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up, in this instance, by a Navy doctor played by Richard Widmark – to catch a murderer doubles for, and is in fact superseded by, the need to find the new source of this wheezing death, the man who caught it from the man he killed, before it can be breathed from man to man and woman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!

Bleeding Over Everything

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[Spoilers, of a sort, for Nightfall follow]
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Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall is neither the first nor last film noir to move its action out of the city and into the country. Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground and Joseph Losey's The Prowler, for example, both do this as well, and the crime fiction that preceded and then parallelled the noir cycle could take place anywhere -- James M. Cain and Jim Thompson both habitually found fringe rural diners and so forth to be fertile settings for their stories of lust, corruption, and murder. But there's a curious effect to the choice of moving the action to the country from the city, which would seem at first blush to be the ideal location for noir, because in film's like Nightfall decent people flee their urban bear-traps, but the corruption always follows.

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Tourneur's film (based on a novel by the great David Goodis, one I'm sorry to say I haven't read) follows one man, David Vanning (Aldo Ray, in full ordinary-guy mode), as he attempts to escape the aftershocks of a trauma he suffered some months back when he and his friend Dr. Gurston (Frank Albertson) were on an extended camping and hunting trip in Wyoming. They had the rotten luck of witnessing a single car accident, and in that car were John (Brian Keith, as almost the villainous flip on Ray) and Red (Rudy Bond, frightening and sometimes hilarious -- one crucial scene involves Red's realization that John doesn't really like him, and Red almost panics in his need to know why, yelling "I gotta know! I gotta know real bad!"). These men are bank robbers, and for a host of reasons they've decided that these two campers, who only wanted to help them, can't wake up the next morning. The doctor is murdered, and David is left for dead. The real problem, however, is that John and Red, in their escape from the scene, grabbed the doctor's medical bag by mistake, leaving their ill-gotten money behind for David to hide.

.Vanning makes it back to the city, taking jobs under an assumed name. He eventually meets Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft), with whom he strike up a hopeful but nervous relationship, until John and Red reappear. Meanwhile, an insurance investigator, played by James Gregory, is searching for Vanning for his own reasons.

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So that's the plot of Nightfall, and it all comes to a head in a snowy expanse of Wyoming farmland. Once the action moves in that direction, Burnett Guffey's photography brightens up, as if the perpetual night and shadows of the city can no longer compete with a sun unhindered by all those buildings, never mind the power of that shining white snow. It's not necessarily that films like Nightfall are trying to make the case that things are better in the country -- in The Prowler, the characters seem to move out of the city and into what almost looks like a nuclear wasteland -- but they're certainly different, and anyway it's in the country that these characters are often looking for peace, and safety. In the city, everything's always clouding up, the buildings hang over you, the people hem you in and crowd you, and if they don't want to kill you, their sheer number makes it difficult to escape those who do. In the city, if it's not all money, then it's all booze, and one's as bad as the other.

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In theory, the country's a new beginning. In Nightfall, Vanning, Marie, and Ben Fraser, the insurance investigator, band together as three decent people to bring an end to all this -- Vanning can give Fraser the money, Fraser can prove Vanning's innocent, and John and Red can be dealt with by honest lawmen. And all of this will happen, can only happen, by going to Wyoming.

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The problem is that John and Red follow. The safety of the country doesn't last, and the decent people are left, unarmed, with the men pointing guns. Then again, without wanting to spoil too much -- although this is no doubt too much -- it must be said that the agent of Vanning's salvation comes in the form of something that you'd never find in the depths of Los Angeles or San Francisco or Chicago or New York. The country comes through after all, perhaps. Still, there's something unspoken in films like Nightfall, something about the purity of a place, if it ever was pure, being tainted by what our decent characters have allowed to follow them. There's something here about corruption and evil living out on the fringes, or anyway among the majority of the populace, and finding the need to travel inland.

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Nightfall will be showing as part of TIFF's Hollywood Classics series on March 6 and 8. This post has been part of the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon.

Detective Story

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Over at Palimpsest, a literary forum I frequent, a discussion has flared up over a statement made by Martin Amis regarding children's fiction and children's authors, the gist of which is that Amis would never write such fiction unless he suffered "serious brain injury." That's the controversial part, but I chose to defend Amis based on the actual point he was making (badly, it must be said), which is that:

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"...the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable...I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write."

