WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE

A review requested by Chris W, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Out of the Past is not the best film noir ever made, nor does it necessarily include everything that makes the genre its beautifully toxic best self (there's a distinct lack of urban rot, which I myself tend to associate with the noir-est noirs). But it might very well be the most quintessential and typical of all films noirs, the one that I'd want to hand to somebody just learning about the form, and promise them that it's all in there: this is the tone, this is the cultural context, this is the violence, this is the hard chiaroscuro beauty of black and white set against each other like jewels in the handle of a dagger. It's ridiculous to say "if you only ever watch one film noir" in the first place, and doubly so to end that sentence with anything other than "make it Double Indemnity", but I'll tell you what, Out of the Past puts in a good bid for that kind of breathless hyperbole. When people like me talk about '40s Hollywood filmmaking as some of the best in history, this is precisely what we have in mind.

It's all right there in the title, changed from the original Build My Gallows High of Geoffrey Homes's novel (a pseudonym of Daniel Mainwaring, under which he also wrote the film's screenplay). The past isn't done with us, as they say: you can try to keep away from it but pieces of it will always come crawling after you to pull you back into whatever swamp you were trying two escape. That's the heart and soul of noir: a fatalism born not out of random bad luck but personal culpability - noir heroes and antiheroes are always ultimately plagued by that one wrong choice they made to kick off the plot, which haunts them until they (usually) die. And so it is with Jeff Bailey né Markham (Robert Mitchum), who only wanted to retire to a tiny town, meet a swell girl, Ann (Virginia Huston) and run a filling station. To live the promised American Dream, one that was being packaged with bright shiny ribbons in the years after World War II ended - Out of the Past came out in 1947 - as the United States finally had a chance to feel mostly good about itself for the first time in over 15 years. But one day, from out of... I don't know, out of someplace, Jeff gets a visitor in the form of Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine), who wants him to pay a visit to Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). I would not spoil the pleasure of hearing the explanation of who Sterling is and how he connects to Jeff's past given in Mitchum's weathered, weary voice, nor the details of who this Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) is that came between them. All that needs saying is that Jeff's protestations that he wants to be left alone, please, don't prevent him from diving right back into a viper's nest of untrustworthy friends and openly venomous but magnificently sexy women.

It's easy to get caught up in the moral universe Out of the Past depicts, which is perfectly typical of the genre: only a could of characters who are purposefully keep to the sidelines can possibly be thought of as "good" to any meaningful degree (the sweetly sexless Ann, a cop played by Richard Webb who's jealous of Jeff, and a deaf-mute teen boy played by Dickie Moore, because sometimes you just go right for the most melodramatic symbolic embodiment of the Pure Fool that you can get your paws on), and the hero is a better person than his antagonists for almost no other reason than because, unlike them, he at least wants to be something besides toxic human garbage. And in its manichean division of its women between the pleasant but fixedly impersonal blonde Ann and the sexually charged, gleefully unscrupulous brunette Kathie, the film has what could easily be the clearest-cut example of noir's celebrated, derided conception of the attractive, destructive power of untrammeled femininity that I've seen - though even despite Greer's perfectly on-target performance, Kathie perhaps isn't one of the top-tier femmes fatales, if only because Out of the Past is more interested in the cold psychological gamesmanship between Jeff and Sterling (though Greer has markedly more screentime than Douglas). I don't know if there's a word for the negatively charged homo-anti-eroticism that passes between Mitchum and Douglas - two males drawn together by their electrifying, unspoken hatred for each other - but this film alone is enough to prove that there should be. Roger Ebert described the film as a series of scenes in which the two actors angrily smoke at each other to assert dominance, and that's no less than true: this is the smokingest of all classic Hollywood films, and no actor ever got more mileage out of the limitless character-building possibilities provided by having a cigarette to fiddle with and smoke to exhale than Mitchum in this movie. And certainly, a lot of that goes towards creating a very clear relationship between the film's two central men that requires no words, only postures, expressions, and tone of voice: Douglas's insinuating whine and Mitchum's forceful baritone matter more, on balance, than any of the actual thoughts they communicate with them.

I have abandoned my train of thought, though, which was going something like this: it's so easy to latch onto Out of the Past in terms of its merciless way of grinding up its characters for their sins - and it doesn't hold back from judging everyone who commits even the slightest infraction, harsh towards its protagonist even by film noir standards, but at least as important is the film's visual scheme for drawing us into its moral universe. It surely did not invent the visual language of noir, which entered Hollywood through the 1930s horror films made by recent German immigrants and had been first matched to crime pictures at least as far back as Fritz Lang's 1937 You Only Live Once, but Out of the Past even more than The Postman Always Rings Twice (the definitive post-war noir), perfected the marriage of the neo-Expressionist noir style with the sunshiny open spaces of southern California. Everything preceding the long flashback where Jeff relates his history of violence to Ann is basically that: cloudless sky and severely clear daytime images that present a pleasant small-town idyll with a coiled-up tension lying in wait, whether it's the church that lingers deep in the frame at the end of the road, silently commenting on the intrusion of Joe the devil into this quiet place, or the way that the sun reflecting off of a beautiful river tends to make the image feel harsh instead of relaxing. I will confess that, for as much as I deeply admire the film's late drift to the standard hard-edged lighting and claustrophobic shadows of its genre, I'm never more impressed than I am with that opening act, which is far more unique in its intentions and its effect.

Out of the Past was one of the most important post-war A-pictures made by RKO, a studio that was not by its nature very much invested in making A-pictures, and it was handed off to one of their most reliable director/cinematographer duos, Jacques Tourneur and Nicholas Musuraca, and that's pretty much already explained what we need to know about how and why the images turned out the way they did. This was the same pair of filmmakers that had invented and perfected the famed Val Lewton horror film aesthetic with Cat People, the first and best of that producer's legendary run of horror movies in the 1940s (which also shared with Out of the Past the low-key art direction of Albert S. D'Agostino, who here does a great job presenting worn-out Americana). Already, the blend of Tourneur's French-tinged poetics with the overtly Germanic idiom of Universal horror and its knock-offs marked Cat People as a special sort of mongrel, a particularly American, urban visual polyglot that could never have been set in Europe, though it has a certain musty tinge of Old World fatigue. Out of the Past took that mixture and re-directed it; while Cat People is no slouch as a work depicting psychology, it still uses its visuals primarily to express atmosphere. Out of the Past is much more directly psychological in its lighting and its heavily subjective frames; it not only makes us share Jeff's general perspective, it positions itself inside his attitude, alert and wiry and increasingly bitter and grim.

Now, the usual caveat that we have to apply to all films noirs certainly comes into play here: the mentality that Out of the Past so flawlessly evokes is a caustic one, its tired cynicism about its characters offering little in the way of joy or sympathy. For I understand that there are many people who find noir much too bleak to get any pleasure out of it, though I'm baffled by them. This is, truly, a perfect encapsulation of the mindset and aesthetic of noir, but not everyone is going to hold that as a compliment. For myself, the film's unyielding potency is all the justification it needs; this is a brutally beautiful indictment of a simply brutal world, and Mitchum's performance is one of the highlights of the entire genre. It is unsparing in the most acute, insightful, and artful way, essential viewing for the noir fan and the kind of movie that could make a neutral third party into a noir fan in the first place.

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: BLACK COAL, THIN ICE (DIAO YINAN, CHINA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/17
World premiere: 12 February, 2014, Berlin International Film Festival

It might have been filmed in color; it might have been filmed in China; it might have been filmed decades after of the essential cultural context of the post-WWII America; but other than those little things, Black Coal, Thin Ice is one of the most all-around perfect example of a film noir to have come out in years. True, any one of those elements is arguably an automatic disqualification, let alone all three, but with its beautiful but menacing cinematography, its portrayal of urban life as inherently prone to violence and moral decay, and its choice of protagonist is a drunk, slovenly ex-cop, plagued by memories of the case that got away, and given a chance to make things right at great personal cost. The tune is right even if the instruments are funny. And the great overriding theme of all the great films noirs - you are alone, nobody can be trusted, and the world around you is dying - is proudly on display in every beat of the darkly thrilling mystery that the film explores.

