Psychobabble vs. Psycho Rabble

The paralyzed pinkies of Chester Morris clutch at psychoanalytic salvation!

A 1939 proto-noir from Charles (GILDA) Vidor. A home invasion melodrama in the tradition of THE DESPERATE HOURS, but it’s also an early psychoanalysis movie, with a spectacular line in dollarbook Freud and a couple dream/flashbacks that must’ve been hugely influential.

Ralph Bellamy: he looks like that guy in the movies, what’s his name? And Chester Morris, he looks like near-sighted football.

Shrink Ralph Bellamy is entertaining a few guests for the weekend, when his house is taken over by escaped jailbird Chester Morris and his gang (including perennial stooge Marc Lawrence and moll Ann Dvorak). They’re all awaiting the arrival of a getaway boat to take them across the lake (one supposes to Canada), which never comes, for reasons never actually explained.

But never mind the boat, what excites and startles is the dollarbook Freud, laid on thick and stupid with a trowel by pipe-puffing Ralph. See, Chester is a neurotic case, with hysterically paralysed fingers on his left hand (just the pinkie works) and a tormenting dream that recurs every night. After one of his pals is gunned down, Ralph decides to turn the power of analysis against his foe: “I’m going to take apart his mind and show him the pieces,” figuring to cure the guy and thus rob him of his psychopathic power of murderousness.

And it works! Forced to confront his suppressed childhood trauma, Chester regains digital dexterity, but his trigger finger now lacks its previous itchiness, resulting in his becoming a sitting duck when the cops show up. Not sure how this squares with the Hippocratic oath.

But never mind the malpractice, check out Vidor’s expressionist elan — first, the dream, in which Chet gets wet, pursued by rainstorms and forced to shelter ‘neath a leaky umbrella which sprouts imprisoning bars. And all in negative!

Then, the flashback which shows the dream’s true meaning — after turning stoolie and leading the cops to arrest his louse of a dad, young Chester ducks under a bar table. Dad, riddled with bullets, collapses over it, and leaks blood onto his cowering son through a crack in the tabletop, as the cops surround the table, their legs forming a circle of “bars”.

It’s all a goofy melodrama, with distinctly B-list stars (I like Ralph, though, and Chester is appealingly limited, one of those familiar faces which accumulates a certain audience affection just by dangling in front of the camera on so many occasions), but entertaining as heck. Ralph’s explanation of the subconscious should replace Freud’s — he sketches an outline of a head, and divides it into two levels, strongly implying that this is the actual physical structure of the brain. Further, he introduces the idea of the “censor band”, a previously unknown concept, which seems to work like a kind of gastric band for the mind, constricting the circulation of naughty thoughts and thus preventing the contamination of the spotless conscious mind with all those dirty unconscious feelings.

It’s a really lovely idea, this “censor band”, a term with no foundation in analysis that I’m aware of: Hollywood attempts to map the human mind, using as its model… Hollywood!

Film noir is a great American tradition, a triumph of western civilisation, a small high in the history of artistic achievement. I can’t expect each of you to run out and find the lost ending of DOUBLE INDEMNITY or the lost beginning of SUNSET BLVD, but you can do your bit for film history by clicking here and donating to help preserve Cy Endfield’s THE SOUND OF FURY ~

On behalf of the Film Preservation Blogathon, operating out of here and here.

W.I.P. marks

WOMEN’S PRISON, a 1955 melo from director Lewis Seiler, follows the same formula as BRUTE FORCE, only with women and more conventional 1950s attitudes. Thus, Ida Lupino plays the sadistic warden, a hissable hate figure, but the politics have been stripped away. Howard Duff, who played an ex-soldier con in BF, here plays a sympathetic prison doctor, devoid of any credible personality, whose role is to reinforce the patriarchy and make it clear that the film doesn’t criticise the powers that be, just uppity, loveless career women and the practice of imprisoning men and women in adjacent buildings.

While Jules Dassin’s 40s minor classic gives us Sir Lancelot singing most of his dialogue in calypso style, here we’re introduced to Juanita Moore scrubbing floors on her knees while singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” The prison is obviously segregated, with all the black prisoners in their own cell, but no comment is made on this. The cigar-smoking diesel dykes stomping around in the pre-code Stanwyck WIP film LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT are long gone, of course, and even the frigid Lupino is judged straight by Duff, the voice of authority. (After introducing the lesbian quotient, that pre-coder even has the nerve to fade the scene out with “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” on the soundtrack…) Duff deduces that Lupino’s unloving, career-chasing personality repels all right-thinking men, and she’s now eaten up with jealousy for the women in her charge, “every one of whom has known love.” An inanely 50s approach to dollarbook Freud pop psychology.

Even without that sexist subtext, the continual provocation to despise Lupino and root for her to get killed  would be a little disturbing. When she’s pursued by an avenging male prisoner at the end, the movie seems to realize it’s gone too far and starts backing away from its own bloodlust. I doubt a modern film would bother.

But entertainment value comes from Lupino’s frosty sadism, and the wealth of female talent in support. Phyllis Thaxter seems like the lead character at first, but goes to pieces under the strain of confinement and is forced to sit out most of the action in a padded cell. No clear decision has been made as to the lead character, but Cleo Moore and Jan Sterling dominate, with great back-up from Vivian Marshall, a stripper who wanted to be a professional mimic, couldn’t get the breaks, and shot her agent (Jennings Lang?).

