Break-Out

BLACK TUESDAY (1954) is quite the thing. An unusual noir, combining the chiarscuro we associate with the genre with the wider screen ratio we don’t. I wonder if Cortez would have had to “protect” for television, and therefore I wonder what the film would look like cropped from 1:1.85 to 1:1.33. The film is a prison breakout/hostage drama, so it’s always about being trapped, so the tighter ratio could make sense, but it’s also an ensemble piece, so having room for supporting characters would also be valuable. I also don’t know if the wider-screen version is a masked version of a more spacious Academy Ratio one, in which case further cropping would do nothing to restore it to its alternative form.

OK, I checked. Oddly, it does look like the film would visually hold together if seen in a pan-and-scan version (but without the panning, just holding on the centre). But VLC Media Player won’t accurately frame-grab the cropped images, so I can’t show you. The below two pics show how the image gets displaced, cropping too much of the right of frame. Why? I dunno.

But never mind all that. Our director is Hugo Fregonese, Argentinian emigre making his Hollywood debut. It’s considerably more stylish than anything else I’ve seen from him. The Val Lewton-produced APACHE DRUMS has an even better script, I think, but HF doesn’t push the boat out the way he does here. THE LODGER (the Palance one) looks great, but isn’t great. Look at the diopter shot below!

As I said, this paired up beautifully with SUDDENLY, but here the political undercurrent is more progressive, anti-death penalty rather than pro-gun. Edward G. Robinson is a gangster on death row who busts out with a few other condemned men, one of whom (Peter Graves) has access to stolen loot. What follows is taut, violent and overwhelmingly negative, which is very bracing. Robinson excels at making wholly bad men seem compelling and almost redeemable. I found myself caring more about him than any of his anodyne abductees, which might be a narrative problem, but in fact the film would have suffered more without a riveting antagonist. (At fadeout, one of the good guys is suffering from life-threatening injuries, and the movie fades out without bothering to reassure us that he’ll recover.)

Robinson’s one redeeming trait is his love for moll Jean Parker, a pre-code star making a welcome return. Supposedly Parker’s star faded because she was “difficult” — which could mean anything. Her beauty has hardened a touch, making her perfect casting here, but she still provides a softening for Eddie G’s character. And it’s nice to see him with a more age-appropriate moll than usual — these two have obviously been through a lot together.

The film has a really superb opening shot where a restless track-with-pans ties together the equally restless death row inmates as they pace in their cells and a blues tune is hummed and banged out on a wooden chair. Unfortunately, it promotes a belief that the subsidiary cons will be important to the story and that these desperate men will be some kind of tight unit, like THE DIRTY DOZEN. In fact, Robinson turns two of them loose on the freeway to serve as a distraction for his continuing escape — which is a good surprise, I guess, but I was interested in the Black convict particularly, and it feels like so was Fregonese.

Writer Sydney Boehm also gave us THE ATOMIC CITY and THE BIG HEAT. It’s good and hard. If anyone, including the actors playing them, had more interest in the nice people, the film would be stronger, but we move from one seething, sweaty situation to another and it’s powerful and exhausting.

The high-contrast approach is so intense, even the daylight scenes are oppressive, the highlights bleached out and the shadows just biding their time, waiting to encroach. I don’t recall Cortez’s Sam Fuller movies looking this shadowy and grim, maybe I just haven’t seen the right prints. Yet.

For some reason I am amused by this shot — Graves being labelled “laundry equipment.” Harsh but fair. The box seems to dance about between shots too, an Overlook Hotel approach to continuity holding sway.

Notes on a Scandal Sheet

Somehow, SCANDAL SHEET, adapted from Sam Fuller’s novel The Dark Page, doesn’t seem to excite Phil Karlson’s full engagement, it lacks the sweaty intensity of his best noirs. Which is a weird thing to lack when you have Broderick Crawford in a lead role.

Fuller’s story is a good one — a muckraking tabloid editor (Crawford) commits homicide and covers it up, and when his top newshound (John Derek) gets on the story he can’t bring himself to squash it — is it because he’s too good a newspaperman, because it would seem too suspicious to be disinterested, or because he secretly craves punishment? The interesting ambiguity isn’t really explored and the dumb script leans too heavily on chance. You’re allowed one big accident, which here is the killing — but when rummy ex-hack Henry O’Neill phones in a hot tip, suddenly the whole bar he’s calling from starts interfering — the juke box gets turned up to eleven, fellow barflies start buzzing him, and Derek isn’t receptive anyway — it feels awfully contrived.

But Derek is a bigger problem — he can play the character’s shiftiness and shittiness, but he can’t redeem it with charisma, as Tony Curtis or Richard Widmark might. A bad guy hero in theory is more interesting than a squeaky-clean one, but not if it makes you tune out.

