Being thoughts on post-war noir from Japan, the States, and Britain:
APPOINTMENT WITH CRIME ・ UK ・ 1946
William Hartnell is the moodiest son of a bitch of any lead character ever, and does it well; you’ll end up rooting for his belligerent psycho before things are through. Picking up a cockney dancehall girl along the way, as an alibi first, then as a sweetheart, he kisses a bible and his soul goodbye as he swears to her he never done the murder he’s said to have done.
The bible gets dumped on the floor in the very next instant when a car pulls up outside. He’s straight out the back while Joyce Howard is visited by alert cop Robert Beatty, who gets her to confront her delusion about her squeeze pretty much straight away.
She’s left crying while the cop runs off to go to the next place, where he’ll also wait on the set for his turn to run into the scene as soon as Hartnell has left it.
Joyce Howard crying in her flat is the only view in this film of a woman alone, but it’s still a man’s view of a woman.
When Hartnell goes to a dancehall girls dressing room we don’t see the interior of that female domain, we only see him with his back to the door, calling through it for his girl. Through a closed door.
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE ・ US ・ 1946
Cecil Hathaway is the most terrible masochist stuck in his marriage with hot Lana Turner - who said from the outset she never loved him - just wanted the security of being with a man who’s got his own burger joint.
Cecil’s in a hell already, and for it he knowingly runs out to grab at and thrust drifter John Garfield into the middle of this grim set-up. Only a complete trusting idiot wouldn’t see how close to fucking are John and Lana when he forces them to dance to his jukebox right in front of him. Cecil is desperate for John to get stuck into his wife and everything he gets for it is everything he asks for.
OUT OF THE PAST (BUILD MY GALLOWS HIGH) ・ US ・ 1947
If Richard Webb were a decent cop he’d hang around and wonder at the foreboding oozing out of bad-sort out-of-towner Paul Valentine - just arrived and earwigging in the background with his dark smirk on.
Webb’s so tired out from laying awake at night while he imagines gas station owner Robert Mitchum boffing his childhood sweetheart that it’s all he can think of.
The idea of food as a lump of fuel is a decent one. There’s not really another way to describe what gets made in that café. Richard Webb isn’t much impressed with his lousy sandwich either, and walks straight out with one triangle, leaving the other half as a snub to the gossipy waitress.
THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE (I WAS A CRIMINAL) ・ UK ・ 1947
A bunch of coffin bearers take their load into the back of a funeral parlour and one of them knocks on the rear-office door and announces, “It’s Soapy, and me, and Bert, and Curly.” It’s a big gang of rubber-face Brit character actors that’ll multiply as the film goes on.
One of the crooks is Cyril Smith. Later you see him have to wait inside a coffin to jump out on someone. Fags being the day’s only time wasting pocket gadget, Cyril in his coffin must have been gagging for a puff while he waits for RAF man gone bad Trevor Howard to show up.
Howard is victim to some of the worst emasculation concoctable. Set-up and sent-down for a cop kill not his own, and served up by Griffith Jones, the very bastard who then moves in on Howard’s girl while he’s slammed-up, and leaving Howard after his bust-out to fall into the company of Jones’s rejected issue-ridden sloppy seconds chorus-girl Sally Gray.
A tough trip to the flicks for Cyril’s family, to be left thinking about him cooped up in his wooden overcoat. His eventual and magnificent bust-out from the coffin isn’t what you’ll expect, ejecting him as it does into the most spacially specific of filmic dust-ups.
ACT OF VIOLENCE ・ US ・ 1948
It’s like a devilish machine that’s been running a long time, beyond anyone’s control – beyond everyone’s wishes for revenge, or escape, or justice, or survival – all set in motion a long time ago. As inescapable as Van Heflin’s hell-hole of a mind, as inescapable as the delirium that sees him mindlessly running through a rundown part of LA, lost, off his nut, shouting in empty tunnels at his demons, and then falling into the hands of a money-grubbing washed-up dame and crook lawyer who take advantage of the story he lays on them.
Sleazy crook Berry Kroeger hears everything said in the back room conversation, through the closed door, while in an after-hours illegal drinking joint, which isn’t empty.
He hears the whole story of Van Heflin’s dark past come to catch up with him - embodied in the steely-faced, foot-dragging menace of Robert Ryan, intent on doing Heflin deadly harm for it.
In comparison to the horror of Van Heflin’s path in the world, Kroeger’s efforts to claw a way through the muck of life appear positively innocent.