The opening is in 1999, when a dismembered body is found in coal-firing plants scattered all across a province; nobody can figure out how such a geographically expansive crime could have been committed, let alone who could have committed it, but cops Zhang Zili (Liao Fan) and Liang Zhijun (Wang Xuebing) doggedly track the killer anyway, and Zhang even thinks he has a solution of sorts. But a random run-in with some desperate thugs ends tragically, with Zhang dropping out and spending the next five years turning himelf into the most dissolute reprobate he could manage. He only emerges when a series of copycat murders starts up, and he figures out quickly enough that the newly dead bodies share a connection to a dry cleaning proprietor named Wu Zhizhen (Gwei Lun Mei), who happens to be the beautiful, dark-eyed widow of the very same man who ended up distributed in coal bins throughout China. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that she has some secrets that need exploring, and it doesn't take a psychic to figure out that Zhang is going to end up fascinated with the enticing woman of mystery for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with solving a cold case or bringing the mad dismembering coal-obsessed killer to justice.

You could not possibly be generous enough to call any of what happens in Black Coal, Thin Ice original (incidentally, the original Chinese title translates to Daytime Fireworks, which suggests enormously different things relative to the film's content; writer-director Diao Yinan selected the titles for both languages). And while it's tempting to read into it some kind of sociological dissection of life in urban China, that would require us to overlook how much of the film's DNA stretches back to 1940s Los Angeles. But originality and social insight are both devilishly easy to overvalue: the justification for Black Coal, Thin Ice isn't that it's daring and meaningful and unprecedented in its complexity (though it would be nice for the Goldener Bär winner at Berlin to be at least one of those things, maybe), but that it's simply a really great version of a long-reliable stock type.

A really great version. If nothing else (and there's plenty else), it's one of the very best-shot films of 2014 (and if I hadn't just seen Timbuktu at the same film festival, I don't think I'd mess around with this ambivalent "one of the best" nonsense). Dong Jinsong, the cinematographer, has a small career to date, but he's clearly a name to keep looking out for: his work is an astonishing mix of classic noir chiaroscuro and glossy, sickly-glamorous candy-colored neon just absolutely everywhere. And while the film doesn't resort to anything as programmatic as color-coding, it's definitely the case that the colors haven't been chosen arbitrarily: there's a scene in a car where one character is lit in blue and red, another is all green, and the cumulative effect (beyond being spookily unreal) is blissfully, intuitively correct: coolness contrasting with rot. I have no idea what colors signify in Chinese culture, but to my Western eyes, it was a perfect little encapsulation of the warring psychologies in that car, and I loved it as much as I have loved any single piece of cinematic lighting all year.

The addition of expressionistic color to the film noir template is inspired, and probably the single most unique element of Black Coal, Thin Ice: in terms of how it structures its narrative, it is elegantly formulaic without stooping to be predictable. And this is a fine thing, in this genre of all genres; in presenting a fatal, deterministic world, the fact that the script falls into generally predetermined contours ends up strengthening our sense that this is not a world where individual people have much of a chance to do anything to change what's going anyway. Still, watching Diao take his characters through the paces is particularly thrilling. And the way that shots are repeated and slightly altered (sometimes by as simple a thing as seeing the same angle in daytime vs. nightime) contributes still more to the sense of a ritual being acted out, beyond the characters.

Not everything is so strictly mired in this idea of the city as a shiny colored hell where your fate is already set: the messy, anarchic ending rather pointedly disputes that notion, for one, and so do the handful of scenes of startling violence (there is little action, and none of it graphic, in the film, but what's there is always jarring, even just a scene of a killer throwing body parts off a bridge). In other words, only moments of violence or chaos can upset the merciless order of this world. Not a comforting notion at all; it's not a comforting film, though. It's a diagnosis and exposition of a cruel world that stomps on humans and their humanity, and its visual beauty is also, frequently, unnatural and even a little gross: it is the beauty of a snake or a poisonous flower. It doesn't end with the pointless loss of the most deliberately nihilistic films noirs, and it even seems to warily toy around with the idea that "hope" is a thing that exists, somewhere. But goal #1 is still and always to confront the darkness of people and the society that births them, and no film has done that with more exquisite craftsmanship and captivating narrative tension in a long while.

8/10

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SIN YOU WENT AWAY

As far as nine-years-later sequels go, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For... well, actually it's pretty fucking awful, since the only other nine-years-later sequels I can think of right off star Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy instead of Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba, and take as their explicit theme the evolution of culture and individual personality against the background of nostalgia. Whereas A Dame to Kill For is powerfully eager to act like not a minute has gone by since Sin City opened, exactly copying the original film's distinctive aesthetic and using extensive make-up to erase the passage of nearly a decade from every returning star's face.

What I started off to say is that, as far as nine-years-later sequels go, A Dame to Kill For could have been infinitely worse. Because, when all is said and done, exactly copying the original film's distinctive aesthetic - that is to say, the aesthetic the original film exactly copied from the Sin City comics of writer/artist Frank Miller, whose visual concepts were translated so precisely that director Robert Rodriguez extended him a directing credit, exactly the situation that attains in the sequel - isn't such a terrible thing as all that, when even after most of a decade, you can still count on one hand all the films that have recalled into Sin City's extremely unique style of harsh monochrome and all-CGI sets designed with the thinness of angry line drawings. And you can count on no hands the number of good films to have done so. Unhappily, A Dame to Kill For doesn't buck that trend; we'll get there in a moment. First I want to finish saying nice things about the way the movie looks, because it's just about the last nice thing I'll have to say. The one big change the new film makes is that, coming in 2014 instead of 2005, it gets to take advantage of 3-D: and for all that I'd have predicted that a 3-D rendering of such a vigorously 2-D art style would look be hideous on a pre-verbal level, actually, A Dame to Kill For turns that to its advantage, pitching itself somewhere between a shadowbox of paper cut-outs and an exploration of the possibilities of pure visual geometry, shapes and dots suddenly gaining some kind of unexpected texture from their planar relationships. It is surely the first and so-far only essential work of 3-D I've seen in 2014; or maybe it would be better to say that it's the only film for which it is distinctly better in three dimensions than in two. I mean, we're lifetimes away from Gravity here.

That nicety aside, the film is not very good, occasionally drifting into outright putrescence. And this was predictable as far back as 2006, when a Sin City sequel first started to form in Rodriguez's hopelessly optimistic eyes. Of the six books and one short story collection that make up the published entirety of Sin City, there's really only one great story and two pretty solid ones, by my reckoning, and the two best were already used in the first movie. Now, A Dame to Kill For is the other pretty solid one. So that's a leg up. And the filmmakers have the basic good sense to avoid the other full-length stories, Family Values (which is impenetrably awful) and Hell and Back (which is better on the merits, but only just, and it's dismally fucking long). Instead, the film rounds out its content with two new stories: "The Long Bad Night" (which, if I understand it correctly, is fleshed out from an unfinished story Miller has had around for a while), and "Nancy's Last Dance" (entirely new), and one of the better pre-existing short stories, "Just Another Saturday Night".

The last of these opens the movie as a prologue, and it's easily the peak of the film: a nice way to warm back up to the style, the moral corrosion, the dementedly hard-boiled dialogue, and the warped physicality of the characters in the form of Rourke's probably schizophrenic thug Marv. The other two are, I want to reiterate, new Frank Miller. "The Long Bad Night" much less so, but "Nancy's Last Dance" is a kind of no-holds-barred tour of all the incomprehensibly dark things that have happened inside Miller's head in the 21st Century, with its rageholic violence and disregard for any kind of logic or linearity (it is, I think, completely impossible to square with the existing Sin City chronology) and even the most modest coverlet ripped off of Miller's deeply unpleasant thoughts about women. Which seems even worse here since it seems evident from the focus on tragic stripper Nancy (Alba) and the voiceover she speaks - I believe, the first ever written for a Sin City woman - that this is trying to redress the baked-in sexism.

