Lost in the Movies: noir

Showing posts with label noir. Show all posts

Melodrama, Crime, Fantasy, and War: 17 Classic Capsules (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #45) - brief reflections on Ah, Wilderness!, A Letter to Three Wives, Invitation, Morning Glory, Parnell, Little Caesar, Dick Tracy, Nightmare Alley, Gilda, The Woman in White, It Came From Outer Space, Pinocchio, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Enchanted Cottage, The White Cliffs of Dover, The Fallen Sparrow & The Angel Wore Red

This podcast season of "Hollywood Classics" reaches a crescendo as I pack over a dozen "capsules" from my Patreon into one episode. Some of these reflections run close to half the length of a normal review while others are just over a minute. As such, they range from tight but comprehensive overviews of a film to very quick riffs on a single element of an otherwise undiscussed movie. Topics include The Angel Wore Red's and The Fallen Sparrow's interpretations of the Spanish Civil War, Little Caesar's spot on the very cusp of the gangster genre, colorful side characters in The Woman in White, the way that everyday forties life is depicted in productions ranging from A Letter to Three Wives to an early version of Dick Tracy, the ability of Hollywood to capture current events alongside more escapist elements in films like The Enchanted Cottage, The White Cliffs of Dover's sympathies with British aristocracy from a down-to-earth American perspective, The Devil and Daniel Webster as a rare cinematic look at New Hampshire, and Pinocchio's proto-Disneyland quality (an idea I've also explored as a visual tribute). Stars like Katharine Hepburn (Morning Glory), Clark Gable (Parnell), and Rita Hayworth (Gilda, of course) appear throughout, and connections casual and arresting alike are made between several of these titles and Twin Peaks itself; for example, It Came From Outer Space anticipates the woodsmen of The Return in a similar location and situation. These topics are organized roughly along a snaking line of occasionally interconnected genres, including poignant melodramas like Invitation (in which a woman realizes her husband may not really love her) to noirish crime pictures like Nightmare Alley (in which a carnival mentalist rises to high society charlatan but risks falling to sideshow geek). Eventually a wide range of fantastical topics - sci-fi, fairy tales, supernatural allegories - bleed into meditations on the legacies of mid-twentieth century wars.

One of the longer discussions, which kicks off the episode, focuses on the many charms of Ah, Wilderness!, a 1935 adaptation of Eugene O'Neil's play set in a 1906 New England town. In addition to leading off from the last couple months of Lost in the Movies subjects - the similarly comic Swing Time and Monkey Business - this bemused but still sincere portrait allows for an obvious comparison to (and contrast with) Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Since I covered that less comedic, more ethereal tribute to small town Americana at the turn of the century in my Twin Peaks Cinema podcast (alongside other underbelly-of-the-pastoral tales Peyton Place and Kings Row), I was eager to tease out those connections as well as exploring how later decades remembered this earlier, ostensibly more innocent zeitgeist.

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tfw you glimpse where your son’s vaguely uplifting graduation speech is about to go pic.twitter.com/hHrLaflDW8
— Joel Bocko (@LostInTheMovies) August 20, 2019

THE LINE-UP

(added in the afternoon)

The title of this summer season, "Ray's Haunted Fifties," evokes Rebel Without a Cause probably more than any other film. This is by far Nicholas Ray's most famous work, so famous indeed that it transcends his own reputation as a director to become an indelible piece of American pop culture mythology. If all of the director's films are haunted, Rebel feels particularly so given not just its own wounded characters but the tragically young deaths of all three leads, most famously James Dean himself (the star died, still in his twenties, before the movie was even released). And if you were to select a handful of Hollywood classics to represent the fifties, Rebel would be up there; it defines our image of that decade to the present day as surely as Elvis Presley records on the jukebox, Leave it to Beaver episodes on the black-and-white living room set, or posters of Marilyn Monroe below movie theater marquees. That aspect of Rebel - the almost intuitively iconographic - is what first leaps to mind when connecting it to Twin Peaks, which calls back several decades (to Lynch's own childhood) for its touchstones of teen culture. James Hurley is obviously derivative, as is Bobby Briggs in his own way, and the way the adolescent characters congregate with one another to take refuge from and figure out the adult world is quite reminiscent of Rebel's second half in particular. All of that occurs in the pilot and much of it is lost as the series progresses and loses touch with its high school roots. But Fire Walk With Me indicates deeper, richer thematic connections to Rebel Without a Cause, linking Laura Palmer to James Dean and Natalie Wood alike - both the characters they play, and the actors themselves.