DRUNKEN ANGEL (酔いどれ天使) ・ JP ・ 1948
A bubbling typhoid ridden swampy bomb-pit in the middle of a neighbourhood somewhere in Tokyo. A thinly veiled metaphor for the rot, not just of Toshiro Mifune as the Yakuza with tuberculorised lungs, but also the stench taking a hold of Japanese society in its post-war re-build.
As the days pass so does the amount of filth cluttering up the fetid puddle, just like a gangster’s soul, just like Japan’s.
When Mifune’s doctor, Takashi Shimura, takes one of his grumpy strolls around the hood, a female voice on loudspeaker echoes railway banalities around the town. Anyone who knows modern Japan will know the ubiquity and tolerance for it. How soon after electricity did it begin?
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER ・ UK ・ 1948
When an animal shows up in a movie everyone else slips off the screen, and it can throw you out of the picture - into thoughts of the real animal, not the character of the animal we’re supposed to be believing in.
The wandering hunstman’s companion in My Brother’s Keeper gets most of his on-screen time to himself. When on-the-run Jack Warner bludgeons the hapless man, the dog performs a perfect slow approach to his master’s fallen body.
In My Brother’s Keeper we are witness to the parallel chase, of handcuffed duo Warner and man-child George Cole keeping ahead of the law, and of the newspaper man David Tomlinson on his honeymoon with Yvonne Owen - roped into pursuing the story by an ignorant editor-in-chief.
It is in this seemingly irrelevant sub-plot of the journo we’re liberated from our modern day expectations of seeing Tomlinson felling a swoop on the story, or of the exercise somehow wrecking the new marriage along the way. They exist here as paragons of another type of life lived well.
Yvonne Owen is perfectly accommodating to the disruption in the romantic ideal of the newlyweds getaway to the countryside. She understands real romance. She is exactly the kind of woman you’d want to marry, refusing to offer the default display of self-righteous indignation that stinks up and makes most modern drama unwatchable.
STRAY DOG (野良犬) ・ JP ・ 1949
At the baseball stadium a woman’s voice announces “Time for the seventh-inning stretch” and everyone gets up and obeys. After the disgrace of the second world war you might think that the nation’s people would be sick of being pushed around and told how to act and when. But then who doesn’t like a good stretch?
Kids will drink juice that had a cockroach in it after it gets taken out. If someone stepped on their pillow with their outdoors shoes on then they would happily sleep with their face on it.
Bobby Driscoll doesn’t even know his pillow got stepped on, when he went out onto his fire escape with it, in the heat of the night, to sleep up there and cool down. When he wakes up and sees a murder through the window crack of the upstairs apartment he slinks off and leaves his forgotten pillow.
Bobby won’t know his pillow got trodden on when the murderer upstairs goes out the window to lug the body up on the roof. The murderer doesn’t see the pillow, nor does he see Bobby when the lad later comes to get it back.
We’ll be thinking about it, even the next day, when his parents won’t believe a word of his tale, we’ll be waiting for Bobby to look at the footprints on his pillow, so he can show them he’s telling some kind of truth.
Bobby doesn’t see a footprint, nor even know to be looking for one, and his mother won’t when she washes it. But we know, because we grown ups wouldn’t drink the juice after the roach is out, with our overdeveloped horror of contamination, and an inability to stop thinking about a trodden on pillow.
OBSESSION (THE HIDDEN ROOM) ・ UK ・ 1949
When American Phil Brown is taken back to posh Sally Gray’s big house after a night out on the town he’ll think his luck is in as he shuffles through a stack of unsleeved 78s.
Are those records smashed up and ruined now, or are they sitting in someone’s collection, and do those owners know they were filmed in 1949 as belonging to Robert Newton?
Newton is thought by wife Gray to be on holiday. He’s not. He’s lurking in the dark corner as young lovers Gray and Brown frolic to his records. It’s Brown who’s going to get the worst of doc Newton’s once-too-often cuckolded retaliation; a meticulously planned response, doled out with such even temper that it’s only the horror of the following events that portray the man’s fury - a response that before the night’s end will have Brown led to the cellar of a bombed-out wreck, to there spend his next few months chained up to a wall.
Pretty soon you’ll be working out ways of your own that Brown could have used to escape his keeper. Is the true horror not the captivity, but instead that if it were you stuck there that you might come up with exactly no good ways to wriggle out of it, that your ingenuity and guile wouldn’t be up to the job - and then realising it to be so, that you’d acquiesce totally and give in to your new life controller.