And A Dame to Kill For has the intense misfortune to end with "Nancy's Last Dance", which means that for the last 20-odd minutes of the 102-minute feature (more than 20 minutes shorter than Sin City), we are pummeled over and over with a nonsensical, needless story that can't put a single foot right (career-worst acting from Alba! Bruce Willis as a sad ghost!) and is almost too ugly for words, so whatever kindly feelings one can generate towards the film are bashed into pieces by the structure that insists on leaving us wanting so much less.

Not that kindly feelings are in strong supply. It's not a long movie, really, but the pacing is all whacked to hell, making it feel positively endless for stretches, and the insertion of "A Dame to Kill For" right in the middle of "The Long Bad Night" does neither any favors - particularly since "A Dame to Kill For" lacks the tendons connecting the two new stories, so instead of feeling like a collection of vignettes, like the first movie, A Dame to Kill For feels almost like one story that has a completely irreconcilable other story twisting around in its middle. "The Long Bad Night" is, itself, a pretty drowsy affair: Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a shockingly lucky gambler who picks up the sweet-natured bar waitress Marcie (Julia Garner) to watch him humiliate the most powerful man in the hopelessly corrupt Basin City - Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) - at poker. He has his own reasons, embarrassingly easy to predict, for wanting to needle Roark, and this perhaps overshadows his judgement about not fucking with psychopaths who have the police and the gangs at their disposal. Meanwhile, in "A Dame to Kill For", gloomy private eye Dwight (Josh Brolin) is approached by his former flame Ava (Eva Green) to help free him from her abusive husband (Marton Csokas) and his thuggish chauffeur Manute (Dennis Haysbert, replacing the late Michael Clarke Duncan, whom he resembles only in that he is an African-American man). But this is noir, and Ava is much too fatale a femme to possibly mean good news. Which Dwight knows and goes in after her anyway, because when somebody is played by Eva Green in full-on "I will play my flawless naked body like a Stradivarius" mode, it's easy to buy her as the kind of sexual enchantress that no male with even the ghost of heterosexuality inside of him could possibly resist. And there are, of course, only heterosexual males in Sin City. And pedophiles, but not in this movie.

The entirely subjective problem with this isn't that any of it is "bad" bad, but that virtually all of it is dull: as written, "A Dame to Kill For" is light-years better than the almost plotless "The Long Bad Night", but both coalesce into a sort of indistinguishable mushiness in Rodriguez and Miller's flabby directorial hands. The titular story is simply not paced well at all, lurching to life in fits and starts, but never maintaining itself - scenes drag on and dither and collapse.Worse yet, especially compared to the original movie, the acting is at an almost uniformly low ebb: Rourke is basically as good as he was last time, but with less interesting material to play, which is enough to make him the stand-out. Brolin and Gordon-Levitt give almost the exact same bad performance of a cold-blooded hard-ass, with Brolin courting goofy excess a bit more freely (especially in the final act of his sequence, when he really should have been replaced by the unavailable Clive Owen). Horrifyingly, even Green can't do all that much: she plays an almost mythically cruel woman well enough, I suppose, and it's easy to take for granted any performer who can be that at ease with her nude body and draw it up into her performance. But she already did both of these things earlier in 2014 in 300: Rise of an Empire, where she managed to, if certainly not "redeem" the character's grossly sexist clichés, at least play them up with a lifesaving amount of broad wit and tactically deployed campiness that recalls Vincent Price, if Vincent Price was an unbelievably hot woman prone to nude scenes. In that film, Green ripped herself out of the movie, off the screen, and into some totally other universe where she could just be jaw-droppingly magnetic. Here, she successfully embodies a straightforward, long-established stock character that, if she hadn't already existed on the page since 1993, could have easily been introduced in a pitch meeting as "we need to put an Eva Green type in this movie". Which is nowhere near as impressive, nor as film-rescuing.

Green's limitation is the film's as well: it's just not interesting in any way. It looks nice: shiny and stylised and glittering with its hard whites and jet blacks moving along the Z-axis. But it doesn't look any nicer than the 21-year-old comic book that it's re-staging, and sucking all of the life from in the process.

4/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE MERRY WORLD OF FRANK MILLER

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, we return to the charming world of Basin City, where men are brutal nihilists and women are slutty slutwhores and buildings are CGI. All this was a little fresher last time around.

There's such a huge gap between the experience of watching Sin City when it was new in 2005, and the experience of watching it almost a full decade later, it feels like two entirely different movies, damn near. Thus it is with films which were at one point on the technological bleeding edge - and oh, how very bloody that edge was in the case of Sin City when it was new. It's almost quaint to think of it now, but there was a time when a "live-action" movie that took place almost entirely in CGI environments was enormously radical. Prior to Sin City, there had been the half-steps of George Lucas's Star Wars prequels, both of which (in those glory days, there was merely a "both", and we could still hold out hope that he'd right things) involved extensive use of CGI set-building; and in 2004, Kerry Conran wrote and directed Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the first American film with 100% digitally-created backdrops for its human actors to interact with; or rather, not to. And in the same year, the French Immortel and the Japanese Casshern were released, both of which also featured only synthetic sets.

But the Star Warses were unpleasantly eager to declare themselves tech demos with terrible narratives and insipid characters reluctantly tacked on, Sky Captain married truly exquisite, imaginative world building to a story that barely exists, and the foreign films made nary a ripple in the States, incapable of proving to Hollywood that an extraordinary new tool for making whole worlds without the tedious labor of making whole worlds now existed, and thus creating the rather dubious world in which we now live. That honor fell to Sin City, the first film of the lot to use this all-digital set creation because it served the greater purposes of the movie, rather than as an end in and of itself. Now that every single mainstream movie from the enormous effects-driven tentpoles to the modest character stories comes in with a sheen of computer-generated Vaseline over everything, it's easy to forget how astonishing this felt at the time; that a movie could and should create a completely synthetic world to provide the right environment for its story to thrive.

In the particular case of Sin City, that environment and that story (stories, rather) can be described in the same way: an amped-up exaggeration of the style, world, and moral ethos of film noir. It's asking far too much to suggest that the film is a parody of the genre, for Frank Miller, author and artist of the comic book series from which the film has been slavishly adapted, would not appear to have nearly enough of a sense of humor to write such a thing as a parody. But it is an exaggeration to the most absurd extremities, a kind of apotheosis of the curdled nihilism, violence, sexism, and urban rot that make up noir. The enormous stylisation - also slavishly adapted from the comics, which functionally serve as the movie's storyboards - is, likewise, an intensified version of the Expressionist photography that turned realistic urban settings into hellish, almost surreal spaces, rendered as little more than black and white lines and shapes with absolutely no room in between for shading, or for human habitation. Individual elements of color, mostly reds with some yellow, blue, and rarely green here or there, serve to provide some minute measure of respite from the savage black and white, a flicker of life whether in the form of love, death, or terror, anything that's not the sheer grinding agony of life in Basin City.

The film's overriding problem - assuming that the whole "ultra-nihilistic extreme expression of film noir style and morality" isn't a problem for you, as it is not for me (and making allowances for how the film watches in 2005 as opposed to 2014, I'm still quite a big fan of the movie) - is that it's so indebted to the comic books, adding nothing but motion and the various textures of the performances. The nominal director, Robert Rodriguez, does very little to the film other than facilitate it; the honorary directorial credit he gave to Miller (without which we would maybe not have Miller's putrid 2008 film of The Spirit, a film that blindly copies Sin City's aesthetic with an incomparably worst script and performances) admits as much, and the fact that the one scene "guest-directed" by Quentin Tarantino is indistinguishable from the rest of the film other than having a slightly looser performance from Benicio Del Toro speaks to how little personality the movie actually possesses that it didn't borrow from Miller.

