SUMMER OF BLOOD: HORROR IN A POST-WAR WORLD - DIGITAL HORROR

Horror, in its broadest construction, has always been something of a faddish genre. There have been comedies and character dramas for as long as there have been movies, and depending on where you want to set the margins around "action movie", they've existed in some for or another for nearly as long. Horror, though, has its ebbs and flows, periods where it's driven mostly underground, periods where it has to hide out in the form of something else. In recent memory, for example, one of these periods was in the first half of the 1990s, which produced hardly any important works of horror in English that weren't trying desperately hard to be prestige dramas or invisible direct-to-video schlock. But the most protracted lull in American horror is the one that began after the bottom fell out of the horror market in the late '30s, after several years of studios big and small trying to chase Universal's genre-defining hits from early in that decade. It was a slow descent: for most of the war years, studio-made horror didn't vanish, so much as decline in importance, puttering along as program-filler cranked out by the B-film units at the mini-majors, Universal and RKO, while the Poverty Row studios kept the genre alive in the form cheap, tacky quickies. It wasn't until after war ended in 1945 that horror basically disappeared for several years at any meaningfully serious level - the Poverty Row folks never gave up on it, but what they made was strictly crap on a shoestring budget with almost invisible audience. We're going to peek in on what they were up to soon enough in this Summer of Blood.

At the moment, let's spend a moment with what amounts the the last big studio attempt at horror in the 1940s: the 1946 Warner Bros. production The Beast with Five Fingers, which premiered at the tale end of that year (on Christmas Day, in fact), and had most of its run in 1947. It's an awkward fit of company identity and historical importance: Warner's was never one of the biggest players in the genre, and much of the film, especially its infamously stupid, winking ending, feels like a conscious attempt to distance the movie from its own content. Which is, as you can maybe guess from the title, a disembodied hand that murders people.

Among its efforts to not be quite so much about a disembodied hand, The Best with Five Fingers spends the largest part of its running time as a murder mystery stealing from the "old dark house" motif. Around the beginning of the 20th Century, American expatriate Francis Ingram (Victor Francen) lives in a grand old mansion outside of a small town in Italy. He's attended by, he thinks, his best friends and most trusted confidants: lawyer Duprex (David Hoffman) is obviously just there for the slightly batty rich client; secretary Hilary Cummins (Peter Lorre), 20 years in Ingram's employ, is interested solely in the access his position affords him to Ingram's impressive library of astrological arcana, with which Hilary hopes to reconstruct the great lost studies of the pseudoscience; nurse Julie Holden (Andrea King), brought on some while back to care for Ingram after he suffered a stroke that paralysed his right side, has since moved from "kind medical professional" to "borderline prisoner under the obsessive control of a selfish tyrant". That leaves only our hero, Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda), and he's nothing but a con-man: a genial, charismatic con-man introduced in the film's opening scene by fleecing American tourists out of $50 for some worthless fake antiques, and then offering up just enough flim-flam to local cop Ovidio Castanio (J. Carrol Naish) so that the officer can feel like he hasn't totally abandoned his professional ethics. So it's hard to imagine that he sees Ingram as anything but a friendly mark.

Even with these enormous caveats, these are Ingram's friends and confidantes, and they are the people he asks to attest in writing to his evident sanity as he prepares to put up a new will. That, of course, means that he's about to do, which happens by accident, it seems, as he falls down a flight of stairs in his wheelchair. And this is the start of everyone's woes: for Ingram's only relatives are a pair of the worst kind of shitty, entitled Americans, father Raymond Arlington (Charles Dingle) and son Donald (John Alvin), and when they learn that Ingram's mysterious new will named Julie as the sole heir to his estate, they smell a rat immediately. But shenanigans of that sort are soon going to be a rather small priority to anybody but the grasping asshole Arlingtons: cued by a light in the masoleum where Ingram was interred, the rest of the cast finds that the corpse has been desecrated, its left hand removed. And right around the same time, the house is filled with the mournful tones of a Bach piece that Bruce re-set to be performed with one hand, as a great favor to the frustrated, crippled pianist. Different characters leap to conclusions at different times: Hilary, who was almost strangled to death by Ingram's incredibly powerful left hand shortly before his death, is the first to be sure that the dead man's missing body part is now haunting the house, and the first strangulation murder would seem to bear him out.