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Just as my Lost in the Movies podcast recently kicked off a six-month season devoted to Hollywood classics, Twin Peaks Cinema is going to explore a similar terrain through an auteurist lens in a more focused period - I'm calling this miniseries of three podcasts "Ray's Haunted Fifties." I'm not sure I've ever heard David Lynch speak about Nicholas Ray as a particular aesthetic or thematic touchstones although Rebel Without a Cause is all over the Twin Peaks pilot and many have observed the connections between Fire Walk With Me and Bigger Than Life. On Dangerous Ground emerges from earlier in the decade, its gritty black-and-white noir milieu closer to our popular cinematic conception of the forties than the fifties, with its gritty black-and-white noir milieu. Indeed, much of the movie unfolds in an urban landscape quite far from Peaks but when the cynical police officer Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is dispatched to a rural crime scene, connections begin to reveal themselves. Before exploring those links, I read a full review of the film that I wrote over ten years ago to establish the story and flesh out the mood. In the discussion which follows, we tease out Jungian concepts that relate as much to Mark Frost's vision of Peaks as Lynch's, while observing the dynamic between Wilson and the blind hermit Mary Malden (Ida Lupino) in light of Cooper and Laura. I also discovered a fascinating dispersion of Leland Palmer's personal qualities between the young, mentally ill perpetrator of the crime (Sumner Williams) and the ferocious patriarch (Ward Bond) who seeks vengeance against his daughter's killer. In the heat of July, the new season of Twin Peaks Cinema finds its footing on a thick blanket of snow...

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As I plan to focus on a handful of major projects in 2022, I will probably be scaling back my main Patreon podcast somewhat. February will be the last month (at least for a little while) for the "Twin Peaks Cinema" approach as well as the "Twin Peaks Reflections" on characters, locations, and storyline connections. However, January also represents something of a milestone for me. Since I actually pre-recorded the February film a long time ago, my choice for January - Nicholas Ray's fifties noir On Dangerous Ground - was the last new "Twin Peaks Cinema" I recorded, wrapping up a project begun in mid-2019. (The public Twin Peaks Cinema podcast will of course continue every month, pulling from the Patreon archive.) On Dangerous Ground completes a trilogy of Ray/Peaks connections and its city vs. country theme also reflects the book I discussed in this month's Twin Peaks Conversations podcast, about the murder of Hazel Drew who was caught between (and perhaps killed by) her own urban/rural divide. Meanwhile, my penultimate Reflections topics are inspired by the season two finale, which I just opened up to the $1/month tier - another benchmark has been reached for Lost in Twin Peaks with all of seasons two and three available to all patrons (and all of season one available to the public). February will be very Fire Walk With Me-themed all around.

"Get Gordon Cole." With that line, Sunset Boulevard solidifies its place not just as one of those films indirectly referenced by Twin Peaks, but as a direct presence inside the work itself. This is the perfect subject to wrap my "What's in a name?" trilogy with Laura and Vertigo. An FBI director named Gordon Cole is played by Lynch himself for three seasons, and Norma Desmond, like Laura's Waldo Lydecker, lends her name to two characters (at least one of whom I'm not sure I even mention in the podcast, given the density of other connections). Initially just a cheeky, trivial nod in early seasons, season three makes this throwaway line a critical onscreen plot point by using it as a trigger for Cooper to awaken from his "Dougie" state. In the process he nearly ends up like Sunset Boulevard's protagonist Joe Gillis (William Holden), a screenwriter who introduces himself to us when he's already dead - although given Joe's watery resting place he may have a closer link to Laura Palmer. Billy Wilder's 1950 classic, the ultimate Hollywood self-portrait, is in many ways quite far from Twin Peaks' texture and locale...if not so much that of certain other Lynch films. However, its central conceit - silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) locked away on her overgrown estate, refusing to believe the world has moved on without her - ripples out into many corners of Twin Peaks both onscreen and off, embracing the older Audrey's domestic entrapment, Cooper's quasi-quixotic self-conception(s), and even David Lynch himself as the auteur lost in his own dream world, frequently forced to pay a price for this immersion.