And as we kind of knew in 2005, and know to an absolute dread certainty in 2014, borrowing personality from Frank Miller is a rather dubious thing to do. This shows in Sin City itself, which is good and bad almost entirely as a function of the quality of the original comic stories it's adapting: it's based on the first, third, and fourth "Sin City yarns", as Miller referred to them during the book's original run in the 1990s, apparently recognising that the word "stories" implies more structure and discipline than his feverish lashings of urban nightmare rage possessed. The first and third - "The Hard Goodbye" and "The Big Fat Kill" - are possibly the best of all seven Sin City miniarcs, in the tightness of their construction and the effectiveness of how Miller's art (which is literally re-created onscreen) works within the mood created by that story. The fourth - "That Yellow Bastard" - is, I would argue, the exact moment when you can watch the early Frank Miller who was largely good if thoroughly retrograde in some of his opinions about vigilante justice, women, and government, starts to turn into the sour-minded crank Frank Miller, who'd fully emerge in the final Sin City yarn, "Hell and Back", and would be responsible for the ghastly The Dark Knight Strikes Again and Holy Terror and the angry, unfunny pastiche All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. And that plays off in the movie, as well, which somewhat awkwardly welds the three units into one film that presumably was meant to have the structural payoffs of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, but doesn't get there. The first two segments (following two prologues), centering around Mickey Rourke's big menacing thug with a heart of gold Marv, and Clive Owen's hitman-in-hiding Dwight, are both delightful, nasty-minded wallows in excess, misanthropy, style. The third, with Bruce Willis as Hartigan, a disgraced cop sent to prison for taking down the psychopathic son of a powerful senator, only to emerge years later to protect the demure, almost fully-clothed stripper, Nancy (Jessica Alba) that he'd rescued as a girl, from the yellowish gnome-man (Nick Stahl) trying to kill them both... that part's just bleak and miserable and gross.

Of course, all of it's a little bleak and miserable and gross. There's a whole cannibalism subplot. But there's a difference between the grubbiness of the third sequence and the arch, even self-parodying way that it's depicted in the first two segments, with their geysers of white blood silhouetted against black, their armies of militant prostitutes (led by an absolutely terrific Rosario Dawson), their curt dialogue that suggests what happens when you take hard-boiled tough-guy slang and let it sit on the fire for another hour or two (Owen, grim and staring, never flexing his chin at all, is terrific at delivering this). Two-thirds of Sin City comes from a place of love and enthusiasm for the overblown possibilities of guttural, pitch-black noir, and that's the part that matter most, the part that especially benefits from the film's prideful creation of elaborate, wholly unpersuasive digital sets. When it's working, Sin City primarily resembles people giddily play-acting at being film noir toughies, everybody going as bad-ass as they can manage to top the actors that, in many cases, they weren't even performing against. It's extremeness and artifice take on an energy that's surprisingly playful, given how pitch-black everything is: so hyper-dramatic that even the most horrifying elements play as a sort of quiet camp rather than bland torture porn. The years have, alas! dulled it somewhat. But the bad-boy naughtiness still works, and if the film has suffered, it's only a victim of its own success.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1949: In which a cold war replaces the hot one, in guiding how society thinks about itself

The Woman on Pier 13 had previews under the title I Married a Communist, and only came into its far less show-offy title when the test audiences rejected it for reasons that probably make perfect sense in the cultural context of 1949, but all it really says to me is that people used to have way less awesome tastes. Because The Woman on Pier 13 is like a pair of fresh-washed jeans, crisp and sturdy and really quite impossibly unexceptional, but I Married a Communist - tell me that there's not a tiny part of you that isn't desperate to see that movie. If the film had come out even a couple of years later, when the tacky excesses of '50s B-pictures had begun to make itself felt, I suspect it might have even been released under its far more delectably outrageous name, but then, by any title, The Woman on Pier 13 feels like a film which found the 1950s pushing their way in to the 1940s ahead of schedule.

It's not hard to guess that a film titled I Married a Communist at any point its development was intended as a ripe piece of anti-Red agitprop, and that was indeed a subject much on the mind of all Americans as the '40s turned into the '50s. The infamous blacklist had started in 1947, when the House Committe on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had begun investigating Communist ties in Hollywood, and those who refused to play ball were prevented from working by general agreement of the studio bosses, deeply anxious to avoid getting on HUAC's bad side. In 1950, a pamphlet titled Red Channels kicked the blacklist into high gear, and in that same year, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy began his attention-grabbing claims that the U.S. government - and the whole country! - was infiltrated by a small army of well-trained, merciless Commie agents who where this close to toppling the entire system of American democracy. Within a couple of years, American political discourse would be in full-fledged hysteria over the Red Menace, and within a couple of years after that, it would all be over, and the Red-baiting of McCarthy would already be regarded as weird, embarrassing paranoia.

The Woman on Pier 13 got out in front of that trend, and not by accident: RKO Radio Pictures, the studio that made it, was itself something of a crucible for how the film industry was tossed back and forth by the pressures of the anti-communist mood of the time. Two of RKO's top creators, director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter Adam Scott, were numbered among the Hollywood Ten, the first blacklist victims, which gave the studio an early association with the scandals and ugliness that nobody much wanted to deal with at the time. Coupled with the collapse of the film marketplace in 1947, down from the all-time high water mark of 1946, RKO - always one of the smallest and most fragile of the big companies - was in freefall, and in 1948, a controlling interest was acquired by notable crazy billionaire Howard Hughes, who made a conscious point of retooling the studio to reflect his interests, which included nuking the progressive message pictures in the pipeline and replacing them with things like, well, like the hysterical I Married a Communist. (In 1950, Hughes made the decision to play along with the government's antitrust suits against the studios - which in those days were both producers and exhibitors - and divested RKO of its theater chain, one of the key developments in the end of the classical studio era. Which doesn't really concern us at this point, but it speaks to the turmoil during Hughes's time in charge, and even to the desperate straits that RKO would never emerge from after this period - the company would keep making movies for another decade, but never regain its footing as a significant studio).

I lead with the social context surrounding the film, and not the film itself, since without that context, The Woman on Pier 13 is not much more than any other meat-and-potatoes B-level noir of the same period. Less than, maybe; in its zeal to score political points, it allows character motivation to dangle, and so it feels quite a bit more dimwitted than the average 1949 thriller. On the other hand, it was shot by Nicholas Musuraca, one of the great noir cinematographers (though he's best-known for the horror film Cat People), and it's strong work even by his elevated standards. So no matter how flimsy the committee-written story gets, the film always looks like a million bucks, and the mood of tension and omnipresent danger remains high thanks to the visuals even when the script wants to suck all the wind out of it through some preposterous artless dialogue and character beats.

The "I" who married the Communist - ex-Communist, actually, though he gets browbeaten into rejoining the Party early on - is Nan Collins (Laraine Day), née Lowry, newly married after a whirlwind courtship to one Brad Collins (Robert Ryan), an important executive in the San Francisco shipping world. No sooner have they returned from their honeymoon than Nan starts to realise the dark side of getting married to a fellow you barely know: he has secrets in his past, dangerous ones like the obviously shady Christine Norman (Janis Carter), who the couple encounters at a restaurant. How shady are we talking? Norman won't even drink good old American booze - she makes a big point of requesting important beer and champagne.

In no time at all, we find out - but Nan doesn't - that Norman is an active Communist, and that back in the '30s, she had quite the love affair with Brad, when he was still going by his birth name of Frank Johnson. He's since had to change identities to cover up his own Communist activism when miserably unemployed during the depression, and now Norman and her handler, a menacing hulk of a man named Vanning (Thomas Lopez), want Brad/Frank to do some work for them. There's a big war between the shipping union and the bosses, you see, and Brad has been the best voice of reason for a negotiation, convincing the union not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and convincing the bosses to stop being so resistant to giving up a fraction of profits for the benefit of all. But Vanning doesn't like that: he wants Brad to start stonewalling the union to trigger a strike and shut down shipping. He has a whole litany of options for blackmail and coercion right at his fingertips, too, and Brad's as good as dead if he doesn't play along. Meanwhile, Norman is busy seducing Nan's brother Don (John Agar), at first to hurt Nan and Brad, then to have another pawn in the fight against the shipping industry, then because she falls in love, to Vanning's immense disgust; for him, no good Communist would ever even think of having human emotions. And naturally enough, Norman's fit of the girlies will have some nasty ramifications that end up making everything a lot worse for Nan and Brad.