At no point was The Beast with Five Fingers going to be an all-time classic work of cinema, but given the tenuous state of horror in 1946, it acquits itself beautifully. Screenwriter Curt Siodmak, one of the key voices at Universal during its shift in the '40s to B-horror, thought that putting the weird-looking, weird-sounding Lorre in the role of Hilary broke the tension a bit too much, but frankly, Lorre is the best thing the movie has in its back pocket for the first thirty minutes. The graceful efficiency with which Siodmak introduces the characters, especially Bruce, is more than commendable, but once the exposition is out of the way, the film settles into a groove that goes on a bit too long with too little direction: "there's someone in this spooky old house who wants to screw around with the possible recipients of an inheritance" was old hat years before '46, but the film's first and much of its second acts cling tightly to that plot form like it needs to be teased out carefully and precisely, or else we'll all be hopelessly lost. It's only the characters, which largely means the actors, who keep it purring along for most of this stretch, and with the cast primarily inhabited by second-stringers, that means that it's a bit rocky here and there. King, in particular, is colorless and flat: as the film's only woman of any serious importance, there's far more weight and attention on her than her one-note declamatory performance style can justify. And Naish, he plays-a de Italian with da, how you say, issa great-a big cartoon. At least Alda is a beguiling leading man, smooth enough to see why so many people would fall for his tricks without stopping to notice how shoddy his patter is, and unctuous enough that we, in the audience, have to notice that, likable or not, he's certainly a bit of a shit.

But back to Lorre, who's only third-billed and maybe not even the third-biggest role until the climax, but damn, does he dominate the film. No matter how ominously luxurious and dead the gaping sets appear, and no matter how uncanny the accumulation of hints that there might be a hand afoot, The Beast with Five Fingers would be thin gruel as a horror film without the creepy little Austro-Hungarian there to add a sense of foreboding. Whatever his gifts, Lorre's voice and screen presence limited him considerably in the types of emotions he could stir: he could be a nervous force of rodent-like pathos, he could be an threatening bundle of sinister undertones or, frequently, both. He's much more the former than the latter in The Beast with Five Fingers, although director Robert Florey uses the actor with stiletto-like precision: there are just enough moments where we cut to a shot of Lorre with a sneaky dark look on his face, turned inward in a most inscrutable fashion, that we can't ever shake the feeling that something is wrong, whether with the character or with the movie as a whole. It's the energy that Lorre provides, in effect, that makes The Beast with Five Fingers a horror movie in the first place, at least until that hand finally shows its face.

Which comes late enough that it would be a dirty trick to talk about it very much, other than to point out that its superlative filmmaking, by 1946 standards or our own: there is a grand total of one shot where it feels like a special effect. And while it would be tempting to chalk that up to the acting in response to it, Flory gives that hand some close-ups, all the better to sell the illusion, tremendously well. The third-act freakout in which the hand does most of its work is peerless horror filmmaking, nasty, explicit, and convincing like nothing else in that generation.

I'd say that one wonders how they could have gotten away with it, except that part is obvious: with an unforgivable final two scenes that retrench to the usual "don't worry, nothing paranormal here" attitude of the more squeamish Hollywood tradition, old-dark-house movies in particular. First up comes a tedious exposition dump that's blunt and artless in exactly the way that the film's initial set-up is allusive and sophisticated and cunning, and it's very nearly the twin to the legendarily bad psychiatrist scene in the home stretch of Psycho. And what's really sad is that this is not, in fact, the worse of those two final scenes: the very last scene is outright comedy, with Naish's big honking stereotype looking directly in the camera and mugging about hey, whatta ya gonna do, these old-a spooky houses. It's so unbelievably wretched that you don't just want to dock points for it: you want to overlook how much of the prior to that is craftily plotted, smartly acted and tensely directed, and declare the whole thing to be a misfire.