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The forties Hollywood classic Laura - in which Otto Preminger wraps the legacy of high society urban melodrama in the emerging form of the moody film noir - is one of the most notable cinematic influences on Twin Peaks. Namely...well, that's just it: it's right there in the name! The central mystery figure of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is reflected in Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), complete with her very own theme music, haunting portrait, and ambiguous "I am dead yet I live" persona. Not only that; the unforgettable columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) would influence both Waldo the bird and Dr. Lydecker the offscreen veterinarian in the nineties series - and the film even features its own Jacoby to boot. In fact, my coverage of Laura initiates a three-month series (the first of many) which groups several Twin Peaks Cinema topics together based on a common theme - in this case, "What's in a name?": films whose character names are adopted in Twin Peaks (see also Madelaine Ferguson and Gordon Cole, if you're wondering what's next). But if nomenclature was all Laura shared with Twin Peaks, I could leave the discussion to this single paragraph. The connections go much deeper, linking wealthy, jealous patrons; detectives falling under the spell of women whose deaths they are investigating; and of course, victims who prove more complex and human than the mythic memories that survive them. This episode kicks off my monthly standalone podcast feed for Twin Peaks Cinema in earnest (the previous public episodes - all on films written or directed by Peaks creators - were released on my main podcast feed, in addition to monthly patron exclusives stretching back two years). And I couldn't think of a more perfect way to dive in than with Laura herself.

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This episode wraps up my "Twin Peaks Cinema" miniseries, in which I discussed a dozen films directed by Twin Peaks episode directors (in this podcast episode, James Foley, Jonathan Sanger, and Stephen Gyllenhaal following entries in September, January, and May) along with a film directed by Peaks co-creator Mark Frost and a film written by Peaks writer Robert Engels (also in this episode). There's still more where that came from, though: the original Patreon episode in which most of this coverage was packed together also includes a deep dive into an arc of the 1990 series Wiseguy, which Engels wrote in tribute to Twin Peaks, so check that out if you haven't had enough yet. And "Twin Peaks Cinema" is just getting started (publicly, anyway, it's been going on over at Patreon for two years). I will be opening this up as its own monthly public podcast in October, with a dedicated stream just for comparisons between Twin Peaks and various movies (for the most part, by non-affiliated creators, aside from some Lynch films eventually - this episode director miniseries is a bit apart from the rest of the material). For now, you can find out what a sun-baked neo-noir, a World War II spy thriller, a racially-charged custody dispute, and a time warp supernatural slayer have in common not just with Peaks overall but with the particular episodes their directors helmed. Some of the connections are pretty surprising!

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After two and a half years, my Lost in Twin Peaks podcast finally reaches the last episode of the original series (although there were will be an expansive episode on Fire Walk With Me in August for the twenty-ninth anniversary of the U.S. release). As a reward for patrons who patiently endured delays earlier in the spring, I released my finale episode a month early, shortly after another anniversary (the thirtieth in this case); it aired back-to-back with the previous episode, also covered below, as a two-parter on June 10, 1991. There was a lot to discuss here in terms of plot, iconic touchstones, behind-the-scenes and historical context: including the astonishing fact that the Time Magazine cover dated this exact day featured a gimmick black cover with the word "evil" subtly embossed upon it, leading to an essay on (one of) the very issue(s) Peaks addressed in more abstract form that night.

On my main podcast episode this month, I take a jauntier trip into nocturnal mystery, comparing Howard Hawks' adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep to Twin Peaks, inspired partly by some feedback a year ago. When you look at the noir classic in light of season one, you notice characters hunting around quiet west coast neighborhoods for seedy clues buried inside secluded domesticity. When you compare it to season two, you may pick up on the more overt nods like characters named Sternwood and Vivian. And season three reveals some of the most intriguing connections yet: what is Mr. C if not a classically independent sleuth, severed from official institutions as he attempts to crack a case on his own while unable to trust anyone around him. And the Cooper of Part 18 may be the most overtly noir-ish incarnation of all. I also enjoyed re-visiting my own essay about Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade for the archival reading series, juxtaposing the two iconic detectives on page and screen, both played by Bogart to different effect.

Lost in the Movies patron edition #80: Twin Peaks Cinema - The Big Sleep (+ Cocoon, Mount St. Helens, Booker T & wrestling documentaries, The Sweet Hereafter, Twin Peaks Reflections: Eckhardt, Malcolm, Marsh estate, Twin Peaks welcome sign, Ed & Norma romance/Part 15, Sam Spade vs. Philip Marlowe & more)

Lost in Twin Peaks #29: S2E21 (Miss Twin Peaks/"Episode 28")

Lost in Twin Peaks #30A: S2E22, Part 1 (Beyond Life and Death/"Episode 29")

Lost in Twin Peaks #30B: S2E22, Part 2 (Beyond Life and Death/"Episode 29")

Lost in Twin Peaks #30C: S2E22, Part 3 (Beyond Life and Death/"Episode 29")

Lost in Twin Peaks: original series now complete! + NOW AVAILABLE: Lost in Twin Peaks #23 (Diane Keaton's ep. 22) open to all patrons

Podcast Line-Ups for...