THE ASPHALT JUNGLE ・ US ・ 1950
Hooligan-for-hire Sterling Hayden stands outside his apartment and calls back Jean Hagen as she departs for her new place. She’s been stopped over a few days while Sterling took to his sofa. Some men with low self-respect will try and make a lay out of any woman they can to make up for it. Others like Hayden punish themselves with total abstinence.
He’s the farm-boy turned bad, lost his family and his farm and now treads a path in the city, through a world of smalltime stick-ups and back-room gambling dens. He’s so far lost in thoughts of someday getting back to that old life he can barely see the day he’s living in.
He stands there and asks for her address, just in case he might need to get hold of her, and then watches her leave. She doesn’t ask to stay and be his dame, but there’s not a part of her act that’s not asking for it. You might for a moment think he’s letting her go because he’s got her pegged as some kind of flake, but that’s not it.
NIGHT AND THE CITY ・ UK ・ 1950
Richard Widmark splashes his way through dank backstreets of dingy post-war London with the figure of some out-of-pocket toady on his heels. He leaves the tail out in the street while he goes up to the flat of long-suffering Gene Tierney, straight in with his shoes still on, to there have a root in her purse for some dough. Catching him in the act, Tierney isn’t best pleased. When fast-talker Widmark sees he’s not getting a single pound out of her he gets a terrible sulk-on.
His loud outfit and spats shoes tell you all you need about this ex-pat loser, always just one more smart idea from making it big - and when Tierney falls into pity and shoves a photo of the two of them in his face - of better days, carefree in a rowing boat - and when you see he still has the hump - in the first five minutes you’ve been told this might not turn out so well.
It’s the ones that do the murders that get the stickiest ends. And Widmark just doesn’t seem the type, so maybe, just maybe, there’ll be some redemption for him as he wades through a cavalcade of lowlifes on his steady slip down the greasy drain.
If a character survives a film you can find out how long they lived by looking at the actor’s biography. Noriko Sengoku passed away, aged 90 in the same month I saw this in 2012.
In 1950 she takes a break from being artist Toshiro Mifune’s model and gets a fright when downbeat lawyer Takashi Shimura pokes his ugly fizzog up against a broken window pane in Mifune’s rundown studio.
Many weeks later Shimura again pokes his gurning head at the still unfixed window pane. The chill winter winds blast through it into the already hopelessly unheatable cavernous abode. It’s maddening that Mifune, prone to using nudes, hasn’t even bothered a botch-job on the gusty view-hole.
ANOTHER MAN'S POISON ・ UK ・ 1951
With her estranged husband back in town and promptly murdered off, writer Bette Davis sets about getting her talons clawed tighter into firm-jawed younger man Anthony Steel. She’s been luring Steel out over the moors for mossy rumpy-pumpy while his fiance sits in Davis’s study monotonously banging her employer’s novel through a typewriter.
Into this comes Gary Merrill, the shady cohort from her husband’s past, come out of the fog to blackmail Davis into taking him on as imposter spouse, and to get him out of a fix involving a shot cop back in the states.
Her sordid pull on men soon has Merrill hitting the bottle, jealous about his fake wife’s young philanderer.
He’s not so oblivious as secretary Barbara Murray to the worst in people, and his eyes for seeing through Davis’s crap are soon opened on the younger woman too.
Even though she knows Steel has been copping off with the deceitful old cow, Murray still wants him. She calls it love but right now she’s confusing it with being the loser.
By rumbling Davis, tossing her engagement ring at her, and turning tail into the night, she gets the upper hand. Steel may have liked the carnal knowledge of the older woman on the side, but that’s not what he wants if it’s the only thing left on the table, and maybe it is.
TOKYO FILE 212 ・ US ・ 1951
It’s hard to figure out what Lee Frederick is really doing in Japan. It’s only in the closing scenes you start to make sense of this perplexing tale, not through any real complexity, but through hardly bothering to pay attention. About halfway in Frederick tries to navigate what food he’s being offered is going to poison him to death or not and it won’t much bother you either way.
The best of the locales is a heartily raucous underground bar, scene to a goblin kingdom singalong; off-limits to the occupiers, and scattered with rough girls dancing on tables, working-class roughs, back alley roughs, and real-deal tattooed yaks. A death silence falls over the drunken horde when Frederick waltzes in with foreign bit Florence Marly. It’s hard to remember how they know each other.