I mean, let's not do that. The Beast with Five Fingers has much that is admirable: it may be more of a mystery than a real horror film, but it's a pretty good mystery, at that. If studio horror had to be put in cold storage for a few years, there could have been a much worse send-off than this: it's not perfect, but it's got enough atmosphere and well-drawn characters to fuel a good many of the tired low-budget genre flicks that popped up like weeds in the years following it.

Body Count: 3, but none of them are the ones who arguably deserve it the most.

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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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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, 1948: In which post-war existence is the subject of much concern and soul-wearyness

The caveat first: throughout this Hollywood Century project, I've been using a definition of "Hollywood' that limits us to films produced solely on money contributed by Los Angeles-based movie sturdios, or by independents working in the shadow of Hollywood. I'm now making a big exception for the first time, to accommodate 1948's The Search, a co-production between MGM (the most Hollywoodish of all Hollywood companies), and Praesens-Film of Zurich. A Swiss-American co-production shot mostly in Germany might be a dubious inclusion at best in a series like this, but I think it's justified on the grounds of what the film represents in a broader sense: how the American film industry sought to cope with the much smaller globe that had come out on the back side of World War II, and America's position as a newly-minted political and military leader, with a population of citizens who had in the recent past been unflaggingly isolationist (not to mention that, as time wore on, it became ever more clear that those citizens were much happier thinking about U.S. power and influence than in giving a damn about the people who lived in all those other countries for whom the U.S. claimed to be a leader).

It's one of the earliest attempts by any American film production company to work alongside a foreign studio, to take part in the great flowering of international cinema that was beginning to make itself felt in the post-war years, and to present to American audiences perspectives and stories that are explicitly European - not the Europeans who'd come to the States and absorbed themselves into the national culture there, retaining just enough of their native personalities for future film scholars to have fun teasing out the French and German and Hungarian and other influences on the films they made in a full naturalised idiom; the Europeans who'd stayed, to continue developing the cinema of Europe. And this consciousness of America's and American film's position within the world at large is reflected in the story of The Search itself, which is all about how the torn-apart slurry of Europe had to be redeemed by an international effort, with Americans throwing in with many other countries to under the damage of seven years of brutal fighting.

It is, in short, a film that finds the most lavish, indulgent company in Hollywood seeking for meaning somewhere in the ruins of the post-war world; Hollywood humbling itself in order to explore the role that America and Hollywood might play as time went by. And indeed, European-U.S. collaborations would become a great deal more common in the years to come, though typically in the form of U.S. film crews touristing their way through the photogenic places that continent made available, rather than following The Search and financing a predominantly native production looking to fuse the styles and impulses of American and continental movies.

For this is exactly what happens in The Search, from a script largely by Swiss writers Richard Schweizer and David Wechsler, with a largely Swiss crew, but with direction by Fred Zinnemann, who'd been in Hollywood for a decade at that point and was about to explode in prominence in the '50s. Though of Viennese extraction, Zinnemann was a fully assimilated filmmaker even by '48; while The Search possesses nowhere near volume of the sinewy, masculine sentimentality that marks virtually all of Zinnemann's prominent later films (including High Noon, From Here to Eternity, The Day of the Jackal, and the misbegotten film version of the musical Oklahoma!), it prefigures his impulse for giving the audience what we want, telegraphing emotional arcs maybe a little too bluntly and making it too clear that we are going to Feel Feelings. But it also prefigures the best of Zinnemann's visual sensibility; his keen sense of where to end the frame and how much distance at any moment to keep between the viewer and the character. And it showcases a skill with young actors exercised nowhere else in the director's career, but that puts us back on the European side of the equation; films about kids being generally a lot more important (and better) on the east side of the Atlantic than on the west.