I was shocked by how little I remembered the plot twists and character turns in the great fifties noir Angel Face, even though I watched it only a few years ago. All I recalled was the central plot conceit resembling the much-maligned James/Evelyn storyline of Twin Peaks' second season - as does David Lynch's own feature follow-up to Peaks, Lost Highway. All three concern a seductive, mysterious woman trapped in an unhealthy relationship, who ensnares a moody, handsome mechanic in a murder plot. Yet each work takes this premise in radically different directions, of varying interest. I enjoyed discovering these developments all over again as I re-visited the Otto Preminger film, comparing both it and Lost Highway to the Peaks subplot (another inadvertent connection: David Bowie croons the opening song for the Lynch film and also stars in one of the Peaks locations I highlight this week, the Philadelphia FBI office).

Elsewhere on this month's main podcast, I re-iterate my new behind-the-scenes schedule and what it means for upcoming projects, and I celebrate the eightieth anniversary of Citizen Kane by sharing an extensive essay from my own archive, written the year that Kane turned seventy. Orson Welles' masterpiece has been featured many times on my own site, from an ongoing video series I just dipped back into to brief comparisons in reviews of other films, so I gathered all of these mentions into their own bonus podcast; I also decided to publicly share my reading of the great Francois Truffaut essay on the film as another bonus. And earlier in May, I released another four bonus episodes - two on feedback, two on film capsules - finally catching up with material from the past year. Among the many capsules, including several political documentaries and nineties favorites, I went on a digression about Twin Peaks' Dougie sequences and how office workplaces have been depicted in the past several decades of pop culture. There's a lot to dig into this month, frankly more than I expected going in, and I hope you enjoy whatever interests you - and maybe even some things you didn't think would.

Episode 79: Twin Peaks Cinema - Angel Face (+ reading Citizen Kane essay, new schedule for 2021 - 22, Twin Peaks Reflections: Evelyn, Jacoby, Windom's cabin, Philadelphia FBI office, Evelyn Marsh saga/Lost Highway & more)

Episode 79 bonus - Film Capsules (1 of 2): Office Space (& Dougie in Twin Peaks' Las Vegas & 80s/90s office media including Dilbert), Toni Morrison documentary, the Spanish Civil War in The Angel Wore Red, And She Could Be Next, Rick Steves on fascism, Terminator 2, Independence Day: Resurgence & more)

Episode 79 bonus - Film Capsules (2 of 2): Irma Vep, Children of a Lesser God, Trumbo, The Fugitive, JFK, Alien, Back to the Future, Great Expectations, Buck and the Preacher, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project & more)

Episode 79 PUBLIC bonus - Reader/Viewer Feedback: Art Spiegelman & An American Tail, Q2 Fire Walk With Me fanedit, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Mark Frost's narratives, East German "ostalgie", Lynchian identity loss & more)

Episode 79 PUBLIC bonus - Viewer Feedback: "Judy's nightmare", shared dreams, the Lodge as test vs. failure & more)

Episode 79 bonus - My Citizen Kane Archive

Episode 79 bonus - PUBLIC reading: Francois Truffaut on Citizen Kane

belated release (in early June)

Lost in Twin Peaks #28: S2E20 (The Path to the Black Lodge/"Episode 27")

Podcast Line-Ups for...

Although he's one of the most ubiquitous topics in online film discourse, I never covered a Paul Thomas Anderson film until I finally saw Inherent Vice in 2018 (this podcast re-presents my response to that first viewing, originally part of a patron episode). He's a filmmaker who...escapes me in some ways. I wouldn't say his appeal escapes me - he's obviously one of the most brilliant directors of his generation - but something about his sensibility frequently eludes me, a difficulty that doesn't appear to be all that commonplace. This noir riff is probably my favorite Anderson (though I've yet to see Phantom Thread), based on a Thomas Pynchon novel but with many nods to cinematic antecedents like The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, and The Big Lebowski. I was going to say that these films actually came after the book only to belatedly discover that actually this novel was published just a few years before the film, in 2009, not (as I had presumed) at the time it takes place, when Pynchon would have been about Joaquin Phoenix's age in the movie. Oops! This is a film I would definitely like to revisit and review again someday (perhaps after actually reading the book); this initial reaction is one in which I feel my way through the film's and Anderson's affects while appreciating various elements onscreen.