Impassioned message-spinning, I am sure, but The Woman on Pier 13 is awfully murky in pursuing that message: it's not really clear what the Communists are up to besides being Evil, with the shipping plan serving no apparent purpose besides causing mischief and hurting innocents. As far as propaganda goes, the film's a complete dud, since it's so freaked out by the merest mention of the word "communism" that it's more akin to one of those crazy anti-drug melodramas that have been made, on and off, throughout film history; especially in the form of Don, so wide-eyed in his innocence as to beggar belief as any kind of human character, simply functioning as the vessel for the film to depict how easily The Bad Thing can take control of your loved ones. It's so frenzied in its melodramatic scare-mongering as to lose any real ability to effectively monger those scares. And while it makes sure to put authentically communist-sounding statements in the mouths of its Party members, ideology isn't governing their actions, which feel like a low-rent supervillain cooked them up, rather than a radical strategist.

For all that, the film is still a brisk, easy thing to watch, for which we can above all thank its 73-minute running time (it's hard for even a very bad movie to feel particularly unpleasant when it has to rush through its plot quickly enough), but also the generally high level of its cast and crew. Laraine Day is a bit of a wet noodle, and with more or less the lead role, that's a problem; but everybody else around her is in pretty good form, especially the men: Ryan (a liberal activist who openly opposed HUAC and makes an odd choice for a film like this) is particularly great in a role that asks him to balance resentment at the dirty Commies with shame at knowing he was ever involved with them, while having to play the covert spy in front of his wife. It's a B-performance in a B-role, but within the range the film requires him to work, it's hard to imagine anybody doing better, and it provides a human hook that The Woman on Pier 13 dreadfully needs.

The real draw, though, is the style: Musuraca plunging the Communists into smokey shadows and letting darkness slowly creep in around Brad, while he and director Robert Stevenson come up with some pretty ingenious framings that present a close, claustrophobic industrialised world - the staging of a stoolie being drowned on Vanning's orders, for Brad's benefit, is in particular a fantastic piece of horror-tinged gangster viciousness of a kind that only a B-movie could have dreamed of getting away with in '49. Stevenson, a British filmmaker who came to Hollywood after the war and found himself at Disney after RKO folded, is undoubtedly most visible nowadays for his fantasy musicals Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, about as far from film noir thematically, morally, and tonally as you could possibly go; and yet there's a whisper of the same visual sensibility, of creating a light touch of the otherworldly. The film has at places a slight but distinct tang of non-reality, more like a very bad dream than a grubby urban hell like in other noirs; how much of that is the director, and how much is the cinematographer wanting to keep pushing forward, I cannot begin to speculate. But it has some nice touches of weirdness regardless: a couple of unusually low angles in the climax, some conscious dissolves that link characters together and emphasise the control that Vanning and Norman have over the good characters' lives.

It is, all told, a film for specialists: for history buffs digging into the world of the second Red Scare, for noir buffs, and probably not for anybody else. The script is, after all, pretty much a joke, and the themes wildly outdated, even more than in most films noirs. Certainly, it's not surprising that the film was a critical and box office fizzle when it was new, since it doesn't offer much that other films without so many flaws don't already have in abundance. But it's a very special little missive from a very unique time and place, all right, and it's more than a little bit rewarding to the morbidly curious.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1949
-Cecil B. DeMille reinvigorates the Bible epic with Samson and Delilah, at Paramount
-At MGM, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star in what remains their most well-loved collaboration, Adam's Rib
-King Vidor, Patricia Neal, and Gary Cooper are among those not quite sure what to do with themselves in Warner Bros' wildly dysfunctional adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1949
-The British-produced The Third Man, shot in Vienna, is the finest depiction of moral rot in post-war Europe ever filmed
-In Japan, Ozu Yasujiro begins his cycle of family dramas with seasonally-inspired, virtually indistinghuisable plots with the masterpiece Late Spring
-Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren make the outstanding experimental animation Begone Dull Care for the National Film Board of Canada

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1946: In which things do not return to normal

I'm not the first nor the hundredth nor the thousandth to point out that the explosion of film noir could only have happened in the aftermath of World War II (the genre was established by 1940, and its roots extend back into Germany in the '20s, but as a phenomenon, it's a strictly post-war concern). It was a perfect storm of sociological pressures: a host of men returning after years away, flooding the job market, with the women who'd stayed behind to serve as the backbone of the American labor force not terribly keen to cede back the new-found self-reliance and professional freedom that the war years had represented. Meanwhile, the capricious, obscene violence of the war and the systematic murder of millions of innocents by the Nazi regime had led the world at large into a new cynicism and disgust at the cruelty humans could do. And when you mix all of those impulses up and pour them out, you have a whole cycle of more or less nihilistic thrillers in which desperate, pathetic men who'd do anything to get a leg up in a hostile world crossing paths with women of dangerous, controlling sexuality and masculine strength (the inherent sexism of noir is impossible to ignore and important to acknowledge, but there's enough else in the genre that works so beautifully that I would be loath to throw it out; anyway; our present subject is a bit more complex in that regard than many of them), and things always end up badly for somebody, if not everybody. It is, in brief, the film genre for a world that has just been broken apart and got glued back together all wrong.

Owing both to its 1946 release date and to its content, there's hardly a better film to serve as emblem for this cultural moment than The Postman Always Rings Twice, adapted by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch from James M. Cain's 1934 crime novel, directed by Tay Garnett, and released, astonishingly, by MGM, just about the last studio you'd expect to do something as grubby and bitter as this (even immediately after watching it for the third, and knowing damn well that Lana Turner was under contract with MGM at the time, I'd have laid money on it being from Warner Bros.), something so invested in human desperation and ugliness and nothing that comes within a country mile of glamor, elegance, or wish fulfillment. The war really did change everything.

The story gives no indication if it takes place in '34, '46, or any other year, though the fashions and cars are contemporary, so let's feel free to read a certain post-war anomie into the life of narrator Frank Chambers (John Garfield), a drifter whose path takes him to a hamburger shack called Twin Oaks, off the highway outside of Los Angeles, California. It's owned and operated by a mindlessly upbeat fellow named Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway), whose only apparent employee is his much younger wife Cora (Lana Turner). Without much else to do - and perhaps motivated by the attractive, obviously bored trophy wife right there before his eyes - Frank stays to take the job Nick is advertising to be a general jack of all trades. But he's really only interested in jacking Cora's trades, if you get what I mean. And please let me know if you do, because I think I let that one get away from me a little bit.

Long story short, Frank and Cora have an affair, and idly plot murder, so that Cora can take over Twin Oaks, and install Frank as both her husband and her co-owner. And they are, seriously, the fucking worst at it. The film plays as a companion piece to 1944's Double Indemnity, also a Cain adaptation, with even more of a sense of doom than the reliably sunny misanthrope Billy Wilder brought to bare in that film. Frank and Cora aren't idiots, exactly, but they're pretty damn incompetent and, more importantly, they're the most lamentable fools of fate. Virtually everything that happens in The Postman Always Rings Twice happens by accident, both the good things and the bad things; Frank and Cora, the latter especially, are likelier to react with horrified shock when events turn the way they planned than with the icewater focus of Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson. Natural-born killers these aren't.