The kid in question is Czechoslovakian Karel Malik (Ivan Jandl), who was separated from his family at Auschwitz, and was, as a result, thrown into a state of shock, able to remember nothing about himself including his name (we only know his identity thanks to a flashback). At the film's opening, he's one of many unaccompanied children dumped into the lap of Mrs. Murray (Aline MacMahon), a worker at a Germany UNRRA facilty - United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration - with some dim hope that at least some of them might be sorted into the right pile to be reconnected whatever survivors might be looking for them. The children, not understanding English, are terrified to be shuttled around one more large bureaucratic compound by people speaking in clipped, official tones, and the American workers aren't equipped to convince them that things are better now; eventually, Karel flees across country, picking his way through the ruins of Germany and eventually ending up in the company of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recruit "Steve" Stevenson (Montgomery Clift), who takes a shine to the boy, christens him "Jim", and starts to teach him English. While this is going on, Karel's mother (Jarmila Novotná) floats from one UNRRA site to another, never finding a trace of her boy, slowly giving up hope, till chance throws her into the arms of Murray, who encourages her to process her grief (Murrary inaccurately thinks she has proof that Karel died) by working to help the children who still remain displaced and hopeless.

The Search is trying to serve three masters: it wants to be documentary, tragedy, and crowd-pleaser all at once. It wishes to depict the fallen-down state of Europe and demonstrate the way that Americans could contribute to its resurrection; and it wants to do this through the story of a psychologically broken little boy suffering, until he very abruptly isn't thanks to his new buddy Steve. That it manages to do all of this is something of a minor miracle, and it would be unthinkable without Jandl in the central role of Karel. It is one of the great child performances in film, simply put: in a role upon which every other aspect of the film is based (Clift ended up jumping into stardom off the back of his performance here, but he'd be nothing without Jandl as the prism through which we see him), to a degree that the film wouldn't merely be ineffective, but completely dysfunctional without him, Jandl navigates the turn from his empty-eyed soullessness in the beginning to the cheery, but occasionally haunted way he plays things later on, without ever letting it seem too fast or too unmotivated - a critical triumph, since the screenplay hustles us through that transition awfully quickly and arbitrarily.

I suppose credit should get spread around a little: Clift in particular is absolutely fantastic, solid and happily free of the neurosis that would be his calling card as an actor in almost all of his other performances (and let's not mince words: I adore Clift and think he was one of the best, maybe the best young American actor of the '50s; but this role called upon a vastly different skill set than all his later triumphs, and it's too easy to read backwards and be amazed by how bright and pleasant and warm he is here). Most importantly, he makes the relationship between man and boy seem sweet and mutually necessary, selling what is ultimately a kind of dubious writerly conceit (I gather than the '40s were a different time, but how many twentysomething men do you know that would jump at the chance to be a surrogate father to a foundling?) so well that it never even seems to come up that we might question it.

But it's Jandl's film, with Zinnemann always gravely privileging his perspective, even when we already know more than he does; the young actor gets more than his share of close-ups and there are many angled shots that stress his smallness and inability to do much to protect himself in this damaged, dangerous world. Staging all the visuals of Germany in decay through the eyes and mind of a confused boy without a past was a masterstroke for all concerned; it underscores the total inscrutability and horror of the environment in a way that only a guileless protagonist could appreciate, divorced from any knowledge of how things got that way, only appalled that they did (this is not a movie that leaves much of an opening for any late-'40s viewer to silently grouse that the Germans got what they deserved, after all; the Germans are nowhere to be seen in The Search, only collateral damage perpetrated by both the Axis and the Allies). Zinnemann and cinematographer Emil Berna do fantastic work of capturing the physical spaces of the ruined cities and situating Jandl within those spaces to seem especially helpless and terrified; it's a stark contrast with the studio-bound interiors, which are more comforting and closer and lit much softer.

