I was sick all day yesterday, which is why I was M.I.A. from posting other than about the interview. However, I had to take the chance to mention that the final week of Film Forum’s excellent “Essential Noir” series begins today and includes some of the best films ever called film noir. Today and tomorrow includes a double-feature of Sweet Smell of Success and Touch of Evil followed on Sunday and Monday by the tandem Shadow of a Doubt and Out of the Past.
Again, each of these films easily fit the “essential” requirement named in the title of this series. Sweet Smell of Success has one of the most well-constructed scripts that’s ever been filmed. While much of the dialogue might seem a bit corny to a 21st century audience, the overall film remains a biting dark satire of fame, power, gossip and publicity. Burt Lancaster gives one of his most brilliant performances as the Walter Winchell-like gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, and Tony Curtis is excellent as an unscrupulous press agent who becomes Hunsecker’s lacky in order to get his clients into the writer’s column. Aside from a wonderful script, Sweet Smell of Success features some beautiful black and white photography, perfectly capturing the bright lights of Broadway in the ’50s, back during a time when the theater district was less about tourism and more about the best nightlife the city had to offer. If you’re addicted to Gawker, “Page 6” or Rush & Molloy, Sweet Smell of Success is definitely a must-see.
Touch of Evil is a different kind of film that like Sweet Smell of Success comes from the end of the heyday of the noir style. In fact, many people consider Orson Welles’ great picture the last of the real noirs — the mark of the end of an era. It shares a theme of corrupted power and power corrupting that exists in Sweet Smell of Success but is set in a very different environment, namely the Mexican-U.S. border where Mexican narcotics officer Charlton Heston goes head-to-head with corrupt American cop Welles, only to get himself and his new bride Janet Leigh into a mess of trouble. The film’s opening includes one of the most famous single long tracking shots in history, jarred from its consistency by a car explosion that kicks-off the story. If you’ve never seen Touch of Evil, I don’t want to say any more because you should just go see it and be surprised. If you’ve already seen it, you know its worth multiple viewings, and as always, watching a film like this, with its stunning photography by Russell Metty, projected is always a treat.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt is one of his most famous and popular thrillers, and rightly so. It is, however, one of the few films in this series that I consider fringe noir at best. That’s not a criticism of the film whatsoever. Shadow of a Doubt is one of the most exciting thrillers of its era. It is a film that helped define the term “Hitchcockian,” and ranks up there among his best films. But it doesn’t really deal with the ambiguous moral choices between good and evil inherent in all the best noirs. In this film, there is a very specific bad guy, and the fact that he masquerades himself as a jolly, likable man who loves his family, hiding in small town mundane middle America doesn’t really makes it more of a conventional thriller. While it does produce a sense of ever-present danger present among an otherwise idyllic world and therefore contains elements of noir, Shadow of a Doubt (made in 1943) is more important for how it influenced later films of this style than for its actual place among them.
Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past is as close as you can get to the perfect noir. Along with Double Indemnity, it’s my favorite noir and, at least in my opinion, one of the few films that should be considered as the standard against which all other noirs are based. With absolute stunning photography from Nicholas Musuraca and brilliant performances from Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas and Jane Greer, this is possibly the greatest treatment ever of a man simply being unable to escape the mistakes of his past, no matter how far he runs or how deep he hides. Greer plays the ultimate femme fatale with Douglas portraying the rich, suave, always smiling heavy. But it’s Mitchum who dazzles as the always conflicted Jeff. Every move he makes throughout the entire film is completed with a knowledge that everything will turn out wrong. He acts without fear because he simply does all he can to escape his situation even though he’s resigned to the worst. But he keeps trying to escape the trap set for him by Douglas, even though there’s no way out. Ultimately, he’s the only honorable character in the film, albeit one who made plenty of bad choices; decisions that alone pushed him towards his final predicament.
I can rave forever about Out of the Past, but doing so would simply give away too much of this brilliant film. If there are films in this series that deserve the term “essential” more than others, Out of the Past ranks near or at the top of it. Do yourself a favor and catch it projected on a big (well it’s Film Forum, so big-ish!) screen while you can.
Out of Focus 