Out of a lot of directions that the film could have gone, the one that Garnett and the actors take it - and it is a supremely rewarding one - is that of suffocating, lower-middle class misery and the urgent desire to get out of it (it's unusually class-conscious and economically-minded for an American film in the '40s). These are not, as per the usual noir tropes, a seductive, purely evil femme fatale (the blonde hair and white outfits which predominately accompany Turner throughout the movie are in and of themselves enough to hint at how unnaturally being evil comes to her) and the hapless, sex-struck dupe who commits evil at her will, but a pair of sad sacks whose lives have played out in such colorless, flat ways that bloodlessly, cruelly killing a man who is by all means pleasanter and happier and more fulfilled than they are seems to be a perfectly reasonable way to - what, really? It's already right on the surface of the story, and Garnett makes sure to play it up anyway, that Cora's big scheme is to replace working at a diner in the boonies with her old fat husband, with working at the same diner with a young virile man by her side, but still stuck in the same rut as before. When money comes into the picture, both characters respond with recoiling horror; their limited imaginations aren't up to dealing with the thought of killing for money. Killing for sex, sure, but for all the sordid erotic chemistry between Garfield and Turner - this is a downright smutty film by '46 standards - the actors carefully reserve a degree of mistrust and detachment that lingers far more than their big, dramatic protestations of love do. They might be horny for each other, but it doesn't always seem that they even like each other all that much. For Cora, Frank is the hot guy who showed up when she was just about fed up; for Frank, Cora was the hot woman who happened to living in the place he landed at when he'd temporarily run out of go.

The thing I get more than anything out of the two wonderful lead performances in the film is a sense of overriding fatigue. These people are tired of life, joyless, flat, blank: and the film happily concedes to them this blankness, with much unexpectedly spartan production design by Randall Duell and Cedric Gibbons that realistically and baldly captures the idea of a rural California diner while stripping it of all personality or vitality, as Sidney Wagner's camera stresses the flat brightness of all the white spaces that result (this is a particularly bright film noir, though its death and violence all take place in the customary shadows - almost comically exaggerated, in one scene - and it has enough of a sour mood that I don't think its place of pride within the genre can be seriously question despite its aesthetic). For Cora especially, the omnipresent, all-encompassing whiteness is definitive, and Turner's work - the best of her career, from where I stand - brilliant embodies the frazzled, irritable, desperate smallness of the character and her world: without ever once being invited to think that maybe her crime isn't so awful as all that, we have an impeccably clear idea of why she'd be driven to do it. It helps that Kellaway is such an alien presence: with his far more theatrical performance style and a catch-all accent that evokes the entire span of the British Empire and very much not the generic America of his co-stars: his bland good cheer stand out against the rest of the texture of the movie and underlines just how intensely that cheer isn't shared by the other characters.

The whole movie creates such an excellent, sustained sense of things being wrong, things being dissatisfying - and Garfield, who maybe isn't giving the best performance of his career (though it's awfully good), had an excellent, innate ability to seem unfulfilled and impatient onscreen (the result of what seems to have not been a very happy life, sadly), made for an exquisite, one-of-a-kind noir antihero in this mold - that even before it begins to explore the outright absurd bends and wrinkles of the events befalling the central duo, The Postman Always Rings Twice has long since established itself as one of the great cruel jokes in early film noir. Without feeling the need to position Frank and Cora as metaphors for anything bigger than themselves, the film still succeeds in diagnosing a society that's gone off course in distressing, idiotic ways. The bumbling, desperate protagonists of the film are modernist even before American cinema knew that modernism was a thing: fools in the hands of a capricious fate, so pathetic and ground down that they can't even do evil properly. Noir would get a great deal more nuanced in its cynicism over the next decade, but not too many films ever managed to best The Postman Always Rings Twice for sheer hopeless fatalism.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1946
-Postwar small-town America is explored in two vastly different registers by William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives and Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life
-Disney releases the technological marvel and racial clusterfuck Song of the South
-The messy shoot of David O. Selznick's final megaproduction results in Duel in the Sun

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1946
-Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are Among Us is the first Germany film to openly discuss that nation's moral culpability during the Nazi years
-The unfinished Jean Renoir film A Day in the Country is edited into a short feature and released in France
-The first edition of the Cannes International Film Festival finally takes place; 11 films jointly win the top prize

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TARR BÉLA IS THE MAN

Tarr Béla's penultimate film (barring an un-retirement), 2007's The Man from London, is among those movies for which more time is needed: at this writing, nearly seven full years have passed since it prickly, divisive premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival, but that event still hovers over the movie, working in tandem with some of the particular eccentricities of its production to over up, if only as a ghost, the suspicion that it's not a "real" Tarr film. Certainly, if we look at the evolution of movies from Almanac of Fall in 1985 to The Turin Horse in 2011, there is a visceral development across them, from the brink of apocalypse through to apocalypse to the post-apocalypse, and The Man from London does not really belong in this same sweep; it especially does not feel like the next film in a row after Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies, which do very much feel like one another in some key ways. (I am driven to wonder if Tarr's retirement announcement, made prior to The Turin Horse, was in response to The Man from London's conflicted reception: if he resented, on some level, the sense that he'd only be respected as long as he kept making Tarr Béla films, unable to ever evolve or explore. And well he might resent that).

Everything else, though, is parochialism - Tarr and his producers even vocally wondered if the brittle Cannes reception might have been the fault of an audio dub that wasn't quite ready yet. Even in the final version, there's something distracting about seeing French and English words coming out of mouths not speaking French or English; of seeing and hearing art film darling Tilda Swinton using her own voice in French while her lips move in English. But every Tarr film had been dubbed, and several of them had employed actors just as famous in Hungary as Swinton is in the anglosphere. So to use those as reasons to make The Man from London some kind of deficient "other" in the director's career (and I have seen people do this, though thankfully not many) is no kind of intellectual position at all.

And to the last substantive criticism of the film that I've encountered, that it's too much of a "genre story" for Tarr's style - well, that's the fun of it, really. We have here an adaptation of a1934 Belgian crime novel by Georges Simenon, done in an aesthetic that suggests equal parts American film noir from the '50s and German Expressionism from the '20s, both of them filtered through the marathon-length takes and portentous camera movements of Tarr's mature career. He, co-director Hranitzky Ágnes, and cinematographer Fred Kelemen assembled here some potent and emphatically weird visuals that call attention to just how much lingering realism was still hanging onto something like Werckmeister Harmonies: the intensely harsh black-and-white compositions that dominate The Man from London leave its setting, a railyard next to the docks in an unspecified French-speaking city, with the texture of a nightmare or hallucination of a real place where all the proportions and lines are out of order.

The plot, which is baiting the audience as much as doing anything else, is not unlike fellow Cannes '07 competitor No Country for Old Men: one inky black night, a workaday nobody named Maloin (Miroslav Krobot) spots a pair of men having a fight at the edge of the dock beneath his observation room overlooking the railway. One man and his briefcase end up in the dark water as a result of this fight; Maloin wanders down after the survivor has fled, retrieving the briefcase, and finding it stuffed to the brim with British pounds. Telling no-one what he found, he goes about the daily routine of his life, only with a new patina of insanity that confuses and to some degree terrifies his wife, Camélia (Swinton), and their daughter, Henriette (Bók Erika). In the meantime, a man from London, Inspector Morrison (Lénárt István) shows up in town to inquire about the theft of £55,000 from a theater owner named Mitchell, a crime that the victim is content to blame on a former associate named Brown (Derzsi János), who has been slinking around in places that lead us to believe he's probably guilty; only he can't take up Mitchell's surprisingly generous offer to forgive all if the money is returned, what with Maloin having taken the money and all.

All of which sounds like a thing, and it's not the thing that The Man from London is, at all. What it is, really, is a film about observing things from the outside: the film is absolutely rotten with drastically canted angles and scenes that emphasise Maloin watching or listening to things that he has no connection to, and a certain point, the film gets in on the act, making us spectators to a story that hasn't been sufficiently contextualised. The thrilling climax of whatever crime story is going on here takes place as we stare at a closed door for at least a couple of minutes, hearing nothing but the drone of the wind; the biggest emotional impact of anything in the movie is a shot of Brown's wife (Szirtes Ági) looking distressed, an image we see twice, without learning anything else about her; in fact, unless my memory is completely off, these two long takes are literally the only times we get to spend any time with her. We see and process her emotions, but they are taking place entirely within her, unable to reach us.