If you'd like to hear me talk more about L.A. detective fiction, check out my patron episode scheduled for June 29, comparing The Big Sleep to Twin Peaks. Also, if you missed it, the top tier of patrons now has access to my Lost in Twin Peaks coverage of the season two finale - completing my coverage of the entire series (although Fire Walk With Me still remains this summer). These pieces and more are also linked and described in further detail below, along with some Inherent Vice-related material.

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I originally planned to cover the surreal Robert Altman film 3 Women on my patron podcast this month, but at the last minute I was reminded that August 2020 is the seventieth anniversary of Sunset Boulevard's premiere. So I switched gears and drove into the heart of the midcentury American film industry. The Billy Wilder classic has some surface (and deeper) ties to Twin Peaks as well as other David Lynch films and I enjoyed digging into it for the first time in twelve years. My 2008 review of the film as part of a Hollywood-on-Hollywood series, one of my favorite essays, is also incorporated into the Opening the Archive reading series. I also cover several characters, locations and storylines on both sides of the law, and spend a lot of time laying out my plans for the fall, winter, and spring with an emphasis on how I hope to get back into the rhythm of Journey Through Twin Peaks after a summer of delays. And my Lost in Twin Peaks rewatch dives into the thick of mid-season two, dissecting where the show went right and wrong...

Lost in Twin Peaks #19: S2E11 (Masked Ball/"Episode 18")

Episode 70: Twin Peaks cinema - Sunset Boulevard (+ new schedule for Journey Through Twin Peaks/other projects, Twin Peaks Reflections: Lodwick, Sternwood, One Eyed Jack's, Partyland, Hank's criminal activities/Part 10 & more)

NOW AVAILABLE: Lost in Twin Peaks #13 ("Episode 12") open to all patrons

Podcast Line-Ups for...

I thought April's main podcast episode would be a quickie; instead it transformed into either my second or third-longest monthly entry. It's been a busy three months, so there was a lot to cover: films watched, podcasts listened to, projects and plans to update, and - perhaps especially - a monumental political moment to discuss. That episode is divided into three separate parts: one Twin Peaks-themed, one politics-themed, one film-themed. And both of my Lost in Twin Peaks episodes are split up too: each covers a major Lynch episode of season two and I had too much to say to fit it all into a three-hour audio file (not to mention the convenience of giving listeners space between them).

Both coincidentally and by design, some of my major Twin Peaks-related coverage arrives at the same time I'm renewing my Journey Through Twin Peaks video series. This includes one of the key "Twin Peaks Cinema" entries, on the 1944 noir Laura (I'll follow with the perhaps equally important Vertigo next month). Most famously, this film lent several character names to the series but its core idea is also poetically echoed in Twin Peaks - including in season three (which I've never really had the opportunity to discuss before, despite touching on the two works' relationships in the past). For good measure, I include my 2011 review in the "Opening the Archive" reading series.

As for Lost in Twin Peaks, this month we reach the exact halfway point of the series and perhaps the most important episode of any: the killer's reveal...

Lost in Twin Peaks #15A: S2E7, Part 1 (Lonely Souls/"Episode 14")

Lost in Twin Peaks #15B: S2E7, Part 2 (Lonely Souls/"Episode 14")

Lost in the Movies #66A
(Path through Journey Through Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks Listener Feedback: The Big Sleep, Mark Frost interview book, Windom/Mr. C and tulpas, "Twin Peaks Reflections": Waiter, Gersten, Diane, hospital, Ronette's bridge, Audrey at One Eyed Jack's/Part 18 & more)

Lost in the Movies #66B
The Bernie campaign & the populist left (+ podcast recommendations)

Lost in the Movies #66C
"Twin Peaks Cinema" - Laura (+ capsules on David Lynch's shorts and Hotel Room, Frank Capra's dark side and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, John Carpenter "alien" films: They Live, Village of the Damned, The Thing, the Spanish Civil War in The Silence of Others and The Fallen Sparrow, Federico Fellini's Il Bidone, 3 "Disneylands" in Pinocchio, Ken Burns' The Congress & more)

NOW AVAILABLE: Lost in Twin Peaks #9 - Season 2 Finale/S2E1 (May the Giant Be With You/"Episode 8") open to all patrons

Podcast Line-Ups for:

Rounding up the last of the January Film in Focus topics, I didn't think this triple feature would have a thematic or aesthetic throughline. In fact, however, all three movies are characterized by a narrative descent into chaos, disintegrating social norms until we are just as bewildered as the figures onscreen. I liked one of these films quite a lot, had a mixed but generally positive reaction to another, and didn't care at all for the third, but I had a good time digging into each first-time viewing.

Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice adapts Thomas Pynchon's Big Lebowski/Long Goodbye-esque tribute to the slacker-as-sleuth genre. Surprisingly, this is the first Anderson film I've reviewed on this site (the only other acknowledgement of his work was a #WatchlistScreenCaps image for The Master several years ago). Howard Hawks' Monkey Business is a madcap (or maybe not so madcap as you'd expect, initially) screwball comedy with some interesting subtexts about Hollywood, aging, and the generation that came to prominence in the thirties Golden Age. Ben Wheatley's High-Rise is another notable adaptation, this time of J.G. Ballard's iconic text of the seventies; the acidic satire opens with a calmly dystopian interior landscape and closes with a peculiar Margaret Thatcher quote and song from The Fall.

Additionally, I dig into the history of the video essay form over the past ten years, and how the desire to experiment with that form led to Journey Through Twin Peaks; I find some more Mark Frost-written Hill Street Blues episodes, and I receive some great feedback exploring Fire Walk With Me's fairy tale links, especially to the disturbing fable Donkeyskin by Charles Perrault. This is the longest episode yet - hopefully you find it enjoyable.

Finally, if you're thinking of becoming a 3rd-tier patron ($10 a month), I've just published a couple pages of the introduction to my revised Twin Peaks character series explaining (among other things) how I will cover the complicated characters of Cooper and Laura, and offering links to the timeline I'm using as a frame of reference for The Return.

Rules for the TWIN PEAKS Character Series (February "See the Future" Preview #1 - 3rd tier reward)

Episode 6: Inherent Vice, Monkey Business & High-Rise (+ history of video essays, Donkeyskin/Fire Walk With Me & more)

Line-up for Episode 6

INTRO
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WEEKLY UPDATE/recent posts: creating Journey Through Twin Peaks
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WEEKLY UPDATE/Patreon: 3rd tier Biweekly Preview - intro to character series, February films in focus - suggest several titles
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WEEKLY UPDATE/works in progress: minor characters, Fire Walk With Me history
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FILM IN FOCUS: Inherent Vice
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FILM IN FOCUS: Monkey Business
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FILM IN FOCUS: High-Rise
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TWIN PEAKS REFLECTIONS: Making Journey Through Twin Peaks, pt. 1 - the history of video essays, form in the Journey videos
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OTHER TOPICS: 2 more Mark Frost-written Hill Street Blues episodes, Dario Argento on the Joe Franklin Show
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LISTENER FEEDBACK: Marie Antoinette, watching the Twin Peaks killer's reveal at 13, Fire Walk With Me as a fairy tale (comparison w/ Donkeyskin) and Christian martyrs' tales
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OPENING THE ARCHIVE: "Examining the Options" (June - October 2009), this week's highlight: Lawrence of Arabia

BECOME A PATRON

The Favorites - The Third Man (#15)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Third Man (1949/UK/dir. Carol Reed) appeared at #15 on my original list.

What it is • "I never knew the Vienna before the war," a cheerful narrator informs us, shortly before disappearing from the film altogether. It's that kind of movie. The music - starting even before this fast-paced opening montage, with the image of a zither playing under the credits - is defiantly incongrous with the shadowy streets onscreen and the murky intrigues of the story (quite a bit more on that in a moment). Our hero, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) isn't much of a hero at all, an American abroad in a land whose pernicious complications he doesn't understand; the film itself seems to hold him in contempt even as it accepts him as our guide. The flashy title character, Harry Lime, is dead when the film begins and Orson Welles' much-celebrated role in the movie is little more than a cameo in terms of screentime (though boy do those handful of minutes pack a punch). The Third Man is very British in sensibility and attitude, as crisp and curt as Reed and writer Graham Greene could manage, but the two most important characters are American, and this may be the greatest noir, a very American form. Francois Truffaut once grumbled that British cinema was a contradiction in terms but The Third Man is as visually rich as any Hollywood feature with several of the most striking images in cinema history. My favorite is the final shot, as a figure approaches from the horizon, flanked by two symmetrical rows of trees, while leaves flitter down from the sky at random. Moving on a narrative level, striking as pure pictorialism, this single take also evokes the flavor of the entire movie, mixing meticulous order (the trees) with spontaneous energy (the leaves), leavening its air of inevitable fate (the long walk) with bracing dashes of ironic surprise (the unbroken stride, straight past the camera, leaving Holly to smoke his cigarette in bittersweet resignation).

Why I like it •

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Chinatown (1974/USA/dir. Roman Polanski) appeared at #45 on my original list.

