the first place (a full review of which will appear here closer to its actual screening dates), as well as the more truly defining Out of the Past, and several others. If you can make it, and if you can you'd better, don't hesitate to do so.

Turnips: A Preamble

.Most men are, according to the ladies at the beginning of Robert Wise’s Born to Kill, turnips. The women are Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell), Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard) who runs the boarding house in whose parlor this conversation takes place, and Helen Brent (Claire Trevor), and a turnip is any man who can be pushed around, who doesn’t take what he wants, and who – although this idea is never spoken, and would probably be sincerely if naively rejected by Laury and Mrs. Kraft – aren’t constrained by such useless emotions as guilt and regret. Whatever the polar opposite of a turnip is, both Laury and Helen have found their king in Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney), a man so completely unconstrained by guilt and regret that very soon he will murder Laury and Danny (Tony Barrett), the man Sam believed was “cutting in on” Sam’s claim to Laury, on impulse. Later, when Sam tells Marty (Elisha Cook, Jr.) -- who is sort of like Jiminy Cricket if Jiminy Cricket was the last guy you’d want for that job – what he did, Marty tells him that he can’t go around killing people like that. Sam wants to know who says he can’t, and Marty concedes that nobody does.

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So Sam’s no turnip, but there are several on the periphery of Born to Kill, and of film noir in general. In one sense, they exist in films like Born to Kill (and Danny was one, and Helen’s fiancé Fred, played by Philip Terry, is another) because, you know, without evil we would never understand good, although in noir that formula is often reversed. Film noir is, more often than not, not about the quest for justice by good men (there are actually a lot of noirs of this sort, but some time back a lot of people decided they’d rather not define the genre like that), but rather about the struggle of bad people – the struggle to live (or, more precisely, to not die), or to flip the course of their morality. Born to Kill is about both kinds of struggle, because while Sam fights to gain money and power and not die along the way, Helen Brent – who finds the bodies of Danny and Laury, and comes to love Sam not despite of, but because of what she knows about him, going so far at one point as to threaten the life of an old rummy (this would be Mrs. Kraft) if she ever yaps to anyone – is astonished to discover that her own soul is corrupt, that she is “rotten inside”. Throughout the film, Helen will alternate between trying to stamp out that corruption, and desperately embracing it.
.In Born to Kill, you have this core evil – Sam Wild – that radiates out, until it becomes diminished to nothing on the fringes. Just outside that core are Helen and Marty, and on the fringes are good people, turnips, like Fred and Audrey Long’s Georgia (good, but not always smart or perceptive, as Georgia, who is Helen’s sister, actually marries Sam). In between are folks like Arnett (William Slezak), the private eye hired by Mrs. Kraft to find out who killed Laury. Arnett is on Sam’s trail, but the audience can’t put a lot of moral faith into him, because we eventually learn that he is in possession of a soul only slightly blackened, in comparison to your Sams or Helens anyway, but blackened all the same. And of the points of view the film makes us privy to, Arnett’s is as close to coming from a decent person as we get. Oh, there’s Mrs. Kraft, but she’s a drunk (she’s good, though, and Howard is terrific in the role – her breakdown before Helen’s ruthlessness is perfect) and we don’t really follow her the way we do Arnett. Arnett's mixture of optimism in the face of poverty (Mrs. Kraft's patronage comes at a very good time) and cynical greed could mirror certain incongruous branches of Hollywood filmmaking at the time, if you wanted it to, but it more precisely and specifically encompasses the tug-of-war within film noir. Born to Kill isn't exactly the cheeriest of all such films (what would that be, I wonder? The Big Steal?), but outside of Danny and Laury (and even Danny was kind of a prick), those behind whom the big door is slammed pretty much, as is so often the case, have it coming.