It is a film, then, about disconnection: about being aware that there are people living lives and having feelings and committing crimes and dying, and being even more aware that all this has nothing to do with you at all. Perhaps the suffocating noir visuals of the docks and railyard are meant to express precisely that: not just other people, but the entire world acting in a hostile, alien, unknowable way. The film's opening shot is an exhaustively long (12 minutes!), glacially slow tracking shot up and across the prow of a ship, focused so intently on the surface of the thing that it's actual meaning and shape get lost, and this is the most stable, unexotic object imaginable in this film's world. The idea, as I take it, is that the longer and closer you focus on something, the more unreal and unrecognisable it becomes, like saying a word over and over until it becomes gibberish.

All this results in a film more icy and alien than anything else Tarr and his collaborators (the usual suspects: Vig Mihály compsed the score, Krasznahorkai László co-wrote the script with Tarr, Hranitzky edited and contributed to the production design), a deliberate anti-narrative about deliberate anti-characters, with only poor Camélia coming across as someone with any inner life at all, and then only because Maloin is so profoundly unable to comprehend it. Combined with the generally static energy of the protagonist, the film is perhaps the most uncomfortable thing to watch in the director's largely unfriendly career; and this, also, maybe contributed to its mixed reception out of the gate. It presents a horrifyingly arbitrary world where every choice by every character is apparently a disastrous one, but they're all so modulated, all so clearly happening to someone else, that it's hard to feel much moved by them. This, then, is the film's horror: it reflects a world of alienation so complete that even we in the audience can't see past it. It's a hard and cruel film, the moral universe of classic noir taken to its absolute extreme, and a gripping experience for anybody already onboard Tarr's wavelength, though I think it would be an especially grueling first exposure.

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STANLEY KUBRICK: A DAY AT THE RACES

With The Killing, we arrive at a very exciting moment in the career of Stanley Kubrick, just shy of his 28th birthday when the film premiered in June, 1956: his third feature and sixth project overall is the very first work of the director's career that he'd acknowledge existed in later years. That's not entirely fair to the previous year's Killer's Kiss, but there's really no two ways about it: The Killing represents a jaw-dropping leap in Kubrick's talents, ambitious, and thoughtfulness. Not too many filmmakers have ever experienced such a staggering step-up in quality between two projects; Killer's Kiss is a fine, wholly generic mid-decade film noir, but The Killing is a masterpiece, one of the undisputed high-water marks of the American crime film whose reverberations can still be felt in a number of ways, and even if Kubrick's subsequent career hadn't included a single project on this level, it would still be sufficient in and of itself to justify him a place in the pantheon.

On top of all that, it's also Kubrick's first film with a non-original source: the young director wrote a story treatment based on Lionel White's novel Clean Break, with the dialogue added to that skeleton by pulp author Jim Thompson. And this perhaps was critical; glancing ahead at Kubrick's filmography, which includes only one project that could even vaguely deserve the tag of an original story, and one project that so thoroughly changed the substance of its source that we might as well call it a new scenario, and both of those co-written by hugely important authors in other medium, we might conclude that for all his many indisputable gifts as a visual artist and cunning experimenter with the details of film language, the gift of imagining interesting stories was alien to him. At any rate, The Killing changes very little of Clean Break, mostly in the streamlining that comes from turning a novel built on a series of psychological vignettes into a chilly third-person thriller, though the climax is heavily shifted to amp up the cosmic fatalism and make the characters a bit less cruel. Both versions are otherwise process stories at heart: the depiction of high ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), after four years in prison, gathers together an assortment of downtrodden schmoes to act as his pawns in a singularly clever plot to rob the money room at a local horse track, watching with anthropological fascination as the various individuals observe their little corner of the plot play out, while we in the audience see the whole tapestry come together strand by strand.

Noir was a good fit for Kubrick's sensibilities, as they'd be more fully laid out in his future work; other than war films, it's the only genre he'd dabble in more than once. The Killing, a noir of the highest order, showcases the first appearance of what would become arguably the key theme of Kubrick's entire career: orderly systems being brought down by an inability to account for the human element. And while this is merely a facet or background element of films like 2001 (with its insane computer) or A Clockwork Orange (with its epically unsuccessful scheme of social conditioning), it's the driving force behind the entire plot in The Killing, which we might summarise as how the perfect crime is ruined because one dumb dupe couldn't keep his mouth shut around his wife in a feeble attempt to save his toxic marriage.

And that's all the more I'll say specifically about the film's plot, since it is a real and tremendous pleasure to see how it all unfolds. What I will say is that the plot structure that Kubrick devised for the film, though it contains nearly all of the same events as Clean Break, makes the movie vastly more exciting and tense: firstly because The Killing does not keep returning to all the characters over and over like the book does, and so we're allowed to forget about one major subplot during the bulk of the film's heist sequence, whereas the book's tendency to keep it fresh in our minds makes it easy to see the ending before it arrives (of course, this if this makes the movie more of a thriller, it also makes the book more of a tragedy; trade-offs do happen). The second and by far more significant and far-reaching change is that Kubrick tells the story in a discontinuous, overlapping chronology: we see an event in the afternoon, then an event from that morning involving different people, then an event involving a third set of people from in between. This fragmentary way of assembling the plot has influenced filmmakers ever since - Quentin Tarantino openly acknowledges his debt, for one - but I don't praise the film for its historical importance alone. The constantly shifting frames of chronological reference are one of the primary ways that the film keeps its headlong pace up; events spilling out in no real order makes everything that much busier and more frenzied, since we have to do so much work to keep up.

For it is a brutally fast film: at 85 minutes, it's neither especially long nor especially short by noir standards, but it screams by like a rocket sled. Even more than the way the plot is structured, this owes a lot to the way the thing has been assembled: editor Betty Steinberg has a marked tendency to end scenes without any kind of "button", a visual or dramatic beat that keys us in to realising that the moment is done now, and so scenes bleed into one another, frequently leaving it unclear what the relationship is until we've had a second to gather our wits (conversely, one fade to black, signifying a sex scene, comes as a purposeful and dramatic rupture in the film's integrity; which, given the nature of that scene in the development of the drama, is exactly appropriate). The result is a reckless narrative momentum that gives the plot the sense of, well, fatalism; a word I already used, and a word that can't really be overstated in regards to The Killing. It is a film where things, once they are started, seem like they can't possibly be diverted from their course; not until a pathetic, whinging argument over a suitcase at an airline luggage counter near the very end does it ever seem like there might be a moment when the choices a character makes will actually change the predetermined shape of the action, for good or for ill.

I am tempted, for this reason, to call it the most perfect of all caper films (I know, I know: Rififi would like to have a word with me). The subgenre is, of its nature, concerned with narrative-as-mechanism: the exact combination of flawlessly-planned coincidences that will trigger just the right results in the right order to spring the traps, silence the alarms, and leave the thief with a bagful of money and the cops with a locked door mystery. A really great one is exciting to watch precisely because of its clockwork precision, and that's a terrific thing to put in the hands of a storyteller like Kubrick, whose overriding personality as a director (some call it a weakness of his form, but that would imply he's doing it accidentally or to the detriment of his films, which is virtually never the case) is one of frosty detachment from his subjects, which causes him to always treat the characters in his films as cogs in a machine. Applying that tendency to this kind of story is a match made in heaven: The Killing is, in essence, a mechanism about the execution of a mechanism. Certainly, Hayden's performance - easily my favorite turn in the very gifted actor's excellent career - encourages this connection, with his mechanical-man patter as he describes his complex plans crisply, brisky, and without a scrap of emotion. So does the bossy narrator (Art Gilmore) whose flat elucidation of onscreen events always and obsessively includes the exact time, frequently noting the exacting precision of those times relative to the plan for the heist.

So does the camerawork, which finds Kubrick working with Lucien Ballard, the first of many cinematographers annoyed to find the photograpy-trained director treating him more like a glorified AC or camera operator than an artistic professional with his own decision-making process. Whatever it took to get it done, and whoever is responsible for the exact content of each shot, The Killing boasts an unerringly exact language of images: movements that glide from Point A to Point B on precise, emphatic beats; lighting (often with just one source) plays at times almost like bare-stage theater, where we are shown only the exact things we need to care about in that moment. Many compositions are totally flat, relegating every point of visual interest to a single line; this causes the handful of deep shots, in which both the action and another character's relationship to that action matter, to explode off the screen.