For ultimately, The Search isn't a desperately depressing movie (its most American touch): it is a hopeful one, in which good people doing there best can make things better and more comfortable for the displaced persons unable to fight for themselves. It's not propaganda, really, but it fixedly presents only the tenderest kind of behavior from the American saviors it scatters throughout the adventure, even those whose tenderness is completely misunderstood by Karel. In one moment, Karel is learning English words, and is convinced that the word for "deer" is "Bambi" - a sweet but also surprisingly clever and insightful example of how American pop culture presents itself to the world as harmless, light, loving fun. And that's what The Search wants to be as well: a depiction of America that says to Americans "this is who we can be, true do-gooders in a world badly in need of good", and says to world at large, "we want to help; let us do it", and in both cases acknowledging that it's a matter of hard work and will to actually serve as a protector and world leader, not a right. As themes built around American exceptionalism go, they really don't get any more sincere and humble than that, and constructed on top of such a sensitive, haunting character study, The Search proves to be humane and earnest without sacrificing a certain hardness and grim realism that keeps it from ever being sentimental or idiotically gooey. Two-thirds of a century after the moment it was addressing has passed, it's still a rich, rewarding movie of a sort that they don't make any more, because they never really did in the the first place.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1948
-Bud Abbott and Lou Costello only meet Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man in Universal's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
-The independent docudrama/noir hybrid He Walked by Night helps to invent the police procedural as we now think of it
-Orson Welles makes Macbeth with Republic, his last American film before a decade of artistic exile in Europe

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1948
-Italian neorealism explodes into an international significance with Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves
-Release the year before the Communist revolution buried it for nearly a half-decade, Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town is one of the most highly regarded Chinese films ever made
-Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes is the British duo's masterpiece and among the most indescribably beautiful films in the history of Technicolor

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1947: In which we are Very Serious about Important Topics

"Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Muslims,
And everybody hates the Jews."

-Tom Lehrer, "National Brotherhood Week"

Some years ago, Northwestern film professor and queer studies scholar Nick Davis* wrote an analysis of the 2009 Best Actress Oscar race that included one of those perfectly formed and winningly pithy critical phrases that stuck with me and bubbles up in my mind with rather stunning frequency: "[Sandra] Bullock is often the only thing standing between The Blind Side and complete, vile unwatchability." There are a lot of movies where that sentiment applies, far more than any of us would hope for, really; but since The Blind Side was a Best Picture nominee, and we're here to look at 1947's Best Picture winner, and so the taste and priorities of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are very much on my mind anyway, I think I shall now take the opportunity to steal and gently rework Davis's statement. To wit: Celeste Holme is often the only thing standing between Gentleman's Agreement and complete, vile unwatchability.

Gentleman's Agreement is a message movie, which is like calling ebola a disease: accurate, but not nearly vivid enough to describe the agonising extremes of . I suppose "vile" is overdoing it a little, but "unwatchable" is almost peerlessly appropriate: having now seen the film, for Christ knows what reason, three different times, my response has always been that I'd rather be doing almost anything with that 118 minutes, up to and including watching my television with the power off. More than anything, it's diabolically dull and somber to the point that it's almost worth laughing at it, except that Gregory Peck's incredibly serious expressions have the tendency to make laughter dry out and die. And this, unmistakably, is the kind of film Hollywood thinks it Should make; at least, it's the kind of film that Hollywood promotes in self-congratulatory ways as proof that the motion picture can be a noble way of teaching lessons and imparting morals to everyday folks, thereby taking off just enough pressure from watchdog groups to return to the business of making fast money on trashy potboilers (although Gentleman's Agreement was one of the year's biggest hits, so bang goes that theory).