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Meanwhile, the turnips -- Fred, for example, who eventually breaks it off with Helen because he can see the blackness welling up within her, and he can even see it winning against her better self -- make it out okay. Not without some scarring (Georgia's going to have to learn to pick better, for one thing) but their essential goodness saves them. They're not quite so fated, as Sam and Helen and Marty are, by the lives they've chosen, at least not negatively, and it's the bad kind of fate that is such a big deal in noir. But I don't know if it's fate so much as it is just plain begging for it. With Helen, it's fate -- her taste for the mean and bloody side of life surprises even her, which implies it's been dormant in her for a long time -- but Sam Wild seems content to pull on the various threads that will eventually leave his life completely unraveled. He's not terribly introspective, and there's a funny scene where he and Georgia have just come back from their honeymoon, cut short because the big dunce got angry that Georgia, who is quite rich, doesn't think it's such a swell idea for him to take over running the newspaper she owns. Clearly, Sam thought this position would be his right by marriage, and seeing his brick-like face cloud over with confused anger would be sad if we didn't remember poor Laury and Danny. Even so, Sam keeps plugging away with one thoughtless or stupid or violent action or reaction until he finds himself on the wrong side of a revolver. The only way his end can be called fate is if you take into account how blind he is. Otherwise, it almost looks like he's deliberately digging his own grave.

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This line of thinking is helped along when you have a figure like Lawrence Tierney planted front and center; he's one of the legends of film noir. Like Robert Mitchum with every ounce of warmth and basic human decency removed, Tierney lumbered through his films like a blank-faced ape made out of concrete. Someone with a keen eye and a sharp sense of character gave Tierney his big break in Dillinger from 1945, directed by Max Nosseck, and his reputation would be pinned by his subsequent work in Born to Kill and The Devil Thumbs a Ride, but sometime in the 1950s he turned into a less murderous, and less ambitious, version of Sam Wild, screwing himself over with a series of drunken brawls (he once apparently got into a street fight with ex-con, crime writer, and future Tierney co-star Edward Bunker), effectively killing his chances for a serious film career until Quentin Tarantino briefly revived him in 1992's Reservoir Dogs (and let us not forget Tierney's subsequent voice work on The Simpsons as Don Brodka, the Try-N-Save's head of security).

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I first heard of Tierney through Barry Gifford's book The Devil Thumbs a Ride & Other Unforgettable Films, in which Gifford pumps up the 1947 Felix Feist movie starring Tierney ("He'll Kill Until He Dies!") as one of the blackest, looniest noirs ever made. I was able to see The Devil Thumbs a Ride about ten-plus years ago, but the copy was beat-down, the sound and image were shot, and I found it to be a very frustrating experience, with that frustration being my primary memory of it. I do remember something of Tierney, however, far less of the surrounding turnips, who are generally too busy trying to stay out of the way of guys like Tierney, or being uprooted and chopped up, to try to be interesting. Of course, though it would be boring to admit it, and regardless of the gender specifics of the ladies' conversation at the beginning of Born to Kill, we're the turnips, in reality scrambling out of the way of killers and thieves, and through the vicarious medium of film we're maybe following some kind of death fantasy (this turnip metaphor is threatening to break down) as we stare, through glass, in fascination (there it goes) at the prowling likes of Tierney, or the deceptively alluring and conflicted Claire Trevor.
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Back to Tierney, though: he made a lot of movies, but, in terms of availability, even the small handful of his early classics seems rather thin when we can't view a sharp, clean print of The Devil Thumbs a Ride, one of those notorious shithouse B-movies that seem to die off by the dozens every year. Well, but hey! As it happens there's going to be a fundraiser to help curb this very thing. This coming February, Marilyn of Ferdy on Films and The Siren will be hosting the For the Love of Film Noir blogathon (click on either of the preceding links), in support of the Film Noir Foundation. Give your money, or give your blogspace to it, whatever you can do. This post is but a taste of what I hope to bring to the table in praise of a film genre that is near and dear to my heart. And if you hate the shit I write, well, my guess is everybody-but-everybody is going to jump in this thing, and the riches will be positively embarrassing. Until then...