Murder, My Sweet

Poised a little above the city, especially at night, is Philip Marlowe’s office. Powerful forces, as they say, gather him up and cast him about. He sticks with it, however. He sees it through to the bitter end.

Cornered

It begins in London, moves to the coast of France, then Marseilles, Berne and Buenos Aires (Hotel Regent, Bar Fortuna). None of these places is very real, tantalizingly so. An Argentinean subway car marked Florida comes into view, briefly, and a night exterior of shops along a street is an approximation. Composition doesn’t govern the shots (and in this it curiously anticipates Jeremiah Johnson), it can’t be called a film noir even though it directly figures in The Third Man and D.O.A. quite visibly.

The RCAF demobs a pilot (Dick Powell) shot down and imprisoned, his French wife of twenty days was killed, he pursues the Vichy official (Luther Adler) who betrayed her and who is thought to have died, or rather he intends to go to France and settle her estate but the chains of bureaucracy and misinformation block his way so terribly that he must give no quarter to any thought of accommodation, his persistence and determination shake off every dead end, he meets the man in Buenos Aires.

Composition doesn’t even enter into the plot, the circumstances or the action. There is no well-placed detective story with a hero bobbing and weaving, only the simulacrum of a Fascist group not very far from Notorious, and a man who has a pistol and a scar, his bitterness and smoldering impatience are all the surface there is, not even Nina Vale’s enticing skintight black lace is anything more than one element of a turgid nightmare.

“Unreal cities”, and yet the state of mind is pierced by the hot charred remains of a house set afire in the act of burning some documents that must be sought out amidst the blackened beams and ashes.

A Maquis leader, a Swiss insurance company, Walter Slezak as a nefarious tour guide, some Argentinean anti-Fascists, and the Buenos Aires police, also people the landscape.

The Caine Mutiny

It’s an interesting problem, loyalty and disloyalty in middle management. At a certain amorphous level they’re even hard to distinguish, which makes for some dramatic ambiguity.

The Mountain

A sustained inspiration by Spencer Tracy, doubtless of some use to Anthony Quinn in The Passenger. It’s about as fine as can be, in a simple story brought down to essentials by the very nature of it.

Raintree County

If the antebellum South is described as Gone with the Wind, the North is evoked as a tree firmly planted. Or, as Prof. Stiles might say, “a very vast idea of the South, more arduous than Jezebel, which might be said to sweep like Sherman to the sea and there find Daphne quite transformed.”

Somewhere in the swamps round about Freehaven, Indiana (Prof. Stiles explains) a single seed of the rain tree (indigenous to China) was planted at the time of Johnny Appleseed, and whosoever finds the tree will be endowed with “the secret of life.” His pupil, John Shawnessy, expands: “it opens all locks, heals all wounds.”

Young Shawnessy is an admirer of Byron. After winning a foot race, he is seen at a picnic wearing a laurel wreath and playing a reed pipe. These early, youthful scenes are often formed on Impressionist models, tempered by Eakins and Homer.

The crux of Showboat is introduced with dramatic fervor. “Lincoln has Negro blood in him,” says Mrs. Shawnessy. Indianapolis is described as “a Copperhead town.” The quest for the rain tree is delayed as “much too perilous a business.” Shawnessy joins the war to retrieve his wife and son. The Union must be preserved.

Some controversy attaches to the screenplay, which is complained of as being not like the novel. To this day, it is necessary to point out to some in the audience that they’re watching a movie. In addition, and most obnoxiously, one must be told about Montgomery Clift’s accident. One is, to the contrary, amazed by Clift’s performance throughout, and no impairment is noticeable. Finally, and with characteristic self-deprecation, Elizabeth Taylor speaks disparagingly of her performance as “chewing the scenery.” Lucky scenery, and perhaps a tinge of complaint against Dmytryk for the intensity of the recital on the bed. Clift’s attention paid is a model for Alan Bates’s (to Janet Suzman) in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.

There is an unmistakable influence on Doctor Zhivago and elsewhere. There is a report that top critics maligned the film as beyond contempt. It is beyond criticism. The pan-and-scan version is as incommodious as that of Ryan’s Daughter.

The Young Lions

Their teeth are broken, says the Psalmist. So much vaunted reality comes down to a paltry thing, the Reich, and then, one despised turns up trumps in the end.

Where Love Has Gone

An expanded dimension of Mildred Pierce, that forerunner of The Sleeping Tiger.

Mirage

One of the great hallucinations on the screen, like being knocked unconscious and remembering yourself by fits and starts. The structure is most complicated. A witty, pointed radio script, cinematically aligned to a film noir style, the homage (scrupulous, unbending) to Hitchcock, all to house a somewhat difficult utterance. The analogy of poetic construction is usefully applied throughout in rhymes, internal rhymes, assonances, etc. David Stillwell (Gregory Peck) meets a girl (Diane Baker) on the stairwell during a blackout, but the sub-basements turn up missing.

It’s memory he’s wanting. In a bookstore window he’s struck by two books, The Peace Scare and The Dark Side of the Mind. He buys a copy of the latter, goes to see the author, a prominent psychiatrist, using a footnote as a reference. “You were referred by a dead man,” says the genius (Robert H. Harris). Amnesia doesn’t last two years, he explains, two days maybe, and throws Stillwell out.

Our man now follows in the heels of Mr. Arkadin by hiring a private detective (Walter Matthau), whose first case this is, to trace his own identity. As they descend a plaza escalator, the camera in the next one descends with them. At Stillwell’s apartment, the refrigerator is full, though it was empty before. The closet is empty. “Brownies” are proffered in explanation.