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This strikes me as entirely fair, to the point of being purely logical, and in my defense of Amis I pointed out that this shouldn't, or needn't, be read as a knock on children's writers (at this point, I was trying to distance myself from that whole "brain injury" thing) because a great deal of very fine, even great, fiction is written under restrictions self-imposed by the author; genre fiction, for example, of which I am a great and tireless defender (you may have seen me on CNN, addressing Congress on this issue). I think the restrictions inherent in genre fiction are much less binding than those of children's fiction, because the audience is more naturally mature (or so one hopes) and less specific. But still, if you're writing a horror novel, you'd better put some horror in there; if you're writing a crime novel, you'd better have somebody commit a crime.

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This all applies to film as well, of course, and yet Cold Weather, Aaron Katz's new film -- a detective story, of a sort -- tries to play with the above as much as it can. Before I get into that, though, I should note that Cold Weather is, I'm told, a "mumblecore" film, a part of that new movement (I guess) of low-fi, ramshackle, urban-white-person cinema that has thus far been profoundly, and surprisingly, divisive among critics. I have to admit that I've largely avoided the stuff myself, on the grounds that I'm not being paid to watch movies and therefore shouldn't feel obliged to watch the ones I think look like crap. I did recently break my embargo, however, and I checked out Uncle Kent, from mumblecore elder statesman Joe Swanberg, thinking, mostly accurately, that 72 minutes of this stuff couldn't possibly kill me. Well, here I sit, bright and alive, but my earlier lack of interest in mumblecore was validated when it turned out that Uncle Kent's entire emotional reserve was tied to the big reveal that the dickhole at the film's center once played with his nephew. As an uncle myself, I've done the same thing -- where the hell's my movie?

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Cold Weather, however, is a somewhat different kettle of fish, I'm at least a little bit happy to say. It looks great, for one thing, and Katz composes his images of Portland, the film's setting, with all the eye for composition and detail that Swanberg lacks. And for such a curious entry into the detective genre, Katz also manages to wring a surprising amount of suspense out of his meager story. That story centers around Doug (Cris Lankenau), an odd duck who once studied criminology and forensic science before leaving school and moving in with his sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn, who, if I may say so, is gorgeous). Gail is the more accomplished of the siblings, having a steady job and an apartment, though a certain loneliness is apparent in her slightly quiet, slumped demeanor. Her slump has nothing on Doug's, though, whose stiff-armed walk and obvious intelligence that has been blocked by some inner barrier, made me wonder about any number of mental disorders. But he does land a job at an ice factory, where he befriends Carlos (Raúl Castillo), a sometime club DJ who Doug turns onto Sherlock Holmes (when Carlos learns about Doug's education, he asks if Doug wants to be a detective like on CSI, and Doug says no, he wants to be like Holmes, but without the big stupid pipe or stupid hat, those being features of the Basil Rathbone movies, not the Conan Doyle stories). Rounding out the cast of characters is Doug's ex-girlfriend Rachel (Robyn Rikoon, who looks very appealingly like Samantha Morton's sister), visiting from Chicago. These four begin hanging out regularly, and Carlos and Rachel, with Doug's casual permission, appear to at least try to strike up something more, with Carlos inviting Rachel -- at Doug's suggestion -- to a local Star Trek convention. This leads to possibly my favorite line of the film, when Carlos, talking to the Star Trek averse Doug afterwards, says "You know Marc Alaimo, he played Gul Dukat on Deep Space Nine? He was there."

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As you may have gathered from the above, Cold Weather takes it's own sweet time in getting to the mystery and detective portions of its story, though in a curious way, knowing that that's the kind of film Cold Weather is supposed to be going in, this helps build a certain suspense and discomfort: something bad is going to happen to one of these people. Who will it be? And what will it be?
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The "who" is one thing, but the "what" is, I must say, a bit underwhelming, or at least it is initially. This all comes late in the film, by the way, so I hesitate to get into particulars, but once three of these characters come together to carry on their amateur investigation -- with two of them swapping out their pairings with Doug almost at random -- Aaron Katz is perfectly happy to stick with well-worn tropes of detective stories, such as pornography and barely-seen men in hats, and briefcases that must be retrieved. In all honesty, this began to wear on me, because I wondered, quite frankly, what the fuck Katz knew about any of this stuff! A certain crime film/fiction snobbishness colored my viewing of Cold Weather, and lingers still, perhaps unfairly.