It is not, by any conceivable means, a warm movie. Every character is to some degree a fool and amoral; unlike the book and so many other films noirs, The Killing can't even bring itself to seriously follow-through on indicting Sherry Peatty (MarieWindsor) for the crime of being a sexual libertine and female, finding her no more capable of real self-directed activity than any of the men, and preferring to blame her dim husband George (Elisha Cook, Jr, also giving my favorite performance of an excellent career) for being gullible enough to believe she loves him, rather than blaming her for using it against him. But blame or not, everybody in The Killing suffers; it's a movie in which people are bugs, captured by a surgical camera lens in the act of being stomped on by a universe that's wholly unimpressed by cleverness. Kubrick would make other nihilistic films - Kubrick would make mostly nihilistic films - but The Killing deserves special attention for basing that nihilism in such grubby, real-world concerns (the documentary-style footage of horse races that opens the film leaves a veneer of realism over even the most baroque compositions to follow), and finding a way to turn even the acidic realm of film noir into something darker yet, where decent people can't be eaten alive by the venality of the world because there weren't any decent people to begin with.

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STANLEY KUBRICK: PUNCHING ABOVE HIS WEIGHT

For anyone with much investment in Stanley Kubrick as a cinematic stylist - and it's hard to imagine anyone being significantly fond of him as a director without having a lot of specific affection for the surface-level elements of his style - his sophomore feature, 1955's Killer's Kiss, is somewhat of an ideal case study. It is exactly the film you'd want it to be in so many ways: faced with hardly any budget to speak of, the 26-year-old Kubrick pulled out every trick that an independent filmmaker of no means could ever hope to stumble upon. No shooting permits meant footage of the streets of New York that crackle with vérité, especially the night scenes with their cruel blacks and harsh lights. Unusable sound meant that some scenes were rebuilt with elliptical, abstract soundscapes that feel experimental and unreal in a manner shockingly bold for a mid-'50s film noir cheapie. No production design meant spare, frighteningly dessicated locations. No fight choreographer meant a boxing scene pieced together in some of the most jagged, Expressionist editing that side of Raging Bull. All in all, no resources meant that Kubrick had to double down on creativity in every area of a film that he shot, produced, and edited, in addition to directing. It is a captivating, bold, downright visionary piece of independent guerilla filmmaking in virtually every respect save for its terrible, terrible piece of shit screenplay.

The story was credited to Kubrick; the script was written by Howard Sackler, who'd already worked with the director on his 1953 debut, Fear and Desire, who was not credited, and Kubrick went back and re-wrote some things anyway. It would be the last work of Kubrick's career based on an original story, if we can permit the conventions of film discourse obliging us to brutalise the word "orginal" so badly as to apply it to this scenario. The film is such a demented slurry of half-eaten film noir tropes that it would play more like a pastiche of the genre than a late example of it, if only there was even a single frame that suggested Kubrick and company had even the littlest sense of humor.

Indeed, so ossified and hidebound is the film's notion of what noir storytelling can consist of, that even at a wee 67 minutes, it still manages to have boring stretches. It's about Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a hopeful welterweight with a glass jaw, who lives across the courtyard from Gloria Price (Irene Kane, the stage name of writer Chris Chase; she was overdubbed by Peggy Lobbin when she was unavailable for post-production), an employee of one of those vanished dance halls where men could dance with pretty young things for ten cents. The film begins on the night of Davey's latest attempt to break out and make it as a famous fighter - clear echoes of Kubrick's debut film, the boxer documentary Day of the Fight, and there's even a shot of the boxing ring that I believe might be taken from that short, though all boxing rings kind of look the same - and Gloria's latest attempt to shut down her violent, rapey boss Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera); neither one of these goes very well, and it culminates late at night with Rapallo in Gloria's apartment trying to force himself on her, with her screams bringing Davey to the rescue. Taken with a fit of romance, Davey whips up a plot for him and Gloria to skip town together, there being no real reason for any of them to stay, but Rapallo has the thugs to make that process awfully hard on him.

You don't need to be a noir expert to have the most groaning sense of been-there, done-that with Killer's Kiss, though that only makes it worse. And the wheezy story is not aided by the flat, dead-eyed acting by everyone but Silvera (who manages to make himself seem intensely, even loathsomely pathetic without sacrificing a modicum of his dangerousness), whose mismanagement by Kubrick suggests his later exercises in anti-directing bad actors, without the obvious thematic or narrative payoff. Anyway, the dialogue is even worse than the performances, and it's hard to know what any actor, no matter how talented, would be able to cope with some of the boilerplate crap Kubrick and Sackler hand their way. Check out this astounding moment of dysfunctional screenwriting:

Davey: "Come on let's go for a walk."
Davey [in voiceover, overlapping the same image]: "She got dressed and we went for a walk."

Presumably, we are really supposed to notice that they went for a walk.

So, it's all pretty junky paint-by-numbers noir, and yet on balance, I can't begin to make myself dislike the movie. It is the work of a young filmmaker with things to learn, undoubtedly, but unlike Fear and Desire, it showcases the photographer Kubrick's instinct for how images tell stories with astounding success: there's a shot of Davey looking out the window, past the camera, at Gloria in her apartment, while to the left of him is a mirror that shows the back of his head and then in just a little square of light, Gloria herself, and it's such a tight, perfect piece of composition and lighting and character building, I could not dare call the film containing it a failure of cinema or the man who imagined it and then put it onto celluloid a developing filmmaker. By definition, anyone who could put that image together is already a filmmaker of skill and wisdom, he simply didn't apply them all the time consistently.

It's not the only striking visual moment, by any stretch: there is a scene where Rapallo's goons advance on Davey's manager (Jerry Jarrett) in an alley, the three men look so inky black against even the underlit backdrop that it feels like something out of a horrible dream about inescapable dark blobs. There's a nightmare sequence with the camera gliding down an empty street with the negative reversed that exactly calls to mind the "Beyond the Infinite" sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, still 13 years down the road. I would, in fact, say that it predicts the mature Kubrick of 1964 onwards more than any of the other films he made prior to 1964, both in specifics like that, and in the more general way that he creates distorted, uncanny realities for his characters - two of the other stand-out moments include a climax set in a mannequin warehouse, in which the violence casually meted out on the dead-eyed, featureless simulacra of women is even more freakish than the already-creepy shots of those mannequins simply standing around in the half-light; and the interiors of Rapallo's dance hall, with a bluntly non-realist sound mix that turns the generic set (with some oddly-positioned white picket fencing as wainscoting) into a hallucination of need and sweat and desperation that doesn't merely prefigure the hellish ballroom scene from The Shining, it arguably betters it.

This does not all add up to Killer's Kiss being the secret lost masterpiece of Kubrick's early career: one thing he'd learn almost immediately would be how to yoke his undeniably brilliant visual sense to stories which could be teased out and deepened by his camera. The best thing he'd consistently do later in his films was to make what amount to narrative experiments: using screenplays that are in some ways deeply broken, and turn them into masterpieces precisely because of how their dysfunctions take place, and how they are visually staged to exacerbate and emphasise everything that is is "bad" about their stories by all the usual rules. But while Kubrick frequently made genuine, I would even say objective masterworks out of conventionally "bad" screenplays, he would never after this do so with such an altogether lazy script as he and Sackler saddled Killer's Kiss with. For all its visual potency, it never feels, like later Kubrick, of a filmmaker deliberately redeeming a dodgy story through the the way the images interact with that story; it feels like somebody showing off their visual talents without particularly caring if the story is in any way remotely compelling or free from the most tired cliché. There's enough great filmmaking here to me to be genuinely confused by why Kubrick included it among the three features he'd later disown, but it's impossible to pretend its not part of his learning curve, however accomplished it might be in some deeply important ways.

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