The movie is diverting enough, I guess, but the heart of the story should be Crawford slowly going crazy with tension, something the script forgets to dramatize — everything is done via dialogue and so since Crawford has nobody he can pour his heart out to, all that valuable angst is discarded like yesterday’s news.

SCANDAL SHEET stars Harry Brock; Mary Hatch; Nick Romano; Hilda Zorba; Dr. Emile Roux; Col. Sherman T. Potter; Tom Quigby; Timothy Peppertree; Inspector Henry Fernack; Leo the Loanshark; Walt Spoon; Miss Bessie Polk; and Spats’ Henchman.

Pg.17 #15

Thus was constituted that terrible trinity whose names are indissolubly associated for all time in the annals of crime. The fate of the three assistants was happier: they were in after life to become those distinguished surgeons, Sir William Fergusson, Thomas Wharton Jones, and Alexander Miller, whose names are yet eminent in the temple of science. It is a strange world.

*

They were all-but forgotten people: the breed that was remembered with a start, or with the unreality of a recrudescent dream. The day of carvings alone brought them into the sunlight and reawakened the memory of former times. For as far back as even Nettel, the octogenarian who lived in the tower above the rusting armoury, could remember, the ceremony had been held. Innumerable carvings had smouldered to ashes in obedience of the law, but the choices were still housed in the Hall of the Bright Carvings.

*

Before then, I’d never been aware of social classes. Suddenly they hit me smack in the face. We lived only a few blocks from some elegant apartment buildings on the Hudson where doormen stood day and night in front of covered entrances helping well-dressed people in and out of their big cars. It struck me for the first time that theirs was a different universe from that of the people who rented cheap rooms or that of my brothers and sisters scurrying to our jobs along with other working-class people.

*

Save existence, they had nothing in common,–came in touch on no single point. Weatherbee was a clerk who had known naught but checking all his life; Cuthfert was a master of arts, a dabbler in oils, and had written not a little. The one was a lower-class man who considered himself a gentleman, and the other was a gentleman who knew himself to be such. From this it may be remarked that a man can be a gentleman without possessing the first instinct of true comradeship. The clerk was as sensuous as the other was aesthetic, and his love adventures, told at great length and chiefly coined from his imagination, affected the supersensitive master of arts in the same way as so many whiffs of sewer gas. He deemed the clerk a filty, uncultured brute, whose place was in the muck with the swine, and told him so; and he was reciprocally informed that he was a milk-and-water sissy and a cad. Weatherbee could not have defined “cad” for his life; but it satisfied its purpose, which after all seems the main point in life.

*

He announces who we are. As he talks I amuse myself thinking of the unprecedented shock in his mind. A short while ago he was Professor Jacobi, a famed and aged man still playing like a fanatic child in his laboratory. He wore a skull cap and occasionally addressed an auditorium filled with dignified and obsequious colleagues. The world paused now and then in its Saturnalia of greed to turn its ears to his voice–a voice that promised calmly and authoritatively that new secrets were being wrested from nature; that science was fashioning new toys from life.

*

Two men in shiny brown coats hovered close to Isaac looking for pigeons to feed. Isaac watched the play of their hands. Their pursuit of birds seemed elaborate to him (Isaac couldn’t locate a smear of pigeon shit in the Place des Etats-Unis). The shiny coats belonged to a dip artist and his squire. Isaac appraised this pickpocket team with a cool turn of his mind. They can’t be from South America. The Guzmanns (a tribe of pickpockets out of Peru) would never wear shiny coats. These are locals from Algeria, or Sicily. Starving kids with the soft, beautiful fingers of a girl.

*

From where I am sitting now I can look out the window and see a pigeon being a pigeon on the roof of the Harvard Club. No other thing can be less what it is not than a pigeon can, and Miss Stein, of all people, should understand that simple fact. Behind the pigeon I am looking at, a blank wall or tired grey bricks is stolidly trying to sleep off oblivion; underneath the pigeon the cloistered windows of the Harvard Club are staring in horrified bewilderment at something they have seen across the street. The pigeon is just there on the roof being a pigeon, having been, and being, a pigeon and, what is more, always going to be, too. Nothing could be simpler than that. If you read that sentence aloud you will instantly see what I mean. It is a simple description of a pigeon on a roof. It is only with an effort that I am conscious of the pigeon, but I am acutely aware of a great sulky red iron pipe that is creeping up the side of the building intent on sneaking up on a slightly tipsy chimney which is shouting its head off.

*

Seven bits of page seventeens. There! I knew there had to be a quicker way to say it.

Classic Crimes, by William Roughead; Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake; A Third Face, by Samuel Fuller; The Portable Jack London, edited by Earle Labor, from the story In a Far Country; The Kingdom of Evil by Ben Hecht; Marilyn the Wild, by Jerome Charyn; The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, by James Thurber, from the essay There’s an Owl in My Room.