What it is • It opens with old-fashioned credits, title cards with a classical font over an abstract sepia-toned background. Though made in the seventies, the film immediately pulls us back to the forties, the era of film noir, or perhaps even further into the thirties, when Chinatown is set. Then the first shot reveals something we never could have seen in actual Golden Age Hollywood: fairly graphic black-and-white photos of an extramarital sexual tryst. Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) carefully watches a cuckolded husband (Burt Young) flip through the sordid stills and immediately three important aims are achieved: we learn about Jake's dirty business, a relatively honest living in a crooked town; we meet a very minor character whose story purpose will pay off later; and we realize something important - this film will lure us in with nostalgia, but its outlook is clear-eyed and unsentimental. Like three of the last five films on the list, and like the film I am immersed in at the time of this writing (the not-so-unrelated O.J.: Made in America), Chinatown takes place in - and is very much about - Los Angeles. Screenwriter Robert Towne was eager to convey his view of William Mulholland's real-life water scheme via the fictionalized story of Noah Cross (John Huston), a charismatic, deeply corrupt businessman who may be involved in diverting water from farmland so that drought-affected L.A. will have to push outward to the Pacific. Some people stand to make a killing on real estate - even if a few other people have to be killed for getting in the way. As Gittes investigates, he falls in love with a mysterious, possibly dangerous young widow (Faye Dunaway) and discovers dark secrets both societal and personal.

Why I like it •

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Big Lebowski (1998/USA/dir. Ethan & Joel Coen) appeared at #46 on my original list.

What it is • Following their Best Picture-nominated Fargo (1996), the Coen brothers made what appeared to be a lark. Chronicling the misadventures of Jeff Lebow...er, the Dude (Jeff Bridges), a Los Angeles layabout who becomes entangled with a kidnapping plot, the film seems to have been fairly well-received. That said, I recall - and re-examining the evidence bears this out - quite a bit of critical bafflement. Not only were the reviews perplexed by the film's gleefully convoluted plot, they were struck by such a trivial follow-up to the most acclaimed work of the Coens' career (the most recent film to land on the AFI's Top 100 in 1998). If the critics were mostly mildly amused, the audience didn't seem particularly engaged at all - the film barely made back its budget. Two years later, the Coens' O Brother Where Art Thou? grossed nearly five times the amount of The Big Lebowski and in 2007 the brothers won the Best Director award that had eluded them for Fargo, this time for the somber, impeccably-executed No Country for Old Man (which, incidentally grossed ten times as much as Lebowski). Overall, they've directed fourteen films in the eighteen years since their little Lebowski floated lazily in and out of theaters, many highly acclaimed and several reaching a wide audience. Hovering just around sixty, they have years of prolific filmmaking ahead. And yet there is a very good chance that this will remain their most beloved film for the foreseeable future, and likely the work they will be most fondly remembered for. Wikipedia sums it up best with the following juxtaposition:

Peter Howell, in his review for the Toronto Star, wrote: "It's hard to believe that this is the work of a team that won an Oscar last year for the original screenplay of Fargo." ... [Howell] more recently stated that "it may just be my favourite Coen Bros. film."

Why I like it •

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Murder, My Sweet (1944/USA/dir. Edward Dmytryk) appeared at #49 on my original list.

What it is • Raymond Chandler has been treated on the big screen many times; this particular novel was adapted again in the seventies under its original title (Farewell, My Lovely), with no less a noir luminary than Robert Mitchum in the lead. The most infamous actor to portray Philip Marlowe is, of course, Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep but if you're seeking an offbeat alternative, you'd naturally be tempted to go with Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye (I have some respectful issues with Robert Altman's take on Chandler, but this isn't the time or place). Too frequently overlooked, however, is the first Marlowe: song-and-dance man Dick Powell, looking remarkably world-weary a decade past his bright-eyed Busby Berkeley days. Murder, My Sweet is not the first Chandler adaptation (it isn't even the first adaptation of Farewell, since two years earlier The Falcon Takes Over had borrowed its plot wholesale) but earlier incarnations of his work had changed the name of the detective hero, as if it didn't even matter. Of course it matters. Marlowe is one of the most iconic characters in modern fiction and Powell's stoic, exhausted, but forthright version of the private eye honors its literary source. In some ways, this Marlowe may actually be closer than Bogie's (whose own star power may have obscured the character's nature). Ultimately, though, the film is here for its intoxicating atmosphere, the most perfect evocation of noir's je ne sais quoi that I've ever encountered, thick with fog, chiaroscuro, wet streets, tightly packed deep frames, harsh lights hitting the lens, and that gorgeous, gorgeous shot of a femme fatale embracing our skeptical hero as her cigarette smoke curls in the air beside him. So that's "what it is." The murder mystery plot? Please, don't make me try to explain that! I've forgotten the details and always have trouble following these sorts of stories as they unfold, with their bewildering array of suspects, double crosses, and red herrings. I'm not sure even Chandler knew what was going on, though Marlowe himself probably had it all figured.

