All Night Long (1962)

☆ ☆ ☆

All Night Long (1962) – B. Dearden

British director Basil Dearden shot this “modern” retelling of Othello in a one room set for the jazz set.  It’s a big London warehouse with a couple of side rooms where an all night party (featuring Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and others) is happening.  The party is in honor of Rex and Delia, a jazz pianist and singer, respectively.  She has halted her career because he wanted her to and his controlling nature allows the film’s Iago, drummer Johnny Cousins (played with an odd American accent by Patrick McGoohan), to set the couple against each other, with the aid of not too bright sax player, Cass.  The camera whirls around the party, following different players when necessary (usually tracing Johnny’s steps as he hatches his plan to get Delia to join his band), all the while observing the swinging jazz gig that is also punctuating the soundtrack.  The B&W cinematography is all high contrast and almost noirish at times.  McGoohan excels at pathetic but the plot machinations are a little too overt and one wonders why he doesn’t get exposed earlier. A few surely controversial elements (pot-smoking, inter-racial relationships) are treated as non-issues. Yet in the end, the whole thing feels suspended in amber, not quite authentic, not quite artificial, not quite present, not quite past.  

Mystery Street (1950)

☆ ☆ ☆

Mystery Street (1950) – J. Sturges

Solid police procedural (shot with noir lighting by John Alton) starring Ricardo Montalban as a Cape Cod detective who needs the help of a forensic scientist from Harvard when a skeleton turns up on the beach.  Of course, we already know who the victim is (a local “B” girl) – and some of her scuzzy wrongdoings that have ensnared Marshall Thompson (as the typical noir fall guy plucked by the fickle finger of fate).  Playing like a long lost episode of C. S. I., the film relies heavily on the forensic evidence (hair, bones, bullet fragments) as well as a bit of legwork and luck.  Elsa Lanchester has a good turn as a shifty rooming house owner.  Very nicely paced throughout and worth a look for mystery aficionados. 

Enemy (2013)

☆ ☆ ☆

Enemy (2013) – D. Villeneuve

History professor Jake Gyllenhaal sees a local film where an extra bears a strikingly similar (OK, identical) resemblance to him and decides to find that man (played by Jake Gyllenhaal).   I’m tempted to call this The Two Jakes…but I won’t; instead, they are Adam and his double, Anthony.  Although Adam is somewhat insecure and detached, Anthony is more assertive and aggressive.  Once they make contact, Adam is threatened and begins to fall apart.  Still, when Anthony attempts to steal his girlfriend, Adam finds himself drawn to Anthony’s pregnant wife.  Gyllenhaal does a solid job playing the two characters so they are distinguished only subtly rather than broadly.  The director, Denis Villeneuve, who made the topical thriller Incendies (2010), seems here to be deliberately trying to create a sense of foreboding and confusion (and the movie’s color scheme – yellow -- and Orwellian buildings of Toronto bear this out).  I’m not sure I was able to fully identify with the horror felt by Adam at finding his double nor “catch on” that he perceives Anthony to be his Jungian shadow (a reflection of his darker unconscious and sexual impulses, which seems plausible in retrospect).  And then, giant spiders.

Topper (1937)

☆ ☆ ☆

Topper (1937) – N. Z. McLeod

Cary Grant and Constance Bennett are killed in a car accident and become ghosts.  For their “good deed” (in order to get into heaven, one surmises), they decide to help an uptight old banker and his wife loosen up.  Since it’s the thirties, Grant and Bennett are the party all night types and the film has aspirations of screwballsiness.  However, it never quite takes full flight (although the scene in the Seabreeze Hotel with Eugene Pallette as the house detective very nearly gets off the runway).  Somehow, the gimmick of the ghosts being invisible holds things back (even though it is the origin of some of the funnier bits) – objects floating in the air just aren’t that humorous after the first few times.  But Bennett and Grant are especially good and Roland Young plays the banker as all spluttering reaction shots.  Not bad but not up there with the best comedies of this era.

  

Tension (1949)

☆ ☆ ☆

Tension (1949) – J. Berry

Richard Basehart is the poor sap married to unscrupulous tough gal Audrey Topper.  She fools around while he works his night job as a pharmacist and she has no interest in his dreams of a house in the suburbs.  In fact, eventually she leaves him for a cashed up liquor salesman in a fancy car.  Well, this makes Basehart want to get even and he even develops a plan to murder the rich bastard.  First, he gets some contact lenses (huge and hard) and he changes the way he dresses.  Then, he rents himself a new apartment and introduces himself to everyone using an alias.  Of course, he meets a new love (Cyd Charisse) during this time.  Still, he intends to go through with the murder until he gets there and realizes its pointless.  Except someone else subsequently does kill the liquor salesman and then Basehart is the number one suspect.  And his wife returns, making things worse.  The whole thing is narrated by a savvy homicide detective (Barry Sullivan) who explains how he breaks suspects by applying tension to them.  Indeed, he gets right into the plot, even leading Totter to believe that he loves her and will take her to Acapulco.  So much for ethics…but this is film noir.

  

Proxy War (1973)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Proxy War (1973) – K. Fukasaku

This third installment in Kinji Fukasaku’s Yakuza Papers series seems to take up where the first film (Battles without Honor & Humanity) left off, with barely an acknowledgement of the second film (Deadly Fight in Hiroshima).  Maybe that’s because many or most of the characters in the second film were dead by the end.  Or perhaps the filmmakers wisely chose to place the cool Bunta Sugawara (playing Shozo Hirono again) at the center of the action – he’s charismatic and his own man, despite declaring loyalty to his former boss the grovelling and untrustworthy Yamamori yet again.  Indeed, no one really can be trusted in the yakuza world and there are plenty of double (and maybe triple) crosses here.  In fact, as with the other two films that preceded it, most viewers of Proxy War will be hard pressed to keep the players straight.  Suffice it to say that the Muraoka family merges with the Yamamori family but the Akashi family still dominates the Hiroshima scene – it looks like there isn’t room for everybody and a battle begins.  However, it must take place in the next film.  So Proxy War is something of a transition piece, but it still has lots of style (and lots of blood) to keep viewers engaged.

Act of Violence (1948)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Act of Violence (1948) – F. Zinnemann

Superior noir that grapples with blame, shame, and existential angst while still functioning as a solid thriller.  Robert Ryan (one of the all-time great heavies) is stalking Van Heflin, a successful builder, with the aim of killing him.  Everywhere you look there are shadows and darkness (as a result of omnipresent low-key lighting design).  Heflin doesn’t immediately let on why this is happening to his wife (impossibly young Janet Leigh) but eventually we discover that he betrayed his own men in a Nazi POW camp and Ryan is one of the few survivors who has finally tracked him down.  Although Heflin’s dedicated himself to doing good for his community, Ryan doesn’t let him off the hook and Heflin can’t forgive himself either. Things take a few dark turns when Heflin runs into the night and into a tired scamming Mary Astor who leads him to a shady lawyer and hit-man.  As you can tell, many of the generic elements of film noir are in full flourish here. And, of course, it doesn’t end well.