Marly is an Eastern European suffering from chronic illeism. She’s the safer exotic for the lead to be cavorting with so soon after the war. She might be a red devil working for North Korean commies, but at least she’s white.
KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (THE SECRET FOUR) ・ US ・ 1952
Ex-cop Preston Foster is on a fishing trip down Mexico way. He’s arranged for 3 crooks he did a job with back in Kansas to turn up for their cut of the dough.
After the bank robbery the stupid cop giving details over the police radio includes masks in the description of the sought men. But actually he’s right, as each was given a snappy felt square to cover their faces, and then ordered not to take them off the whole time they are together, in case of any squealers should anyone get caught.
Foster is Mr. Big on the job, he knows each of the men, but they don’t know him nor each other. It’s really not hard for them to start to figure out who is who as the shifty creeps Lee Van Cleef and Nevile Brand turn up for their faux holidays.
At exactly the wrong time, Foster’s cute daughter Coleen Gray also hits the tiny resort, surprising her old man on a break from preparing for her bar exam. Foster tells her to get packing but she says she’s going to spend the week there studying her books, and besides, she likes the cut of the fella she flew in on the plane with. When she gives the name of Jack Elam her old man is gobsmacked.
Jack Elam, with a character described earlier as, “A real sucker for a crap game. Kind of dark and real weird eyes. You won’t have any trouble finding him by the cigarettes he smokes, just look for the chain.” And him also being the last of Foster’s motley hoods to arrive. Foster’s trying to process the thought of fidgety three-time-loser, cop-killing Elam leching over his precious clean-cut daughter, and trying desperately not to.
HUNTED (THE STRANGER IN BETWEEN) ・ UK ・ 1952
Runty 7-year old Jon Whitely is just about the most adorable creature ever put on film. When they asked him to be in Hunted I’d like to know how they sold it to him. How they sold the idea of being yelled at in the face by Dirk Bogarde, and to then be dragged around by the arm at the full-pace of a grown man on the run; of being chucked into shadowy doorways and thrown in holes. When did they tell him of being shoved over in a hard courtyard by bigger boys, of having to haul himself through muddy moors, or of being soaked through in the middle of the night?
THE HITCH-HIKER ・ US ・ 1953
Rolling down through a Mexican party town, Frank Lovejoy Jr. feigns sleep so fishing trip chum Edmond O’Brien won’t try and convince him to stop off and get plastered in front of fan-dancing dames.
If Lovejoy were a younger man, and un-jaded by hedonism, he’d never know that the right choice turns out to be exactly the wrong choice when out on the lonely highway they stop to pick up hitching maniac William Talman. With the two of them under armed guard for a days long stick-up, there’s plenty of times you are in their shoes and grabbing for his gun or tossing hot soup on his distracted mug.
It’s being two that stops them trying - and having survived a war, knowing the futility of seeing a death back across the pond, the horror of seeing their buddy gunned down in a botched grab for freedom.
You’ll be reading the runes of how they cope during their desert trip, reading for signs about which of the two is being set up for a sacrifice. Lovejoy was quieter. A family man, that’s in his stead. Back at the start O’Brien was doing the talking and the driving, so it was him we lumped for. Who’s going to crack first, have his life thrown away so the other will be vindicated in his life-taking retribution?
COSH BOY (THE TOUGH GUY)(THE SLASHER) ・ UK ・ 1953
Cosh Boy James Kenney is the early clockwork orange, the remorselessly evil post-war delinquent. There is no demonic possession to explain how these boys turn into the kind of heartless monster like Kenney, who goes after his pal’s pretty teen sister Joan Collins, and then doesn’t give a damn when she’s up the duff by him, or even that she tries to drown herself in the river because of it.
If there’s any explanation at all, for how this crooked old-woman head-cosher turned out, then it’s a broke but spoiling mum and an absent war-dead dad. There is no hope of redemption for Kenney, only a 10-minute beating at the hands of his new step-dad when the cops come for the boy in the wake of a bungled heist.
They happily turn a blind eye, going for a walk round the block while his mum and gran listen to his screaming through the wall to their bedroom. It’s for the beating that the judge might cut Kenney’s stretch down, now that there’s proof the home has a stern patriarch who can flog the kid mercilessly but lawfully, in a way the establishment wishes it could too.