Why I like it •

update 2/21: It's finally up!

I announced this video nearly a month ago but got distracted from it repeatedly. Then this weekend I finally dove in - and almost lost everything when my nearly-completed project wouldn't open Friday night. Thanks to the generous help of Nuno Baltazar, I was able to get it up and running again and so here today - finally - is my video comparison of these two classic films. The Vimeo upload and original intro (including a link to the essay that inspired the video) follows the jump. My previous entries in the Side by Side series were Twin Peaks & Neon Genesis Evangelion and Dial M For Murder & Rear Window. I've also made a YouTube playlist featuring all three videos.

Who is Sam Spade? Who is Philip Marlowe?

Well, for many film buffs, Bogie will always be Bogie. Granted, there's plenty of wiggle room within the Humphrey Bogart persona: the paranoia of Fred C. Dobbs, Dixon Steele, or Captain Queeg; the ruthlessness of those many gangster roles; the lovable grunginess of his turn in The African Queen. But when he dons his detective's fedora and lights his cigarette, there's an iconic continuity to the look, the mannerisms, the speech. One could justifiably assume that Bogart's iconic screen presence eclipses any individual character tics, whether he's supposed to be playing San Francisco sleuth Sam Spade (in John Huston's 1941 The Maltese Falcon) or L.A. dick Philip Marlowe (in Howard Hawks' 1946 The Big Sleep). Yet at root, Spade and Marlowe are very different people - one might even say fundamentally so, despite the superficial similarities and notable overlap. Within the hardboiled detective persona, they represent different motivations and actions - at least as originally conceived.

This review contains spoilers about the book and the film.

One of the most unique neo-noirs of the seventies, The Long Goodbye displays both the advantages and pitfalls of free-association adaptation. Both critics and defenders of the film tend to miss the point. Goodbye boosters point to Altman's rich invention and thought-provoking subversion of genre tropes, but tend to take for granted the conventionality of the source - Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Marlowe had become in '73 and remains today a cultural icon as the prototypical private eye thanks to Chandler's series of detective stories and novels spanning the thirties and forties and (especially pertinent here) the films based on this material. Meanwhile, the film's critics notice what Gould's and Altman's Marlowe is missing but don't seem to appreciate what is added to, or even improved upon, from the book. The latter group have become more obsolete these days, as the distance from Chandler's era increases and the movie becomes more and more a part of the cinematic firmament it once seemed to subvert - a fixture rather than an outlier. In the mean time, I sense, less and less people commenting on the film have actually read the book it's based on, or realize how much the film's sense of subversion, disappointment, and distance shares with the novel itself - and what the film misses in some of its broader departures.

Rebel Without a Cause as Twin Peaks Cinema #16 - Ray's Haunted Fifties (podcast)

On Dangerous Ground as Twin Peaks Cinema #15 - Ray's Haunted Fifties (podcast)

January 2022 Patreon podcasts: LOST IN THE MOVIES #87 - Twin Peaks Cinema: On Dangerous Ground (+ Twin Peaks Reflections: Pete, Doc, Spirits, Glastonbury Grove, Bank, Mystery box/Mulholland Drive & more) plus TWIN PEAKS CONVERSATIONS

Sunset Boulevard as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #8 (podcast)

Laura as TWIN PEAKS CINEMA #6 (podcast)

Films by Twin Peaks episode directors - After Dark, My Sweet, Code Name: Emerald, Losing Isaiah, Matthew Blackheart: Monster Smasher (TWIN PEAKS CINEMA podcast #5/LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #26)

Inherent Vice (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #24)

Patreon update #6: Inherent Vice, Monkey Business & High-Rise (+ history of video essays, Donkeyskin/Fire Walk With Me & more) and preview of the TWIN PEAKS Character Series "Rules"

The Favorites - The Third Man (#15)

The Favorites - Chinatown (#45)

The Favorites - The Big Lebowski (#46)

The Favorites - Murder, My Sweet (#49)

Side by Side video: The Asphalt Jungle & The Killing

Spade & Marlowe, Private Eyes (The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, on page and screen)

The Long Goodbye

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