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Back in the '70s, when science fiction was a bit more of a hot genre than it is now, but still struggling for mainstream acceptance, writers like Theodore Sturgeon would complain about critics who raised up, say, Kurt Vonnegut while refusing to acknowledge the plain-as-day fact that Vonnegut wrote science fiction, and he referred to people like Aaron Katz -- a non-genre filmmaker trying his hand at the form -- as "blatant dabblers." It's easy to sympathize with Sturgeon, but it becomes hard to fault Katz when you realize that Cold Weather is a detective film that deliberately puts off its mystery element for about half of it's roughly hour and a half running time, and then, once that element has been introduced, spends maybe seven minutes on an extended gag based on Doug's thinking that while Sherlock Holmes didn't smoke a Meerschaum, he did smoke a pipe because it helped him think, and maybe a pipe would help Doug think, too. The fact that the tag to this joke is not only funny, but ultimately moves the plot along (not because the pipe helps him think, just so you know), makes it fairly clear that whatever Katz's genre ambitions are here, he's not a punk for approaching them in his own way.

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It's that "own way", in fact, that gives Cold Weather its charge. The actors playing the four lead -- and practically only -- characters have an easy naturalism, mixed, in the case of Castillo and Lankenau, with a kind of inexperience, a greater abundance of which also leant Steven Soderbergh's similarly wonky crime film Bubble an off-kilter fascination. And I stress again, Katz has a pretty wonderful eye, not only for the basics of filmmaking, but for happy accidents, the latter of which I'm tempted to assign responsibility for a fairly amazing shot of Lankenau mounting the steps of a Portland bridge at sunset. What that setting sun does for Katz and cinematographer Andrew Reed's camera is a gift. If it wasn't a gift, and was composed by them with full knowledge of the final effect, then God bless 'em.

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What I can't quite get away from is the idea that Cold Weather is, in the end, the story of a bunch of kind of sad, kind of lonely people brightening their lives by getting into an adventure. It's a light-hearted film in that way, pleasantly so, though its undercurrent of melancholy is fairly deep. But part of me is missing the "more" that some critics have claimed Katz is reaching for. At the same time, I'm not sure why I should care about that too much, because the film's ending, quite untraditional by detective story standards, feels, in relation to everything else, like not just the best possible conclusion, but the only one. Tobias Wolff once said that a short story should begin after the beginning and end before the ending. So ends Cold Weather, and the film lingers as a result.

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Irons

When you have a blog, and you plan to maintain it indefinitely -- you don't treat it as a goofy lark, in other words -- and you further wind up putting out feelers to various groups in the hopes of gaining a reputation as a kind of unpaid professional, once those feelers are out and you begin receiving some sort of positive response, it becomes easy to neglect your actual blog. Which is sort of ironic, or self-defeating, or a form of rationalization. One of those, anyway. Because if you change "putting out feelers" to "having several irons in the fire", as I shall now do, you have my current situation, which is this: I have several irons in the fire. I'm pleased to have stated that so neatly.

So, I'm sorry that I've been neglecting the blog lately. I feel genuinely bad and nervous any time I do that, for neurotic and self-absorbed reasons that needn't concern you, but there's the potential for a very good payoff in the both semi-distant and not-so-distant future. In the meantime, I have movies to watch, and it is my hope that some sort of regular posting will resume this very week. Tension, excitement, laziness, sandwich-cravings: all these are currently at war within me. Something has to give. The center cannot hold. Many are strong at the broken places. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. I'm not locked up in here with you, you're locked up in here with me. You know, all that stuff.

But since I don't wish to leave you today with nothing for your time, here's something, which I hope is not old news to you, but may be. You guys know who Albert Brooks is, right? And how he doesn't seem to make movies anymore, and even though his last couple have been disappointing his absence is still a source of great sadness? Well! Have I got news for you! In May of this year, Brooks is publishing a science fiction novel, called 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America. I know, I just about shit my pants, too. In a brief article for the New York Times (published last July, so, like I say, possibly old news for you people), Brooks describes the novel this way:

“I can’t not put humor in a book,” Mr. Brooks said. But, repeating a line he said to a friend recently, he added, “I don’t want to be the one to break it to you, but the future ain’t that funny.”

As St. Martin’s described the book in an e-mail message, “2030” takes place at a time when “a population that has finally been freed from the scourge of cancer is dramatically aging, sparking resentment against the ‘olds’ and leading to a nation so hamstrung by entitlements and debt that its only way out are solutions heretofore unthinkable.”

Mr. Brooks, 62, said the novel addresses the generational dynamics among roughly “a dozen major characters,” and deals in part with feelings he has experienced as he has watched the younger ranks come up behind him.

“We took to the streets for the Vietnam War,” he said. “But there’s other reasons that kids should take to the streets. They just haven’t gotten there yet. And from what I’m reading, with the iPhone 6, they won’t have to.”