It's about antisemitism; and in a twist that rather neatly mirrors its content, it exists because the most prominent gentile studio head of the era, Darryl F. Zanuck, was intensely eager to make it and felt that the Laura Z. Hobson's new novel and the period immediately after World War II had ended presented the perfect moment for it, with the recent discovery of the breadth and depravity of the Holocaust making it clear just how toxic antisemitism could become if left unchecked. The story follows a celebrated California journalist with the impeccably posh name of Philip Schuyler Green (Peck) who arrives in New York to take a job at one of the biggest liberal issues magazines going. The publisher, John Minify (Albert Dekker), wants him to write about antisemitism; and what possible angle could we take on such a well-trod subject, Phil wonders, till he chances onto the most obvious possible gimmick hard-hitting journalistic conceit; pose, himself, as a Jew for six months and soak up all the antisemitic abuse that a man named Philip Schuyler Green who looks and sounds like Gregory Peck (incidentally, I would pay solid money to hear Peck try to wrap his baritone around some Hebrew consonants) would never know of naturally. Virtually nobody knows his true identity: his mother (Anne Revere) and son Tommy (Dean Stockwell), of course, and Kathy Lacy (Dorothy Maguire), the Connecticut girl he fell for on his third day in New York. But to all of his co-workers and the world at large, he's just Phil Green, a real haimisher mensch. And Phil makes sure they know it, too, what with his intensely weird tendency of throwing statements like "simply because I'm Jewish myself" into the middle of conversations where very few human beings in the annals of recorded history would use them. And does he encounter antisemitism? Boy, and how!

The only thing that's more intensely irritating than how baldly Gentleman's Agreement vocalises its themes in clumsily anti-natural dialogue is how delightfully it stacks the deck; in this film's universe, virtually every human being other than Phil himself hates Jews, including the Jews themselves. We know from history that even in the depths of Nazi Germany itself, there were goyim willing to risk their lives and their family's to protect fugitive Jews; this small population of genuinely sympathetic, decent people was apparently not to be found in such a metropolis as New York City, where even the most dedicated, socially responsible liberals are prone to spouting off with grossly ill-informed opinions and accidentally track in the odd racial slur. But not Phil! He is a paragon of stability and grim-faced sincerity, as we know when the opening scene that finds him and Tommy admiring a statue of Atlas, the Titan supporting the entire world on his shoulders, which Tommy adroitly notes is just like what Daddy does. Because if Gentleman's Agreement finds an opportunity to put flatly thematic statements of purpose into the mouths of its character, by God it will take all of them. This is a script that sees fit to require one of its chastened characters to passionately rant, about the racism that has crept even into the publishing offices of the liberal magazine, "Well, there just isn't anything bigger than beating down the complacence of essentially decent people about prejudice! Yessir, I'm ashamed of myself." Screenwriter Moss Hart was primarily a comic playwright, collaborating with George S. Kaufman on pieces You Can't Take it With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, so maybe he thought it was funny. It should be funny, frankly.

There's not a smackeral of non-ironic mirth to be found anywhere, something Kathy tries to point out multiple times in scenes that I believe are meant to showcase that she's shallow and running from the Brutal Truth that Phil so earnestly plumbs, though frankly, for all that Maguire is an impossible wet blanket whose performance is mostly just an exercise in looking befuddled and unhappy with her jaw hanging open in the oddest way, I'm going to have to concede those scenes to her entirely. Peck is stuck in one gear throughout the film, and it's the most fucking tedious thing: granite respectability and bottomless integrity, dimly like his future iconic role as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird with all of the warmth and humility drained out to leave just the statuesque father-knows-best shtick which, in this case, feels downright bullying. He's smug and boringly self-righteous, with absolutely no minute scrap of shading that might make the character even a little complex or interesting. There's no apparent awareness that he could, at any minute, reveal that he's not a Jew, with the tension of how much bigotry Phil can withstand (not much: the six months silently turn into eight weeks) before caving adding some level of tension and awareness that real Jews don't have that out. In fact, his absolute best friend, Dave Goldman (John Garfield) - because there was no way this story was going to avoid giving Phil a Jewish BFF - seems to very invisible kill this possibility when sagely noting that, if anything, Phil is trying to experience too much antisemitism all at once, more than proper Jews do, even. And there's even less of a possibility that Phil perceives, or even suspects, that there's some scrap of bigotry within himself; keeping the story's morality clear, no doubt, while stripping it of a chance for any kind of drama beyond the "Phil angrily declaims sociology at Kathy, scene after scene" structure that the film in its completed form possesses.