They go together to Stillwell’s office, which doesn’t exist, and pass in the corridor the office of Charles S. Calvin, Attorney-at-Law, who fell to his death during the blackout. They examine the stairwell.

A brutal, bespectacled thug (George Kennedy) is after Stillwell, who emerges from the ruckus with a key and a keychain bearing the image of the Western Hemisphere and a motto, THE FUTURE IS HERE. This is the company motto of Unidyne, Stillwell is a cost accountant. The trouble is, he says, “I don’t know what a cost accountant does.” The desk security man knows him, the man with the funny name, Joe Turtle, it’s off to his apartment. Turtle’s dead, another thug (Jack Weston) thrusts a bloody pistol into Stillwell’s hand. “Better take this, you might need it.”

The girl in the talkative stairwell is confronted with the deed, “a portrait of the man you work for... you know the artist by his work.” She says “there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

To avoid the police, they duck into a neighbor’s apartment. No-one’s at home except a little girl, who serves them imaginary coffee. “Where did you learn to make such good coffee?”, they ask. “Television,” she tells them. “It’s coffier coffee,” they agree.

Dmytryk is just getting warmed up with this dense situation, which is itself in counterpoint to Stillwell’s reviving memory, introduced as unprepared inserts or cutaways, the unprepared flashback.

He tells the detective he works for the Garrison Company, but none exists. There is a Garrison Laboratories in the Capra-sounding town of Brewster, California, run by Charles Calvin’s peace foundation.

Josephson (Kevin McCarthy) rears his head, a work chum, formerly head of the physiochemistry department at Unidyne. And all the while Stillwell is struggling to recover his past, the girl from the stairwell (who evidently knows him somehow) claims his future. “Promise you’ll love me, David, promise me.”

Two hoods from “the Major” make a play, Stillwell grabs one, threatens to kill him. “I’ll save you the trouble,” says the other, pulling a silenced trigger.

Now you have the idea, this is very close in style and substance to Seven Days in May, North by Northwest, The Big Sleep, Charade, Three Days of the Condor, etc. Dmytryk is now ready to begin in earnest.

Stillwell pursues his investigation, but finds an old derelict blocking his progress up the steps of a building. After hearing the old man’s harangue, Stillwell retorts upon him, “I didn’t ask for your references, all I want is for you to move.”

He finds the detective murdered, and smashes up the room in his frustration like Kane. The old man turns up spruce with a gun in his pocket. Stillwell makes his escape by conversing with a dendrologist about the gingko amidst a juvenile field trip to Central Park.

Josephson, the office chum, accosts him there, what they want is on a piece of paper Stillwell must have upon his person. “What if it’s not in my pockets?”, asks Stillwell, not knowing what it is. “You’re all alone, David,” Josephson says, “there’s nowhere for you to go.” The old man appears, and one of the thugs. The old man is run over, Stillwell escapes, amid returning memories of a conversation with Calvin in the country somewhere out West, to the psychiatrist’s office again, where he is told “a doctor can’t afford to stop at a street accident anymore.”

This is The 39 Steps, of course, and Spellbound, much changed. Now the beans are spilled. Garrison Laboratories is a radiation lab, most of it underground. “I’m a physiochemist,” Stillwell remembers, who worked on level SUB 4, and before that at Unidyne. The psychiatrist describes amnesia as “putting a bandage on a bruised toe,” and adds, strangely, “these are strange times.” Stillwell exits with a curse on his lips.

CHARLES CALVIN IS BURIED, reads the front page headline. He fell 27 floors from his New York office.

The Major (Leif Erickson) is the head of Unidyne. Calvin’s peace foundation was only a front to house top scientists working on ways to neutralize atomic radiation for ostensibly peaceful uses. Stillwell found a formula, went to New York, learned Calvin’s secret, set the paper on fire rather than see it fall into the hands of the Major for military use. Calvin clutched at it, went out the window by misadventure. A clean bomb would cut down the overhead in human statistics, says the self-described “cost accountant”.

The girl in the stairwell shoots the gun-wielding thug, Josephson grabs it. Stillwell persuades him, against blandishments of security and wealth, to call the cops.

“I believed in Charles Calvin so much,” Stillwell avows, “I forgot he was only a human being.” “Help me, David,” says the girl, “please help me.” He replies, “We’ll help each other. That’s really what it’s all about anyway.”

Or, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “we must hang together, or hang separately, surely.”

Anzio

The battle is understood in its effects as the long descriptive middle section, a succession of images, and in its causes as an outer framing device of question and answer, symmetrically.

The inner structure sees the unopposed landing, the short ride to Rome, the disaster of the Rangers ambushed, the construction of the Caesar Line with minefields and heavy fortifications, the farmhouse of a forced laborer, and snipers on the rise.

Recklessness precedes the landing, timidity accounts for the failure, the corruption of contact with the enemy is the essential reason for an almost feminine submissiveness to Kesselring’s absent response.

Bluebeard

The proto-Nazi baron is a World War One ace shot down by the Russians. His impotence stems not from the injury that scarred his face and altered his beard, but from a crippling devotion to his late mother.

The vexatiousness of women is exposed to a mortal degree in his various brides, he has no answer but to kill them.

A takeoff from Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Ebert bemoaned, incredibly, “the sad disintegration of Richard Burton’s acting career.”