So it'll be funny, but he's actually serious. I think on the list of things anybody might have expected from Albert Brooks at this point in his career, writing a humorous, yet serious-minded, science fiction novel would count as "Not Listed". I must say, I'm delighted, excited, wary, and craving a sandwich. May can't come soon enough.

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.

Brief Thoughts on The Descent Part 2

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Brief Thought #1 - In The Royal Tenenbaums, Owen Wilson's Cormac-McCarthy-if-he-was-bad writer Eli Cash describes his novel Old Custer by saying: "Everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is, maybe he didn't?" Such is the philosophy of The Descent Part 2, directed by Jon Harris, and the continuation of Neil Marshall's excellent 2005 horror film. In the original, Sarah, played by Shauna Macdonald, was left in an underground cave with her mind broken and surrounded by ravenous, blind, pasty-white creatures. That was the original British ending, anyway, though when the film hit the US a new ending was shot, one that was less ambiguous and a bit more uplifting. What the British-made sequel is saying, bascially, is that the reshot ending is canon, because Sarah is out of the cave and running around covered in blood. Interestingly, in the DVD commentary Jon Harris claims to have never seen the reshot ending of the original, on which he worked (Marshall is a producer of the sequel), so I guess he absorbed it through osmosis. Also, that chick Juno, the one Sarah axed in the leg because Juno slept with Sarah's deceased husband, leaving her bleeding on the cave floor to be swarmed by the creatures? She's alive, too! So, since The Descent Part 2's plot revolves around the attempted rescue of the five women from the first film, Harris and his writers have approached the maxim that all sequels should be the same, but more of it, by stopping after the words "the same".

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Brief Thought #2 - There's some pretty good stuff in the sequel involving Sarah and the crew of rescuers stumbling across the dead bodies of the characters from the first film (although I was able to remember the specifics of the earlier scene in only one of these cases). The first time this happens they find the body of a woman who has been devoured from roughly the sternum down, and Sarah -- whose memories of what transpired before are slowly returning -- mentions something about being attacked by creatures or animals or something. One of the rescuers, the designated Stubborn Leader played by Douglas Hodge, while standing directly over this eviscerated corpse, responds with "There's nothing down here that could have done that!" Given the evidence to the contrary that he has ready-to-hand, one is tempted to think that the filmmakers were awfully stubborn about keeping this character stubborn.

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Brief Thought #3 - The Descent Part 2 is a low-budget affair, through no fault of its own. What it lacks is any flair or personal style, or even style borrowed from its predecessor (other than borrowing the same shot from The Shining that Neil Marshall borrowed for his film). This is especially evident in the first 40 minutes, in other words, all the stuff that happens before the creatures attack again, all of which is awfully limp and plodding. But eventually all hell breaks loose, and there's a certain suspense and energy here. But one nicely imagined set-piece is badly undercut by the film's low budget, or rather, by the fact that the filmmakers refused to acknowledge that low budget and find another way to shoot it. The offending bit involves two people falling into a seemingly endless pit of blackness, to their death, and it looks as though the two actors were filmed grappling, and then that image was reduced in increments with the hopes that this would effectively mimic the image of two people, seen from above, dropping out of sight. Instead, it looks like they're shrinking. I believe the TV show Land of the Lost was fond of this kind of camera trickery, but in any case it reminds me of a saying that I believe is an old one, and if it's not it should be: If you can't do it, don't do it.

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Brief Thought #4 - What I just described above in Brief Thought #3 would have to count as the climax of that particular scene, and the idea, narratively, behind it is a good one -- I'd like to stress this. Unfortunately, Harris seems intent on training his audience to not care about anything or anybody, because whatever emotion he'd created in the scene is almost immediately obliterated by the coda that follows. It's rather annoying, nor does this philosophy end there. If a given film's structure could ever be categorized, or succinctly described, the structure of The Descent Part 2 could be described this way: Nothing Matters. That's what our movie's about. It's about Nothing Matters. Which, theoretically, is actually not a bad idea for a horror film to be based around, but The Descent Part 2 wants us to feel certain emotional connections, then wants to slap us in the face for feeling them, but also wants us to walk away from the film still feeling them. Is this an achievable goal? I don't know, but it's sort of amusing to hear the screenwriters talk, as they do in one of the DVD extras, about how Sarah's character goes from vengeful in the first film to empathetic and sacrificing in the sequel, when we already know, having watched the film, that all that empathy and sacrifice meant precisely jack-shit.

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Brief Thought #5 - Also, about 80% of the characters who die in this film -- creatures and regular folk alike -- die by having their throats ripped out or punctured. I mention this only in passing.