It's worth noting that the director, Elia Kazan, would later distance himself from the film, which even he admitted with dry and dull, and he would claim that Peck's performance didn't work; the latter is just kind of a catty thing to say, but he's completely right of course, and while I run more cool than hot on later Kazan, there's complicated, vibrant humanity in most of the performances he directed than anything we ever see here. Even in his later, still more broken fake racism story Pinky (where a white actress plays a black woman pretending to be white), the place has a heaving, visual tactility about it (Gentleman's Agreement is plagued by a cavalcade of nondescript residential interiors that the gifted Arthur C. Miller can make look smoothly attractive, though he is hard-pressed to do anything more; there are a couple of scenes where the staging has some creative depth to it, but these moments are fleeting), and the characters at least seem like they have passions. Not so in Gentleman's Agreement, where everything is at the same stoic, turgid level, where everyone is just as pinioned by one-track characterisations as in that future Oscar-winning tub-thumper about how racism is bad and everyone is racist, Crash.

Except for Celeste Holm! Rightfully winning an Oscar for her efforts, she plays a colleague of Phil's at the magazine, a bubbling life force of sarcasm and barely sublimated sexual energy (let us suffice to say that she obviously loves the though of men in just their pajamas) that covers up for a deeply sublimated sense of romanticism that's beautifully and wrenchingly teased out in her final scene. She's a lifesaver in the midst of yawning averageness and stubborn mediocrity, but she's also giving a real performance too, not just just an act of triage. It's genuinely one of the best turns in Holm's underappreciated career as a top-notch supporting actress, spiky with enough sadness to give it weight, and a skill at delivering lacerating barbs with as much knowing nastiness as anybody. Structurally, she's the film's much-needed comic relief; but functionally, she's the even more necessary human relief, a beating heart in the midst of all the deeply sincere and earnest mannequins populating the movie.

Now, compensating for all the ways in which the film is kind of fucking dreadful, it's incontestably a valuable and important and brave piece of political commentary. 1947 was, after all, the ideal year to start having That Conversation; Zanuck's instincts were dead on. And Gentleman's Agreement certainly got that conversation going; it's confrontational and direct and merciless and gives its audience no way out: do you support this toxicity, or do you abjure it; do you fight for a more just worldm or slink away and give in to the one that exists now? It couldn't do any of those things if it was remotely subtle or artful, and the fact that it's a grueling slog through two hours of condescending lectures shaped into something that pretends to be a story should be tempered by admitting that it wasn't really looking to be entertaining in any quantifiable way in the first place. It's a Moral Lesson; an effective one, given the context.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, behind Edward Dmytryk's film noir Crossfire, it was the second-best message movie about antisemitism nominated for the 1947 Best Picture Oscar. Can't hardly do better than that!

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1947
-Robert Montgomery directs and stars in Lady in the Lake, an MGM film noir with the odd gimmick of being entirely first-person
-In the midst of his embroilment in accusations of Communist sympathies, Charles Chaplin releases Monsieur Verdoux, his first major flop
-Walt Disney voices Mickey Mouse for the last time in Fun and Fancy Free and the short Mickey's Delayed Date

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1947
-Luis Buñuel directs Gran Casino, his first Mexican production
-Henri-Georges Clouzot is freed from a ban on filmmaking, and makes the crime thriller Quai des Orfèvres in France
-Ivan Ivanov-Vano directs The Humpbacked Horse at Soyuzmultfilm, the first feature-length animated film made in the Soviet Union

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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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