Fiona enjoyed this big load of tosh, which I might have given up on. Yet, as a bad taste spectacle of melodramatic baloney, it’s actually pretty enjoyable. We don’t get to see Marshall do a striptease with impersonations thrown in, but she does a great Bette Davis, and later turns her talents to plot-advancement when, by way of dubbing, she puts on Lupino’s voice and bypasses security. A shame they had to cheat and loop her, but her body language is still impressive: the precision of Ida’s drama-queen gestures is amped up to 11. Poor Marshall never got a better role — if she didn’t shoot her agent for real, she should have.

Donate here to help rescue THE SOUND OF FURY, a much better and more progressive noir. Read more about the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon at Ferdy on Film and The Self Styled Siren. And stay out of trouble!

Hume and Desire

Jules Dassin has a short way with stool pigeons ~

And this was before he got ratted out to HUAC.

The movie is BRUTE FORCE, really the beginning of director Jules Dassin’s run of good Hollywood films before he was compelled to work abroad (where he made more good films). Dassin tended to completely dismiss his earlier movies, forbidding their inclusion in retrospectives, although his short THE TELL-TALE HEART is excellent, and NAZI AGENT with Conrad Veidt is pretty good. He wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about BRUTE FORCE either, correctly remarking, “But all these prisoners are such nice, sweet people–they’re all so lovely–what are they doing in jail?”

Stuff like the drawn-out assassination the stoolie helps offset the sentimentality, and there’s a fine, nihilistic, quasi-apocalyptic ending, which shores things up. Flashbacks to the prisoners’ lives on the outset allow minute cameos for the likes of Ella Raines and Yvonne DeCarlo, who are always welcome, but they actually puncture airholes in the picture’s claustrophobic intensity, and let the pressure seep out. Inoffensive as scenes, they’re seriously damaging to the dramatic tension.

Fortunately, the movie is held together by the very different styles of Burt Lancaster (physical, simple and direct) and Hume Cronyn (crafty, contrived, but effective) as tough convict and fascist deputy warden. Cronyn is working to undermine his boss by fomenting trouble so he can take over, but he gets more trouble than he’d been counting on. In the concluding riot, the prisoners eventually transform into a foretaste of Romero’s ravenous zombies. It’s pretty alarming.

Well hello.

What makes the conflict more than usually juicy is Cronyn’s decision to play his role quiet, sibilant and coded gay, and Dassin’s collaboration in presenting him with a good bit of innuendo. The rifle polishing is downright suggestive. Torturing a prisoner with a rubber hose while Wagner blasts out of the gramophone is a pretty pointed bit of characterisation, with Hume’s fine array of Greco-Roman muscle art supplying a further raising of the eyebrow.

Dassin is one of cinema’s few likable sadists — his interest in the sexuality of violence or the violence of sexuality seems clear to me, highlighted by whippings in RIFIFI and THE LAW, and the perversity of BRUTE FORCE, but it never splurges out of its rightful place in the narrative. It’s also dramatically harnessed by the storylines of NIGHT AND THE CITY, UP TIGHT! and others, where the whole second half of the narrative consists of putting the protagonist through the ringer (has any leading man ever sweated so much as Richard Widmark in NATC?) — the idea of drama as a means of confronting the hero with everything he fears, everything that could destroy him, destructive testing for the human personality, is very much to the fore. Meanwhile, Melina Mercouri and Maximilian Schell’s relationship in TOPKAPI seems pleasantly kinky.

Furthermore, excusing Dassin’s relish for cruelty is the fact that, as a man, he was more sinned against than sinning. I know of no stories showing him to be cruel personally, but the blacklist certainly caused him to suffer. If he indulges a taste for fantasy violence in his work, that seems decidedly harmless by comparison.

BRUTE FORCE’s prison populace is dotted with familiar faces, like calypso singer Sir Lancelot, familiar from many a Val Lewton chiller, Jeff Corey, and Charles McGraw, whose whisky-singed snarl as one of the titular bad-asses in THE KILLERS should have qualified him for a bigger part, only Lancaster and Ava Gardner apparently stole all the attention in that one.

BRUTE FORCE is an effective prison drama as long as it keeps its mind on its job. Producer Mark Hellinger and screenwriter Richard Brooks are probably responsible for the editorializing from the prison doctor (Art Smith), who delivers drunken lectures at every turn about society’s responsibility to its convicts, but he raises the whole thing up into a tasty film noir stratosphere with his last lines, the absurdly heavy-handed, allegorical, yet rather thrillingly bleak “Nobody ever escapes!” Spoken with a crash of music from Miklos “Mr Subtlety” Rosza, and a pull-back through the prison bars from Dassin, showing the doctor as just as much a prisoner as everybody else, including the audience.

All this week, Shadowplay is participating in the For the Love of Film (Noir) film preservation blogathon. Read more about it here and here. There’s also a donation link, and all contributions go towards restoring Cy Endfield’s searing THE SOUND OF FURY, AKA TRY AND GET ME (reviewed here). This is a really worthwhile cause.